Bulgarian relics spark an international scuffle

The New York Times

SOFIA — A self-described Bulgarian looter has ignited an international controversy by admitting that he dug up an ancient treasure – a set of rare 12th-century silver dishes – and accusing Christie’s of trying to resell one of the dishes in London for far more than he ever got for it.

The case has developed into Bulgaria’s first high-profile effort to recover allegedly plundered antiquities, with prosecutors seeking the return of not just the dish that Christie’s was trying to sell, but also nine dishes that Sofia maintains are from the same set and now in the possession of three Greek museums. Continue reading “Bulgarian relics spark an international scuffle”

Crusading justice minister is excluded from Romania cabinet

The New York Times

 


BUCHAREST — Monica Macovei, the Romanian justice minister who has lost her job in a cabinet shuffle, made fighting corruption her mission and appointed a crew of tough and independent prosecutors to help carry it out.
 

They did so with spirit, investigating and indicting lawmakers, government ministers and even a former prime minister, as Romania tried to prove to a skeptical European Commission that it had the political will to clean up its judicial system. They made friends in Brussels, but enemies at home. Continue reading “Crusading justice minister is excluded from Romania cabinet”

Newest EU citizens wonder what it will mean

The New York Times

BUCHAREST — For the past four years, at a fictional bar called La Europa, Romanian villagers have discussed, argued and wisecracked about their future in the European Union, trying to come to terms with European standards like the length and curvature specifications for cucumbers.

Their adventures are broadcast into Romanian living rooms from the Bucharest set of a popular Sunday sitcom, “The Winding Road to Europe.” Continue reading “Newest EU citizens wonder what it will mean”

A death in Sofia revives memories of a shady past

The New York Times

SOFIA — In a Cold War-style drama in one of the last places in Europe to tackle its Communist-era legacy, the sudden death of the man in charge of a key Bulgarian secret police archive that was about to be declassified has created a political uproar.

The man, Bozhidar Doychev, 61, had served since 1991 as director of the National Intelligence Service archive, which is believed to contain information about the 1981 shooting of Pope John Paul II and the assassination of the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, as well as records on current officials who may have worked for the secret police. Continue reading “A death in Sofia revives memories of a shady past”

In shrinking Bulgaria, where are the people?

The New York Times

LUKY, Bulgaria — This socialist mining town of the future was so new when it was founded in 1959 that it had a new, modern maternity ward and no cemetery.

Today the population is 4,000, down from 10,000 in 1990. Only two of the five lead-zinc mines still operate, unable to compete on the world market. Eight of the municipality’s nine schools have closed because there are so few children. The maternity ward has long since shut its doors.

“We have almost used up the cemetery we have now,” said Todor Todorov, mayor of this town in the Rhodope Mountains of southern Bulgaria. “We’re in a hurry to find terrain for a new one.” Continue reading “In shrinking Bulgaria, where are the people?”

For Europe, a lesson in ABCs (of Cyrillic)

The New York Times

SOFIA — When Saints Cyril and Methodius gave the Slavic world its first written script, their mission was to draw the Slavs under the influence of Constantinople and away from Rome. A thousand or so years later, Cyrillic is heading west – this time to a united Europe.

With Bulgaria scheduled to enter the European Union along with Romania on Jan. 1, Cyrillic is becoming the bloc’s third official alphabet, after Latin and Greek; by the end of the decade, if Bulgaria succeeds in joining the euro zone, it may even appear on euro banknotes.

Although Bulgaria has no commitment to reciprocate by displaying signs in the Latin alphabet, “We are doing it,” says Nikolay Vassilev, minister for state administration and administrative reform. “More slowly than I would like.”

With one of the world’s largest translation services, the EU does not expect problems adding Bulgarian and its Cyrillic alphabet to the array of languages it already handles.

Still, linguistic diversity comes at a price. For 2005, the total cost of all language services – written translation and spoken interpretation – in the EU’s 20 official languages was €1.1 billion – about 1 percent the total EU budget, or €2.28 per person across the 25-member bloc. With the addition of Bulgarian and Romanian in 2007, along with Irish becoming an operational language, the cost is expected to increase by a total of €30 million, or $38.5 million. The directorate-general for translation will need about 60 full-time translators for each of the three new languages – 180 jobs.

