site.btaLess Well-known Facts about BTA

Sofia, February 16 (BTA) - As BTA celebrates its 120th birthday, it is proud to share some less well known facts about its past and present:

BTA is one of the first news agencies in Europe and the world. It is among the ten agencies that operated in the 1890s, along with Havas (established in 1835, predecessor to Agence France-Presse, which was set up in 1944), Reuters (established 1851) and Press Association (1868), the Danish Ritzaus Bureau (1866), the Norwegian Telegraph Bureau (1867), the Hungarian Telegraph Agency (1880), the Lehtikuva Finnish Telegraph Bureau (1887), the Swiss Telegraph Agency (1894), and Harbour News Association (est. New York, 1848, ultimately becoming Associated Press).

Unlike most of its 19th century counterparts, BTA was and has always been a state-owned institution.

BTA is the world's only news agency that has not changed its name. It has existed without interruption, surviving three coups d'etat, four wars and four changes of the country's form of government (from principality to kingdom to people's republic to republic).

BTA boasts Bulgaria's largest photo archive, with over 5 million pictures, built up since 1952 (until 1989 alone, the collection numbered more than 130,000 black-and-white and 5,000 colour films).

The BTA Reference Library Department keeps the country's richest systematized archive, collected since 1950: over 500,000 items stored in some 4,000 boxes with over 80,000 thematic files, 22,000 microfiches, and 63,000 filing cabinet cards.

Every day, BTA transmits in real time over 1,000 pictures and as many news items, videos, analyses and comments in Bulgarian and English.

BTA is Bulgaria's first news outlet to purchase a media risk insurance.

BTA processes news feed in 15 foreign languages, including Chinese, Arabic, Greek, Turkish, Polish, Czech and Hungarian.

BTA's most valuable assets are the people who work for it. Over the years, its staff has included poets Dimcho Debelyanov, Nikolai Liliev and Nikola Yanev, writers Yordan Yovkov, Zmei Goryanin, Todor Genov, Vicho Ivanov and Serafim Severnyak, art critic and theorist, writer and semiotician Peter Uvaliev, literary critics Dimiter Yanakiev and Filip Panayotov, artists Dimiter Boyadjiev and Anzhela Minkova, encyclopaedia compiler Ivan G. Danchov, newspaper and magazine editors Stefan Prodev, Krassimir Droumev, Vecheslav Tounev and Svetoslav Terziev, TV journalists Stefan Tihchev, Ivan Garelov, Dimitri Ivanov, Asen Agov and Daniela Kuneva, radio journalist Kiril Vulchev, and translators Tsvetan Stoyanov, Vladimir Moussakov, Krustan Dyankov, Nelly Dospevska, Todor Vulchev, Petko Bocharov, Vera Gancheva, Alexander Shourbanov, Dragomir Petrov, Mariana Melnishka and Aglika Markova.