European ex-Communist countries have been widely considered to possess little associational life. The main explanation for this observation has been the lack of organizational vivacity in the past, either during the Communist regime or before it. More recently, however, some researchers, and especially those involved with area studies, have warned such a conclusion might be hasty and incorrect. The associational history of Bulgaria—a case that has not been much studied until now—provides additional support in favor of the argument that pre-Communist associational life in the region has been abundant. The evidence provided in this paper comes from an original compilation of more than 100 organizations classified according to contemporary standards and from narratives on the most popular and populous organizations in the country since the nineteenth century.

This article examines selected system-level variables. Its premise is that a better understanding of how and why scholars may, or may not, choose an international orientation in their career requires taking into account factors beyond personal preferences or constraints. We suggest that characteristics of national systems shape prospects and strategies of internationalisation and look at two broadly defined variables: resource availability and career incentives. With respect to the first, we study the absolute level of national resources and their relative importance vies-a-vis those provided by the EU. With respect to the second, we consider the rules and norms governing the progress of academic careers, especially the extent to which international collaboration is significant and necessary for initially attaining a stable academic position and career advancement. We explore these questions through targeted comparison of four national cases, selected to ensure crosscutting variation across the selected variables. A comparison of two relatively low-resource cases (Bulgaria and the Czech Republic) with two relatively high-resource ones (France and Finland) is followed by a comparison with respect to career incentives. This allows to conclude that both factors should be considered as necessary conditions for internationalisation, and to suggest how this hypothesis might be further tested in subsequent research.

This research note addresses issues, concerns, and opportunities for teachers and researchers of the third sector in Central and Eastern Europe, drawing on experiences in Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, and Hungary. The paper briefly outlines the development of the third sector in the aforementioned countries, and describes the current state of third sector teaching and research there. It then frames the challenges for the region’s teachers and researchers, and proposes an appropriate role for the West, commenting upon the West’s relevance within Central and Eastern Europe.

What is the effect of external stimuli in curbing corruption at the national level? This article analyses the intervening impact of EU post-conditionality and GRECO monitoring on countries’ anti-corruption record. It finds that “soft governance” has a positive impact and stimulates national responses against corruption. This positive influence increases when is additionally conditioned by strong internal stimuli targeting corruption.

Russia’s unprovoked war on Ukraine has deteriorated the security environment in all neighbouring countries. Some of these countries are terrified of the risk of further Russian invasions while others express less fear of Russian hostile and unlawful actions. The aim of the paper is to outline the Kremlin’s narratives presented in Romanian and Bulgarian media and their impact on the security concerns of both countries. The paper argues that Russia uses media to spread narratives trying to reshape public opinion and to aggravate insecurity and distrust. The arguments are divided into the following parts: First, Romania’s and Bulgaria’s perceptions of Russia are analysed; second and third sections describe the Russian official rhetoric presented in the local media. The conclusion sums up the outcomes of both cases and the impact of the Kremlin’s narratives on Romania and Bulgaria.

This article deals with the tuberculosis policy in Communist Bulgaria from the 1940s to the end of the 1950s. The focus is on the BCG vaccination as the major preventive tool. The article’s reconstruction of decision-making draws on evidence from archive records produced by the Bulgarian Ministry of Health. The main question guiding the research is how past Bulgarian experiences on the one hand, and international traditions, on the other, influence medical opinion and state policy towards tuberculosis and patients with tuberculosis. How did the Cold War context shape BCG vaccination policy? The author presents the story of the ‘Bulgarian’ BCG strain, which was made possible by the international research networks and travels of the Bulgarian scientist Srebra Rodopska (1913–2006). Her story has recently been rediscovered and made popular in Bulgaria, in the context of debates about COVID-19. This article aims to correct the public history narrative, which has thus emerged by placing the story of the BCG vaccine within its Cold War context. The author pays attention to dependencies between medicine and politics, and to the role of the state. Despite the popular story of Rodopska as the inventor of a ‘Bulgarian’ BCG strain and vaccine, what actually happened was that in Bulgaria of the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet strain and vaccine production technique were used. This was also due to Soviet pressure to follow the Soviet model of public health infrastructure.

