The Bridge of Friendship blog is seven years old

A message, dedicated to the 7th anniversary of the Bulgarian-Romanian blog

Vladimir Mitev

19 September 2022 marked the seventh anniversary of the Romanian-Bulgarian blog “The Bridge of Friendship”. However, I won’t give a summary or it will be very short. I approach this anniversary with the thought of new projects or thinking about the completion of things started in recent years. The moment is one of transition and requires more work and fewer statements or generalisations.

Definitely something new and thematically related to the blog is the fact that from September 2022 I am employed by the Romanian section of Radio Bulgaria, part of the Bulgarian National Radio. In a few days, the website of this section will be up and running, which will contain a lot of interesting information translated from the radio website (news, opinions, interviews), as well as original posts by the Romanian section team – my blog and that of Iulia Bahovski, creator of the other Romanian-Bulgarian blog MyRo.Biz.

I expect this section to attract interest from the Romanian public. It will be addressed to Romanian speakers from all over the world and will be able to increase the knowledge of Bulgarian realities and Bulgarian-Romanian relations.

This autumn and winter I should finish my PhD research on pre-revolutionary Iranian literature, which I started in 2020. This has led to the blog “The Persian Bridge of Friendship”, a smaller sibling of the Bulgarian-Romanian blog, which focuses on the Bulgarian, Romanian and Persian cultural spaces. My intention is to continue this activity as well. I think my PhD opened my eyes to some important phenomena and characteristics of modern Iranian society. And the Persian blog also allows me, within modest limits, to be a bridge between spaces that do not know each other well, but deserve more satisfaction from their mutual contacts.

This autumn will also be important because I have to complete a study commissioned by the Bulgarian Diplomatic Institute on Romanian foreign policy, the global context and Bulgarian-Romanian relations. In the context of this research, a series of interviews with Romanian foreign policy and economic experts will appear on the blog.

Today, The Bridge of Friendship has 1,277 articles. 189 subscribers via email or WordPress.com. Over 1,500 followers on Facebook. 152 subscribers on its YouTube channel. 84 subscribers on his Telegram channel. 138 followers on Twitter.

According to me and readers, the blog plays a positive role in the Bulgarian-Romanian space. As far as it is possible, I will continue to develop and strengthen it, as I believe everyone benefits from it.

Bulgarian-Romanian relations are marked by a lack of trust between Bulgarians and Romanians, which is also due to an insufficient mutual knowledge or lack of genuine curiosity between the two. For me, both peoples are interesting both separately and as a package. Thanks to the blog, I think I manage to find concepts and approaches that help me discover things in Bulgarians and Romanians that lead to change – in me and in them. So, on the seventh anniversary of the blog, I am thinking about what lies ahead and I expect the work I have started to continue.

In the context of current events in the world, I believe that if one wants to change the world, one should blog. Make blogs, not war!

Photo: The bridge at Rousse-Giurgiu (source: Yavor Michev)

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