Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Albania, Romania and Greece Still in the Running for the New 7 Wonders
BalkanTravellers.com
Out of the twelve sites from the region that competed with nearly 250 other sites around the world in the second phase, half of them were voted among the top 77 nominees to continue on to the third phase.
The Balkan contenders that remain in the running include: Mount Olympus in Greece, the Belogradchik Rocks in Bulgaria, Vrelo Cave in Macedonia, Đavolja Varoš in Serbia, the Retezat National Park in Romania and Lake Ohrid in Albania and Macedonia.
In the coming days, a panel of experts will select 28 candidates out of the current 77. They will be announced on July 21 when voting will resume, to continue through 2010 and 2011. The sites selected to be the new seven wonders of nature will be announced in 2011.
The six sites around the Balkans that are no longer in the competition are: Mount Vlašić in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Tara River Canyon in Montenegro, Cappadocia in Turkey, Drin River in Albania, the Danube River and the Plitvice Lakes in Croatia.
Read more about the Balkan sites in the New Seven Wonders of Nature competition on BalkanTravellers.com
Epicure
Bulgaria
Pumpkin head!
If you wish to insult somebody in Bulgarian, you could call him tikvenik – a word whose content isn’t quite clear, and which Bulgarians use to mean anything from ‘thickhead’ to ‘airhead’. The good thing about this kind of insult is that it expresses your definite lack of approval, Full Story
Curiosity Chest
Macedonia
Recycled Life: Bottle Collectors in Skopje, Macedonia
Like quicksand, poverty is hard to escape - the harder you fight, the worse it can get. In Skopje, some work hard scouring the city for "treasures." They are bottle collectors, spending the day in search of recyclable plastic which they can sell for a subsistence income.
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Useful Reads
Bulgaria
Street without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria (2008) | By Kapka Kassabova
Danube blues
Text by Nicholas Lezard for The Guardian*
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Music
Serbia
EXIT Festival in Novi Sad, Serbia: Overnight Exile in the Fortress
Located roughly in the middle between Bulgaria's Black Sea and Croatia’s Adriatic coasts, which are both shaken by high-energy rock parties each July, Novi Sad hosts one of the most significant summer festivals on the Balkans – EXIT. As fans from all parts of the region start to gather in the town for for this year’s event, scheduled to take place between July 10 and 13, Mila Popova recounts about the time she spent at the festival last summer.
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Photogalleries
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A Perfect Shot
In Homo Urbanus Europeanus, exhibited May 9-24 in front of the National Theatre in Sofia, Jean-Marc Caracci presents his photographs of people in the urban environment of European capitals.
RED&WHITE SOFIA. On the 1st of March Bulgarians say goodbye to the winter. They buy each other red&white threads to carry around until they see a stork and spring can begin. Photography by Lode Desmet
BULGARIA D'OR: The Bulgarian countryside, patinated with the noble golden dust of the autumn. Photographs by Lode Desmet
360 degrees Bulgaria, an exhibition by photographer Alexandar Ivanov, is on display at the Sea Garden in Varna until August 28. It will be shown at Plovdiv’s Central Square from Sept 5.
The exhibition Photographs of a Trip Through Bulgaria by Hungarian photographer András Balla can be seen in Sofia's Hungarian Cultural Institute, at Aksakov 16 Street, until August 22
Instant Spring in Sofia | Photographs by Lode Desmet
Off-the-season Beauty of Bulgaria's Black Sea Coast | Photographs by Adelina Iliev
Bulgaria's Northern Black Sea Coast
Photographs by Albena Shkodrova
excellent smugs