The directorate, based in Luxembourg and Brussels, is already the European Commission’s largest department, with about 1,650 full-time translators and 550 support staff members. In 2005, they translated 1,324,231 pages.

About a third of all EU documents are translated into each official language; the rest, largely internal documents, are translated into the EU’s three working languages: English, French and German.

Rusana Bardarska, a Bulgarian translator, said the hardest part of introducing Bulgarian was EU terminology, for which Bulgarian words may not exist. “Should we translate ‘communitarization,’ ‘convergence,’ ‘flexsecurity’ and ‘cohesion,’ or rather introduce them as new words in Bulgarian?” she asked.

“The alphabet is the easy part,” said Dieter Rummel, head of language technology at the Translations Center for the Bodies of the European Union. “But it was a big deal 10 years ago.”

When the Greek alphabet was first introduced, Rummel said, the available technology could not smoothly accommodate the new character set. But EU computers now use Unicode, a character encoding system that allows representation of all alphabets, even non-Indo- European alphabets such as Chinese.

Back in Bulgaria, however, spelling is a major problem, according to Vassilev, the government minister. Many Cyrillic letters have no Latin equivalent, or several possibilities. The result, he says, is that some Bulgarian cities are spelled seven different ways in Latin – even on signs within the same city.

“There is no other country in the world with a problem of this magnitude,” Vassilev said.

To address this, Vassilev developed “Comprehensible Bulgaria,” a transliteration system created by linguists so that all Bulgarian proper names would be rendered the same way in the Latin alphabet. The transliteration software is available for free on the ministry’s Web page.

The new spellings are now obligatory for state institutions, but people are free to continue transliterating their names as they like, and Vassilev expects it to take years for the public to adopt the new system.

He himself has used four different spellings of his own name during his lifetime. If the cabinet accepts his proposal to make name changing an administrative act rather than a court procedure, he will change his name to conform with the new system: Vasilev.

In Sofia, the capital, street signs differ in each area. Signs for streets named after Communist-era heroes coexist with the signs bearing new post-Communist street names. Some neighborhoods have signs in Cyrillic only, while others have Latin signs as well.

“Until now, neighborhood mayors who have wanted to change the signs have changed them however they have wanted,” says Velizar Stoilov, deputy mayor for transport and transport infrastructure. He is working on a project to replace and unify the city’s 800,000 or so street signs on the occasion of Bulgaria’s EU entry. All would be bilingual, with the spellings defined by the new system. Informational signs for tourist sites in English would also be included.

Since the city cannot afford the estimated cost of €4 million, EU accession funds are a possible source of finance, Stoilov said.

Visitors to Sofia have mixed impressions of the linguistic challenge. While they are glad to have maps in the Latin alphabet, some say, this does not help much when street signs are in Cyrillic.

“If I want to find where I am on the map, I have to count the number of streets,” said Stanley Tam, a bus operator from Ottawa.

Chantal Bonnin, a surgeon from Bordeaux, disagreed, saying she liked signs in Cyrillic only, even though it took her family two hours to find their hotel. “If they write like us, it’s a problem of the unification of languages,” she said. “Otherwise, in 30 years, there will be only one.”

Vassilev says he has no concerns about the survival of Bulgarian as a language, at least not as a result of accession to the European Union.

“Joining the EU has less of an effect on Cyrillic than globalization, the Internet and SMSs,” he said.

For Bulgarian-language Internet communication and SMS exchanges, young Bulgarians have improvised a new Latin-based alphabet, largely because of the convenience of using Latin text interfaces.

Bulgarians are so proud of their alphabet that they celebrate a national holiday on May 24 called “the Day of Bulgarian Enlightenment and Culture and of the Slavonic Alphabet.” The holiday was created in the mid-19th century, when Bulgaria was trying to become independent after 500 years as part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire.

