site.btaEuropean Poetry Graces Sofia's Metro in Annual Campaign

The 10th edition of an annual event called Poetry in the Metro kicks off in Sofia on Tuesday, November 18, the Foreign Ministry said. The project is aimed to present European poetry in the trains and stations of the underground railway system of the Bulgarian capital.

The opening ceremony will take place at the Polish Institute on Tuesday evening. The project will be presented by the Institute Director, Malgorzata Hejduk-Gromek, and by Bulgarian poetess and literary critic Ameliya Licheva, who is the editor of the Literaturen Vestnik newspaper. Representatives of the participating foreign embassies and other institutions will read out the featured poems in their original languages during the opening ceremony.

This edition of Poetry in the Metro, which will last until December 15, presents poems from 25 countries in Europe: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.

The Bulgarian participant is Lyudmila Mindova, who has been proposed by the Foreign Ministry's State Institute for Culture and the editorial board of Literaturen Vestnik.

The Poetry in the Metro project was launched in 2016 by the Polish Institute (Instytut Polski) in Sofia and Literaturen Vestnik. The partners contributing to the current edition also include Sofia Municipality, Metropoliten JSC, Goethe Institut, Instituto Cervantes, Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Espaco Camoes, the British Council, the Culture and Information Centre of North Macedonia, Liszt Intezet, Institut Francais, Ceska Centra, and the embassies of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Lithuania (based in Bucharest), Luxembourg (based in Prague), Norway, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland, and Ukraine.

Bulgarian National Radio and Bulgarian National Television are media partners for the event.