What Is the Origin of the Bulgarians?
Who were the Proto-Bulgarians, and where did our ancestors come from: are we heirs of the Thracians, did we arrive from the distant steppes, or are we Sarmatians? How did genetics become the next great scientific leap, giving us many answers about the past and, in practice, leaving only one theory standing? Historian Assoc. Prof. Dr. Todor Chobanov, author of Proizhodat na balgarite – debatat prez XXI vek (The Origin of the Bulgarians: The Debate in the 21st Century), explains why this question still drags us into fierce arguments a millennium and a half later.
22Edward and the Afronauts
Of all the eternal stories, there is one we underestimate most often. Let us saddle Rocinante, greet an illegally young Dulcinea and chase the windmills of the Solar System! The renowned hidalgo Don Quixote, a few centuries later, is Edward Mukuka Nkoloso, the inventor who… very nearly beat the US and the USSR in their battle for space!
23Where Do Bulgarians Come From—and Why Are We Still Fighting About It 1,500 Years Later?
Where do Bulgarians come from? And why are we still fighting about it 1,500 years later? History is now a different story. But what do historians think? Alexander Moshev is not afraid to provoke on matters of the past, while sticking to the rules of science. The past divides us the way only politics and sports can. Why? Can that change? Today's guest studies both the history of the Bulgarians and the way we try to explain and interpret it today. What does science know today about our origins as a people? Why, so many centuries later, do they become a pretext for “bloody” clashes online? Is the end of history approaching, and how will it be changed by the fact that each of us now leaves behind an enormous amount of data? We will also talk about the parallel “history” being born on the internet. About the forgotten heroes of the past. About how world fame fades and when it is worth seeking a different point of view.
24Oppenheimer: The (New?) Prometheus
J. Robert Oppenheimer, “the father of the atomic bomb,” built the most powerful weapon of destruction and then became one of the most stubborn and persuasive advocates for banning it. It is no accident that his story is being told again today, when bombs are falling in Europe once more and technological progress may again carry the risk of self-destruction.
25“Maybe Nihilism Is Written into Our Genes?”
Ivaylo Kunev tells inspiring stories from the Bulgarian past in a magical way… So how did we end up with the words in the headline? Leaders, the people who know how to change the world, to lead, to build, to persuade. They are the big theme of today's guest, who has spent more than a decade designing and running leadership programs. Ivaylo has impressive managerial and entrepreneurial experience that spans decades. At the same time, he knows how to tell a story—his tales of strong personalities draw a huge number of fans. He is the author of the book Liderite: zabravenite istorii na Balgaria (The Leaders: Bulgaria's Forgotten Stories). Leadership. The subject is so heavy in our part of the world, and in the times we live in generally. So it is time to look for the hard answers. Is it worth collecting the stories of politicians, entrepreneurs and… khans? Why do we find it so hard to form a political elite and to have authentic leaders as a nation? What would Tolkien have written if he had been Bulgarian? How can Bulgarian history become a personal adventure and offer inspiring examples that help us make our dreams come true?
26The Genius Who Poisoned the World Twice
Technology changes our lives at breakneck speed, and its creators—inventors, programmers—are the heroes of our day… At least until it turns out that an innovation the world greeted with wild enthusiasm is lethally dangerous. Yet one inventor rode a wave of fame for years, revered as a genius, while creating not one but two technologies that later proved to have cost human lives, and whose damage to the whole planet will outlast generations. The story of Thomas Midgley Jr. is worth recalling every time we cheer the latest huge breakthrough in artificial intelligence or any other technology—a reminder of how important it is to weigh the risks before we take flight on the wings of enthusiasm, and to think about and discuss the big questions technology puts before us, the ones we never seem to have time for…
27“Armed with Art, We Are More Vigilant and Less Deceived”
Not the politician or the soldier but the artist is the one who should paint tomorrow. That is the great theme of a little-known British historian who, a decade ago, gathered a rare historical genre of text into one ambitious book: the manifesto. Alex Danchev had a distant Bulgarian connection, and with a fine eye and wide-ranging knowledge he assembled a puzzle of 100 twentieth-century manifestos. What might the manifesto of the future look like in the age of artificial intelligence? We'll get there, of course…
28BDS or Phonetic? The Battle for Bulgaria's Keyboard
How are the letters on your keyboard arranged—according to the good old layout inherited from typewriters, known as BDS? Or the phonetic one, where the Cyrillic letters follow their Latin equivalents? Is there a better solution? Does this choice really make a serious difference to how fast we type on a computer? And might both standards be obsolete, since they come from a time when their main purpose was to suit the typewriter? This story begins 115 years ago, when computers did not exist even in people's imagination…
29“Programs, Programs and More Programs!”: The Computer Future as Seen from 1988
In the 1988 book Klyuchat kam badeshteto (The Key to the Future), Ivan Ivanov and Metodi Stamenov gathered the era's visions of the computer world. Looking at today from that vantage point is more than impressive: what did the authors get right, what have we achieved, where have we failed, and are there moments when, 34 years later, we sound just as optimistically ignorant about what technology can do? And who came up with the title's idea, so fashionable today in career choices?
