site.btaUPDATED Bulgarian News Agency, Hungary's DUNA Sign Cooperation Agreement

The heads of the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA) and Hungary's  DUNA Media Service Provider (DMSZ), Kiril Valchev and Anita Altorjai, signed a cooperation agreement here on Tuesday, the first between the two agencies. Since 2015, Hungary's news agency MTI, established in 1880, has been part of DMSZ. Altorjai signed the agreement also on behalf of the Media Service Support and Asset Management Fund (MTVA), which managed the rights on archives, photos and other content of the agency. 

The signing was attended also by Bulgarian Ambassador to Hungary Hristo Polendakov.

The agreement provides for each party to receive the other party's information feeds in English, and both parties have the right to use this information in their information services. This will allow each of the two agencies to publish daily a news item of the other agency with the right of free access for all visitors to the respective site, as well as the right to archive these published materials for the agency's historical and editorial purposes. The contract shall take effect from the date of its signing and shall be automatically renewed annually in perpetuity.

According to the BTA Director General, the agreement will allow the two agencies to complement the news from Hungary and Bulgaria, respectively, to the information they buy from the global agencies, without investing additional funds. He noted that news about the Bulgarian minority in Hungary would be particularly useful. According to the 2022 census in Hungary, 3,770 people declare themselves Bulgarian, but according to the Bulgarian Embassy, together with the local people of Bulgarian origin, the number is almost two-fold higher. According to a report by BTA's reference department, Bulgarians in the census self-identify according to three characteristics: belonging to the Bulgarian nationality, Bulgarian as mother tongue, and communication in Bulgarian in the family and among friends. According to the data, there are larger communities in Budapest (1,390 people) and in the area of the large cities of Pécs, Miskolc, Debrecen, Szeged, Kecskemét, etc. Based on the census results, the cultural autonomy of nationalities in Hungary is also ensured. Any settlement that has at least 25 people who have declared themselves Bulgarians can establish its own self-government (municipality) if it declares this right during the local elections in 2024. In Hungary, in addition to the 21 districts in Budapest, local self-governments can be established in another 16 settlements of the country. The elected three-member local self-governments receive state funding as well as funds from the local government to implement the cultural autonomy of the Bulgarians in their settlement by organising activities to preserve national identity: celebrations, exhibitions, concerts, and commemorations of traditional holidays.

Valchev and Altorjai discussed the opportunities for the two media to promote the activities of the cultural institutes of Hungary in Sofia and Bulgaria in Budapest, as well as the new Bulgarian Cultural and Education Centre, opened on May 25 this year by Presidents Tamas Szujok of Hungary and Rumen Radev of Bulgaria.

Valchev noted that greater information exchange will be particularly useful in the areas of tourism, business, education and politics, because Bulgaria and Hungary are both members of NATO and the European Union, with Hungary presiding over the EU Council in the second half of this year for the second time after the country's entry into the Union in 2004. According to Bulgarian Ambassador Polendakov, about 100,000 Hungarian tourists are expected in Bulgaria this year and a trade turnover of nearly EUR 3 billion, while the universities in Budapest and Szeged are supporting training in the field of tourism, business, education and politics.

Valchev invited to Bulgaria former newspaper, radio and television journalist Anita Altorjai, who has been the executive director of DMSZ since 2022, prior to which she had served for ten years as the press director of the Office of the President of Hungary. The BTA Director General invited her to visit this year or next year for the Bulgarian-Hungarian Friendship Day, set in 2016 by the Bulgarian and Hungarian parliaments on October 19, when the memory of the patron saint of the Bulgarian people, St. John of Rila, is celebrated. St John of Rila's relics were taken by Hungarian King Bela III in 1,183 AD to the city of Esztergom, which was the capital of Hungary at the time. In 1,194, the King returned the relics to Bulgaria.

Valchev presented his colleague with a woodcarving of the Rila Monastery and an icon of St. John of Rila, a bilingual album in Bulgarian and English titled "Symbols of Bulgaria", edited by former BTA employee Tanya Nikolova, the English-language edition of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences on the Bulgarian alphabets, as well as the medal from the Bulgarian National Bank's Mint and the Bulgarian postage stamp dedicated to the 125th anniversary of BTA.

After 2021, when the National Assembly made access to BTA news open access, Bulgaria's national news agency arranged new contracts with the global agencies from which it buys information to allow all Bulgarian media to republish their news translated into Bulgarian free of charge.

In addition to purchasing news products from five global news agencies, after the agreement signed Tuesday, BTA now provides Bulgarian media with free news from 45 national news agencies from four continents (Europe, Asia, South America and Africa), with which BTA has similar cooperation agreements, including with the national news agencies of all of Bulgaria's neighboring countries and with 23 European agencies (16 EU members) that are members of the European Alliance of News Agencies (EANA).  BTA has such agreements with the national news agencies of Austria, Azerbaijan, Albania, Algeria, Argentina, Armenia, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Vietnam, Ghana, Greece, Israel, India, Iran, Spain, Italy, Yemen, Cambodia, Kyrgyzstan, Cyprus, Kosovo, Côte d'Ivoire, Latvia, Liberia, Lebanon, Moldova, Mongolia, Nigeria, the Netherlands, the United Arab Emirates, Poland, the Republic of North Macedonia, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Slovakia, Serbia, Turkiye, Hungary, the Philippines, Croatia and Montenegro, and is a subscriber to Ukraine's national news agency.