“The holiday was a good solution to separate Bulgaria from the Turks and away from Catholic Christian world,” says Christo Matanov, professor of medieval bulgarian history at Sofia University. “The main task was building a modern nation.”

The Cyrillic alphabet is used by 224 million people in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Bosnia (in Montenegro, Serbia and Bosnia, the Latin alphabet is used, too). An additional 60 million Central Asians use Cyrillic to write their own non-Slavic languages, though the Soviet-era linguistic leftover is being phased out.

That Bulgaria “gave” the alphabet to the Slavs is hotly disputed by five other Slavic nations – Macedonia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, and Russia – as well as Greece.

The Bulgarian claim is based on the alphabet’s taking hold, developing, and spreading mostly within the territory of what was then the Bulgarian Empire.

It is no surprise, then, that Bulgaria, planning to join the zone of countries using the euro as currency in 2009 or 2010, wants the word “euro” to be written in Cyrillic on bank notes, as it already is in Latin and Greek.

The European Central Bank is planning to consider integrating the new alphabet in a series of euro banknotes to be issued by the end of this decade.



In Bulgaria, a fleeced public is left in cold

The New York Times

SOFIA — The director of the Sofia central heating company might not have a glamorous job. The company, a Soviet- era behemoth, is more than €50 million in debt and is owed €80 million by customers unable or unwilling to pay their heating bills. The pay for the director is just €500 a month.

But Valentin Dimitrov, the director until April, managed to live well: making a splash at high-society parties with Elena Tihomirova, Miss Bulgaria 2003, living in a villa worth €400,000, or $506,000, and driving a customized Lexus sport utility vehicle.

After 10 years in the post, through three governments involving all the major political parties, Dimitrov inadvertently provoked the end of his career by seeking in February to raise consumer rates by 12 percent. Continue reading “In Bulgaria, a fleeced public is left in cold”

Bridge to a new era for Bulgaria and Romania

The New York Times

VIDIN, Bulgaria — Construction has not yet begun, but a new bridge over the Danube is already lifting hopes among Bulgarians and Romanians on both sides of the river.

The bridge, which will span the Danube from this downtrodden city to the dusty Romanian town of Calafat, will not just forge new connections, but is also meant to help one of Europe’s least developed regions.

After eight years spent arguing over the location and four years of looking for funding, the €230 million, or $290 million, project is expected finally to enter the construction phase next year thanks to European prodding and finance. Continue reading “Bridge to a new era for Bulgaria and Romania”

Border officials living in opulent villas

The New York Times

STAVRI DIMITROVO, Bulgaria — A powerful illustration of how Bulgarians see border officials living according to separate rules is the so-called “customs officers’ village” here on the Ivailovgrad Reservoir, 30 kilometers from Svilengrad, the town nearest the Kapitan-Andreevo border station. Half of the 40 or so homes in the village are luxurious weekend villas built by former and current border officials and “businessmen.”

The first sight upon entering the village is a hotel-sized mansion on the other side of the reservoir being built by Rumen Atanasov, popularly known as “The Goat,” a hotelier and the former Black Sea representative of Georgi Iliev, a Bulgarian ex-wrestler and organized crime boss who was shot and killed last summer. Continue reading “Border officials living in opulent villas”

In Bulgaria, a porous gateway to EU?

The New York Times

KAPITAN-ANDREEVO, Bulgaria — The spindly observation towers on the Turkish side of this frontier post’s barbed- wire fence stand abandoned, like decaying concrete dinosaurs of a distant Cold War past.

“This border was built to force people to pass through very slowly” from Bulgaria to Turkey, said Nikola Karaivanov, chief of customs at the Kapitan-Andreevo border station. “Now,” he said, “it needs to be changed in the opposite direction” – to control passage into the European Union.

EU officials say that this sprawling border area about 300 kilometers, or 185 miles, southeast of Sofia will soon become one of the EU’s busiest external frontiers: 35 lanes of increasing trade and passenger travel between Turkey and an expanded, 27-member bloc. Continue reading “In Bulgaria, a porous gateway to EU?”

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