site.btaBulgarian Consul General in Nis: Bulgarians in Serbia Need to Regain Their Self-Confidence

In an interview for the FAR multimedia portal in Bulgarian and Serbian, Bulgarian Consul General in Nis, Dimitar Tsanev, said that Bulgarians in Serbia need to regain their self-confidence. Tsanev, who has been consul since 2020, spoke about the challenges that Bulgarians in Serbia are facing. Nis is the administrative centre of the Nisava District where the majority of the Bulgarian population in Serbia lives.

One of the main priorities of the Bulgarian Consulate General in Nis is to assist and support the Bulgarians in Serbia who, due to historical circumstances, have remained outside the borders of modern Bulgaria. It also aims to protect their civil rights, preserve their cultural and linguistic identity, and develop economically and socially the region where they live, Tsanev explained.

In his words, the creation of conditions for economic development in the region is an important element for the restoration of the self-confidence of the Bulgarian population in Serbia, but also a factor that will allow young people not to leave their native places in search of a higher social standard. The lack of a modern, adequate infrastructure in the towns of Tsaribrod or Bosilegrad scares off investors, Tsanev said. Another unfavourable factor in the region is the lack of a sufficiently skilled workforce. Bulgaria has a limited ability to influence the creation of suitable conditions for business development, but it is still involved in improving the welfare of the inhabitants of those areas, providing employment opportunities on its territory to almost 1,000 people from Tsaribrod, Bosilegrad and their surrounding villages, Tsanev added.

As teaching of native Bulgarian language is of great importance for the Bulgarians in Serbia in the field of education, the Bulgarian state, through appropriate mechanisms, will continue to support the study of the Bulgarian language, he emphasized. After many years of struggle, a fifth-grade class was established in the primary school in Tsaribrod, which is taught entirely in а Bulgarian mother tongue.

Tsanev also addressed his compatriots in Tsaribrod and Bosilegrad that amendments to regulations are being planned, according to which candidate students for Bulgarian universities will enjoy priority under Council of Ministers’ Decree 103 if they have studied in primary and secondary school classes with comprehensive teaching in Bulgarian.