30Gamebooks: The Phenomenon That Taught a Generation to Read
Gamebooks are a purely Bulgarian cultural phenomenon, and there is a lot to learn from them. They show how the wild early years of the “transition” had not only mutri, the thick-necked gangsters of the era, but also a peculiar, meaningful literature that woke a love of books in an entire generation. If this story is familiar to you, it is worth learning how it continues today: one of the beloved authors, a knight of the gamebook, is fighting to give the phenomenon a new life. If you have never heard of it… then it is time, because this is something rarely talked about, and it was one of a kind. We go back to tell the story of the phenomenon and its six great authors, then turn to what the beloved writers do today, and finally look ahead to the gamebooks that will soon return in full force.
31Guy Fawkes, the Face of Anonymous
You have seen this face many times. It is the great symbol of the 21st century. It comes from deep within Britain’s past, yet it would never have become the archetype we know today without a pure accident that came from art. Who was this Guy Fawkes? How did a mythical figure from Britain’s distant past come back to life to carry so much symbolism? How did his name become a word used every day in English? And is he really someone who deserves to be held up as an example?
32Takor Kyurdyan: The Artist of Archetypes
A remarkable master spends years searching for his own way to leave his gaze on photographic paper, and in the end he finds it: he coats his nude heroines in emulsion and “prints” them directly onto the paper. His unconventional approach and his photographic paintings, which become known as “archetypes,” own their era, and then seem to vanish, just as archetypes do. Today you will find almost nothing about him on the endless internet. Takor Kyurdyan died a quarter of a century ago, at only 51, and now his singular works are being reborn, dug out of time's memory by a young historian. It is time for a black-and-white digital story that brings together the fates of three men in a friendship beyond time.
33Voyager, Delyo the Outlaw and an Immortal Humanity
If you met an alien, how would you introduce today's humanity? The story of the Voyager project is incredible. It is the first and last large-scale attempt by our civilization to introduce itself: to gather everything most important that defines it and present it in a form that other species could decipher. And to do it with technology that today, almost half a century later, seems primitive to us. We all know about Valya Balkanska's song in space, but what else have you heard about Voyager, the space traveler drifting among the stars that may be the last witness to humanity's existence? And how exactly are aliens supposed to understand what we have to tell them? Liftoff!
34Luddites, Long May They Live
The Luddites were a British movement that rose up against the machines two centuries ago. Workers fighting for rights that had fallen victim to automation caused such chaos that Britain had to send more soldiers against them than against Napoleon's army. Technological progress is often frightening. Today, the Western world calls people who worry about the future brought by the supposedly limitless possibilities of computers “Luddites.” In that sense, we all are, or at least it is good to be, Luddites to some degree. What does the history of the skeptics' battle against technology look like, and was it always doomed? What changes if we look at it from the vantage point of today and the questions our time raises?
35“My Future Reached Out Its Hand…”
The Cybernet was boundlessly amazed. Its three antennas stood up straight and bent into marks of wonder: “What is feeling?!” In 1969 the poet Dobri Zhotev told, in verse, of his meeting with the Cybernet, and today his reflections sound more than timely. The poet's story is as fascinating and instructive as his poems.
36The Dreamer Who Should Have Been Bill Gates
“It was not a happy moment when I realized that computers were being built to make money, not to make minds,” says Gary Kildall. He wrote the first operating system for personal computers. And, according to legend, he let slip the golden contract with IBM that could have put him at the top of the software world—the place Bill Gates and Microsoft won instead. He is, without a doubt, a legend of the computer age. He died at just 52, but left an enormous mark on computer history.
37The Past in the Future: The Legacy of Todor Slavchev
The whole Bulgarian 20th century is there. Tsar Boris III, Georgi Dimitrov and Todor Zhivkov appear; the Bulgarian authorities are welcomed in Macedonia in the early 1940s, and soon after our soldiers storm the German lines; the People's Court and the first rallies of the 1990s are caught on film. The photographic archive of Todor Slavchev is a bottomless treasure trove that reaches us thanks to his granddaughter, Yana Uzunova. Enjoy these extraordinary pictures and read their remarkable story…
38The Bauhaus: When Technology Met Art
These days we have almost grown used to seeing technology and art as rivals, yet this story reminds us that when the two come together, the results can be astonishing. The Bauhaus was a school where both paths converged; it lasted only a handful of years at the start of the last century, but it left behind an entire movement in architecture and art. Its story comes to us from the past to teach us about the roads of the future…
39Six Forgotten Treasures of Bulgarian Technology
What set the old Bulgarian ancestors of the computer mouse apart? What exactly is punched tape? What did the first electronic chess set made in Bulgaria look like? And how did the world's largest floppy disks come to be… Bulgarian? Anton Orush is the living archive of Bulgarian technology, and the creator of “Sandacite” shows us six of his remarkable finds.
40The Living Museum of Bulgarian Technology
“These are the last years in which something serious can still be done to save the vanishing history of Bulgarian technology. Now is the time for concrete deeds,” says Anton Orush. And his deeds are astonishing. Over 12 years of enormous effort, he has assembled the most complete collection of Bulgarian technology in existence, along with a whole sea of information about its past and present. At just 30, he is a living encyclopedia, and his home is a remarkable library of stories. Let us set off on an unforgettable technological visit.
