site.btaUPDATED August 16, 1979: First Banner of Peace International Children's Assembly Opens in Sofia

The first Banner of Peace International Children's Assembly took place in Sofia 50 years ago, between August 16 and 25, 1979.

The Assembly was initiated by the daughter of Bulgaria's communist leader Todor Zhivkov, Lyudmila Zhivkova, in her capacity as Chairperson of the Committee for Culture (equivalent to minister).

Zhivkova borrowed the name of the assembly and its motto ("Unity, Creativity, Beauty") from a school of thought established by Russian philosopher and artist Nicholas Roerich - a mixture of mystic insights, ambitions for the world's culture and forecasts of mankind according to which the future belongs to the creative individual.

The "banner of peace" itself was conceived by Roerich in the 1930s as a sort of a cultural Red Cross, to mark every cultural institution as neutral and ensure its protection in wartime.

The emblem of Bulgaria's Banner of Peace represented a globe depicted as a half-broken egg shell with two chickens inside.

"You opted for the road of fire. Fiery warriors, predestined by the epoch to wage the last battle for beauty. The sense of beauty will open the gates to the future," Zhivkova said, welcoming the 2,200 children (1,100 from Bulgaria and 1,094 from 76 other countries) who attended the first edition. "Let the beckoning power of Beauty, Truth and Wisdom unite your hearts for the sake of cooperation and mankind's common future," she said further.

"Everyone is entitled to be an artist in the Peace Assembly," Zhivkova told the first participants. The long-term idea was to gather gifted children from around the world, put them on record and follow their development. They were thus supposed to establish a permanent link to Bulgaria and act as its global lobby.

The first Banner of Peace Assembly was intended as a tie-in with the International Year of the Child - 1979, proclaimed by UNESCO, and was held under the auspices of UNESCO Director-General Amadou Makhtar M'Bow. 

The assembly was planned as a one-off event, but its international success prompted a decision to hold it once every three years. Four more assemblies followed, all after Zhivkova's sudden death in 1981: in 1982, 1985, 1988 and 1989, with an overall attendance of 3,900 children from 138 countries and 14,000 from Bulgaria.

The Banner of Peace headquarters was established in Sofia in 1982, and international centres were set up in Poland, France, Portugal, Belgium, The Netherlands, Austria, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, India and other countries.

In 1987, UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar designated Banner of Peace as a Peace Messenger. Celebrities that Bulgaria hosted in connection with the Assembly included Leonard Bernstein, Herbert von Karajan and Gianni Rodari. 

Banner of Peace was designed as a major propaganda initiative of the totalitarian state. The idea was to project an image of prosperity, abundance and care to the outside world. The participants were supposed to network into a new form of global-scale cooperation, as ideology-free ambassadors of their respective peoples. The combination of peace, children, art, unity and freedom with no strings attached was a recipe for success against the background of the Cold War, the nuclear threat and the incessant talk about disarmament in the 1980s.

One lasting reminder of the Assembly is the Banner of Peace Monument, renamed The Bells in April 1990. Having taken just 30 feverish days to build, the concrete structure of four 37-metre-tall pylons encircled by a number of smaller concrete stands was unveiled on Sofia's southern outskirts on August 25, 1975 as a symbol of the children's movement. Seven large bells weighing from 700 to 1,000 kg were mounted in the highest part of the monument to symbolize the seven continents of the planet. The composition was completed by 16 bells from various countries. More bells were added later on, and they now total 100-plus, including a memorial bell "NATO in the service of peace" in May 2002 and a bell presented by Pope John Paul II during his visit to Bulgaria in May 2002. On June 12, 2004, a Pantheon of the Children Victims of Terrorism was inaugurated at the monument.

After the advent of democracy in Bulgaria in 1989, the Banner of Peace project was discontinued on August 30, 1990, and its coordinating unit in Sofia and 18 centres abroad were closed.

On the occasion of the first assembly's 20th anniversary, Zhivkova's daughter, Evgenia Jivkova, initiated the establishment of a non-governmental Lyudmila Zhivkova – Banner of Peace Foundation in 1999. The Foundation organized ten small-scale Banner of Peace Assemblies in Sofia between 1999 and 2008. An eleventh assembly took place in 2019, marking the 40th anniversary of the Banner of Peace Movement and held under the auspices of Bulgarian Vice President Iliana Iotova.