site.btaPoet Yordan Eftimov: Bulgarians Still Need to Be Evaluated from Abroad to Realize What They Have

Poet Yordan Eftimov attended the launch of the April issue themed “Bulgaria at the World Expos” at BTA's MaxiM Hall on Sunday. "I think what we seem to have yet to develop is a culture of debate about our achievements. Right now we are still at that stage where we need to be evaluated from abroad to realize what we have," he said.

According to him, the issue of presenting the achievements of the Bulgarian society is a big one, with very specific dimensions over the years. Just one of those dimensions are those exhibitions like EXPO 2025, Eftimov noted. “Just one small dimension, but very significant, is how a Bulgarian lawyer, but an extremely sensitive public figure like Aleko Konstantinov, wrote about his visit to the Columbian Exposition, and the exhibitions in Prague and Paris,” he said.

He said that the first thing he thought of when he learned the subject of the April issue of LIK was a book by Prof. Milena Georgieva published more than ten years ago, which was dedicated to Ivan Penkov. “A great Bulgarian artist who in the 1930s was tasked with thinking about figurines, literally puppets with national costumes and some other such signs to represent a Bulgarian visual tradition of some kind,” Eftimov said. He noted that Penkov is also the author of the design of several Bulgarian representations around the world.

"There is still to be a good analysis of our past and of the real achievements of Bulgarian artists and intellectuals, but also of Bulgarian engineers, Bulgarian scientists, which we have so far arranged in a very short and I would not say particularly qualitative list, in which, for example, the name of John Atanasoff is one of the first to appear. After all, this is an American inventor and scientist of Bulgarian origin. By contrast, for example, we have Aleko, who is one of the great thinkers in the field of law, who we just have to recall his ideas in this direction. But he is not the only one. We have such thinkers as Dimitar Mihalchev - in philosophy we have our own tradition I would even say," Eftimov further noted.

The April issue of LIK magazine, titled Bulgaria at the World Expos and published in English and Japanese, was presented simultaneously in Osaka, Sofia and in 40 BTA national press clubs across Bulgaria and abroad.

The magazine, timed to Expo 2025’s 13 April opening and Bulgaria’s new type-A pavilion, blends on-site reporting by Ivan Lazarov with essays on how Bulgarian culture travels. It traces this journey from Aleko Konstantinov’s 19th-century world-fair diaries through the 1970 Osaka Expo—where yoghurt, the Children’s Radio Choir and a pyramid-shaped pavilion won Japan’s heart—to today’s drive, described by SME Agency head Boyko Takov, to make Bulgaria “a factor” in tourism, investment and science. The pavilion’s designers promise an “experience that leaves a mark,” while pieces on Bulgarian yoghurt, the Valley of Roses’ ties with Fukuyama and Munakata, and a chronology of global expos, all drawn from BTA’s expanding digital archives, show how national identity is forged in dialogue with the world.Since January 2024 LIK has been freely accessible. All issues since its revival in 2022 can be downloaded from the BTA website. The April issue Bulgaria and the World Expos is available in Bulgarian, English and Japanese.