A guide to Jewish Bulgaria

Authors: Dimana Trankova, Anthony Georgieff
Publisher: Free Speech International
Published: 2021
Covers: hard

This is the expanded and updated second edition of the famous A Guide to Jewish Bulgaria first published in 2011 and now a collector’s item.

A Guide to Jewish Bulgaria was designed as a „journey through both time and territory.“ It contains introductory chapters on early Jewish history in the Balkans, life in the Ottoman Empire (1393-1878), Jewish going-ons in independent Bulgaria (1878-1944), Jewish decline under Communism (1944-1989), and Jewish life post-1989. A special section deals with the famous rescue of the Bulgarian Jews from the Holocaust „paid off“ by Jews in Aegean Thrace, Vardar Macedonia and Pirot who were deported to Nazi-occupied Poland.

Richly illustrated with superb photography, this book focuses on what remains of the Jewish presence in Bulgaria now: synagogues, old cemeteries, remnants of Jewish neighbourhoods in Sofia, Plovdiv, Vidin, Ruse, Varna, Burgas, Yambol, Samokov, Dupnitsa, Kyustendil, Gotse Delchev and elsewhere.

This new edition contains a chapter about Jewish heritage in Bulgaria’s neighbouring states: Turkey, Greece, North Macedonia, Serbia and Romania.

A must for anyone interested in Jewish heritage in Eastern Europe in general and Bulgaria in particular.