BTA's Latest LIK Magazine Issue Dedicated to Bulgarian Academy of Sciences' 155th Anniversary Presented in Bucharest

UPDATED BTA's Latest LIK Magazine Issue Dedicated to Bulgarian Academy of Sciences' 155th Anniversary Presented in Bucharest

BTA correspondent Martina Gancheva, Metodi Yordanov

Left to right: AGERPRES Director General Claudia Nicolae, BTA Director General Kiril Valchev and Bulgaria's Ambassador in Bucharest Radko Vlaykov (BTA Photo/Valdimir Shokov)

Bucharest,

28.10.2024 12:00 | UPDATED 28.10.2024 15:12

(BTA)

“We're presenting the October issue of the LIK magazine, dedicated to the 155th anniversary of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS), in the Bulgarian News Agency's (BTA) National Press Club in Bucharest, because it was in Romania, in the city of Braila, in 1869, that the Bulgarian Literary Society was founded, which grew into BAS,” said BTA's Director General Kiril Valchev here on Monday.

The presentation coincides with the second anniversary of the opening of BTA's National Press Club in the Romanian capital, as well as with the feast day of Venerable Theophano Basarab as canonized by the Romanian Orthodox Church.

Holding the presentation of the new LIK magazine, dedicated to BAS in Bucharest, on the day after the [snap] Bulgarian Parliamentary elections is sending a message that the Bulgarian people need to be led by men of learning, like the ones who founded BAS in Romania.

The Venerable Theopahno Basarab is an example of the commonality between Bulgarians and Romanians - we share a common faith.

Bulgarians and Romanians are also connected by a great European river - the Danube. We are linked by a common historical destiny, which runs through the shelter found here by the Bulgarian emigrants who published in Bucharest the emblematic newspapers of the Bulgarian national revival period, through the trials of the world wars and communism, to reach the Treaty of Friendship signed 30 years ago between our democratic countries and their joint accession to the European Union and NATO.

And the Bulgarian community in Romania continues to connect us through the centuries to this day. Bulgaria must continue to rely on the Bulgarians in Romania to contribute to our country, as our forefathers did during the National Revival period, including with the establishment of the Bulgarian Literary Society, which grew into the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

At last, Bulgaria's leaders must build on what has been achieved before them. As with the opening of this National Press club with a correspondent's bureau, BTA actually restored and built on what it had achieved in the period 1984-1991, when it had a correspondent in Bucharest, the journalist Petko Petkov, who was one of the few journalists to cover events from the scene in Romania at the end of 1989, when the country was swept by mass protests against the rule of its President Nicolae Ceausescu and his information was quoted by world agencies.

It also transpired from Valchev's remarks that copies of LIK magazine will be available at Romanian universities which have Bulgarian language programmes, as well as the library of Bucharest University, the Romanian National History Museum and the Union of Banat Bulgarians. "At the beginning of this year, BTA started sending out copies of LIK to over 300 cultural institutions in Bulgaria: national and regional libraries, universities, museums, galleries. It had not occurred to us before that that it would be helpful to send the magazine to [educational] establishments across the world that teach Bulgarian studies," said Valchev. He stressed that anybody can also read LIK online on the BTA website.

Before that, Catalina Puiu, a professor of Bulgarian language at Bucharest University, said that in the 1990s, her alma mater used to subscribe to BTA's LIK magazine and copies of it were already available at the university library. "We would read LIK all the time," Puiu said.

/MY/