Environmental Art

Bulgarian Gothic

- Zlatyo Boyadjev

A reference to Grant Wood's American Gothic here.

love is not a factor

There is no Bulgarian word for "Yuppie"

As a Bulgarian friend put it, "I can’t think of a word. Perhaps, we don’t want to rise in the world as the Japanese."

Bulgarian Umbrella

Bulgarian Black Market

VICE TRAVEL: Sofia, Bulgaria
by Top-Notch112

човечество

"A man is the childhood he has had, the family, the streets he has walked, the house he has lived in, his friends and enemies, the books he has read, the music he has heard, the paintings he has seen, his convictions and ideas, his breakfast, lunch and supper, the sunrises and sunsets he has seen, the words he has spoken, the decisions he has made, the life he has led."

- Bulgarian photographer Hristina Tasheva

An earlier reference to photography here.

Bulgarian Mafia

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“Other countries have the mafia, but in Bulgaria, the mafia has the country.”

Even so, "Britain is scarier than Bulgaria."

Story here.

Wall Street brokers become monks

Bulgarian monk Brother Nikanor, 32, walks in front of Tsurnogorski monastery, some 50 km [31miles] west of the capital Sofia, September 24, 2008. The Nasdaq broker turned monk advises his former colleagues, shattered by the financial crisis, to keep a jar full of soil on their desks to remind them about where we are all heading to and what really matters in life. Five years ago, after failing to find happiness in the life he lived, the Christian Orthodox who hadn't practised as a child quit the New York-based market for a dilapidated Bulgarian monastery that once served as a communist labour camp. 

[source: REUTERS]

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[Another?] Wall Street broker has left Manhattan to become a monk in a Bulgarian monastery.

Hristo Mishkov was a broker on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York until he gave it all up to return to his native Bulgaria, reports the Daily Telegraph.

He now wakes at dawn to attend to a herd of cheese-producing buffalo in the 12th century Tsurnogorski monastery, 30 miles west of Sofia.

Exchanging designer suits and shoes for a cassock and sandals, Brother Nikanor believes Wall Street and the City deserve all they get as the global financial system goes into meltdown.

"It is right to see people who consume more than they deserve shattered by a financial crisis from time to time, to suffer so that they can become more reasonable," he said.

The collapse of banks and investment firms was a necessary correction because they had grown greedy, he said.

"Many people in the world do not realise that they have not earned the food they eat, that they take without giving," said Mr Mishkov, 32, who worked for Karoll, one of Bulgaria's leading brokerages.

"But if someone consumes more than they have earned, it means someone else is starving."

His former colleagues were stunned when he decided to become a monk, but he had made up his mind to seek spiritual well-being rather than material wealth.

"Everybody can be a good broker but this does not bring much benefit for the world," he said. 

[source: ANANOVA]

Do they know each other?

Bulgaria's White Brotherhood

Founded March 7, 1897, by Peter Konstantinov Deunov [1864-1944]. A non-smoking, vegetarian "curious mix of Christian and Indian mysticism."

Константин Павлов

Bulgaria's Konstantin Pavlov [born 1933] died today. He was among the few Bulgarian intellectuals who dared to assert their professional independence during the 1945-89 communist regime.

ELEGIAC OPTIMISM [1960]

I won't be nasty anymore,
nor provocative.
I will choose my means and enemies with care.
Bye-bye Sofia, I am going back to nature!
In Kurilo, I have a nice little house—
I will mend the old fence,
and live there quietly, invisible.
In the winter, I will meditate.
In the summer, I will raise . . .
What will I raise?
Only snakes dart in the weeds.
I will raise snakes
instead of carrier pigeons.
You can achieve anything with goodness.
They say that snakes become very attached
to their masters.
I will send them
as a small favor
to my enemies.

blinder

In a province of southwestern Bulgaria, Byzantine Bulgar-slayer Basil II [958-1025] won a crushing victory and, according to later legend, blinded 14,000 Bulgarian prisoners, leaving one man in every hundred with the sight in one eye to lead his comrades home.

Shopi

Shopska salad is a Balkan appetizer made from tomatoes, cucumbers, onion, raw or roasted peppers [preferably roasted], and sirene [white brine cheese]. Consumed with rakia.

Shopska salad derives its name from the regional group called Shopi residing in Bulgaria, Macedonia and Serbia. The Shopi are credited with developing the original recipe.

Glory

I just bought this attractive Russian "Slava" brand wristwatch with Chinese mechanism for $15 on eBay.

Given recent Russian atrocities in Georgia and ongoing Chinese offenses in Tibet and Darfur [about which Richard Just writes here], what am I enabling? 

When I bought the watch, I was motivated by the fact that the cyrillic alphabet was not invented by Russians but by Bulgarians and that Chinese culture extends back 5000 years.

NBC's coverage of the Beijing Olympic Games opening ceremony garnered 34 million television viewers; attendees included American President Bush, Russian Prime Minister Putin and French President Sarkozy among others.