site.btaIntellectuals, Politicians Take Stand in Favour of Keeping March 3 as National Holiday

A group of intellectuals and politicians have launched a campaign to defend March 3 as the national holiday of Bulgaria. They intend to propose a referendum on the matter.

Late in July, three parliamentary forces: GERB-UDF, Continue the Change - Democratic Bulgaria, and the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, tabled a joint bill to amend the Constitution. One of the proposals is to replace March 3 (the date generally accepted to mark Bulgaria's liberation from Ottoman Turkish rule in 1878 in the course of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878) with May 24 (Alphabet Day, the nation's most important cultural holiday) as the national holiday. The idea triggered a heated public controversy.

MEP Petar Vitanov told a BTA-hosted news conference in Sofia on Monday that the group behind the pro-March 3 campaign includes people of various occupations and political views. The news conference was also attended by historian Iskra Baeva, former Bulgarian Academy of Sciences president Ivan Juchnovski, law expert Yavor Notev and journalist Yavor Dachkov. Vitanov also listed former Bulgarian president Georgi Parvanov, former Socialist MP Georgi Kadiev, physicians, actors and athletes among the group's members.

Vitanov said: "We view March 3 as the culmination of five centuries of struggling for freedom. March 3 is the line which runs between shackles and liberty. It is the dawn of our modern state. It epitomizes the feat of the tens and hundreds of thousands of people who died for Bulgaria's freedom. We are trying to resist an attempt to misrepresent history for the sake of political expediency."

Taking a journalist's question, Vitanov said incumbent President Rumen Radev is not part of the initiative. He said the idea is not to establish a political party but to raise the question of whether the Bulgarian people want to change their national holiday.