site.btaFinal Group of 34th Antarctic Expedition Arrives at Bulgarian Antarctic Base

The final group of the 34th Bulgarian Antarctic expedition arrived on Livingston Island on Friday. The group includes dermatologist Prof. Razvigor Darlenski, Deputy Director of the National Centre for Polar Studies at St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia and logistics coordinator of the National Polar Research Programme Dragomir Mateev, as well as icon painter Ganka Pavlova.

They left for Antarctica on February 7.

In Punta Arenas, Chile, the group was joined by lawyer and economist Marina Stefanova and director Yordan Mihaylovski. The group reached the Bulgarian Antarctic base aboard the Bulgarian research vessel Sv. Sv. Kiril i Metodii (RSV 421); the shipped picked them up from King George Island.

On Livingston Island, the group was welcomed with bread and salt, a Bulgarian hospitality custom.

The Bulgarian naval research vessel Sv. Sv. Kiril i Metodii (RSV 421) departed for Antarctica from Varna (on the Black Sea) on November 7, 2025. After a month-long voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, the ship arrived at the Argentine naval base in Mar del Plata on December 13.

BTA has had a national press club on board the ship since 2022 and another on Livingston Island since February 2024. BTA Director General Kiril Valchev said they exist thanks to the generous support of RSV 421 and Bulgaria’s St Kliment Ohridski Base, which provide the necessary facilities. These two press clubs are added to the news agency’s other 41 national press clubs (33 in Bulgaria, seven abroad in neighbouring countries and in nations with large Bulgarian communities, and one mobile National Book Press Club). 

The news items of BTA's special correspondents on RSV 421 and Antarctica are freely available in Bulgarian and English on the agency's website. They can be used free of charge by all media, with attribution to BTA. Valchev recalled that thanks to its correspondents, the news agency appears among the top results on Google when searching for the phrase “Antarctica correspondent”.