The article introduces the special issue by mapping the field of pertinent scholarship and situating the articles with regard to the special angles and contributions they have to offer. As our five articles present case studies from Bulgaria and the GDR, both state socialist countries and their health care systems are portrayed here to provide context. The introduction locates each of the contributions and the overarching aims of the special issue within current scholarly discussions and demonstrates the issue’s innovative potential.

Magnetic susceptibility variations in loess–paleosol successions are widely utilized proxy records for reconstructions of global climate change during the Pleistocene. Analysis of the role of local factors in the establishment of magnetic signatures is rarely addressed. This study compares magnetic records along several adjacent profiles exposed in three open quarries near Kaolinovo (NE Bulgaria). The effect of the position of the sampled locations in the local landscape on the magnetic enhancement is revealed by differences in the thickness and degree of pedogenic magnetic enhancement. The profile, situated in a local paleo-depression, revealed disturbed sedimentation and depletion in the magnetic susceptibility. At lateral distances of 2–3 km (between quarries) the magnetic records show firmly repeatable patterns. Magnetic, geochemical, and diffuse reflectance data demonstrate a trend of increasing content of pedogenic hematites towards older paleosols, while goethite has major contribution to dithionite extractable iron phases. A representative stacked record of magnetic susceptibility for the Kaolinovo site is established using the results from mineralogical analyses. Comparison of the stacked susceptibility record from Kaolinovo with other sites from Bulgaria reveal that loess–paleosol sequences preserve reliable and repeatable magnetic records of global climate change for the last three glacial–interglacial cycles.

The article focuses on the export of cadaveric pituitary glands from communist Bulgaria in the 1980s, used for the production of human growth hormone. The case is explored in the broader context of practices and transnational networks for the supply of pituitaries. Special attention is paid to the changes resulting from the turn to the production of recombinant growth hormone in the mid-1980s, which put an end to the international ‘market’ of pituitary glands. In the last sections, different perspectives are explored to make sense of the case under scrutiny: those of bioethics and biolaw, on the one hand, and of bioeconomy in a globalising world, on the other.

It is impossible to understand the phenomenon of disinformation without unraveling the more perplexing notion of “truth.” This article explores how a Bulgarian psychic or prophet named Baba Vanga (1911–1996) became one of the most noteworthy mediums of “truth” in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russian imagination. With Bulgarian-Russian transnational ties as context, we trace how belief in Baba Vanga’s abilities and prophecies was propagated by witnesses via word-of-mouth, newspaper articles, books, TV programming, and the internet. We periodize the ways Vanga secured a place in Russian “truth worlds,” drawing upon both science and religion or a conglomeration of both. We look deeper into the origins and more recent circulation of a purported Vanga prophecy from 1979: namely, that Russia would rise to be the ruler of the world. The dissemination of this message, we argue, is not a Russian state plot to bolster aspirations in Ukraine and its standoff with the West. Instead it has been transmitted in far more fragmented and mediated ways and even countered by the Russian Orthodox Church. A deeper pondering of these mediations of Baba Vanga can help us better understand what we call the “post”-truth world, in which truth is crafted by online “posts.” In contrast to the notion of “post-truth” that posits a dearth of truth, our concept of “post”-truth recognizes that truth is not just in unprecedented excess today but is built through a complex and participatory bricolage that uses science and religion to build shared realities as never before in history.

This article presents the results of AMS radiocarbon dating, stable isotope analysis, and FRUITS dietary modelling to investigate dietary variability among sixty individuals buried at Varna in the mid-fifth millennium bc. The principal pattern was the isotopic clustering of some forty-three per cent of the population, which suggests a ‘Varna core diet’, with the remainder showing a wider variety of isotopic profiles. While there is a slight trend for heightened meat and fish consumption among male individuals compared to female and undetermined individuals, the authors found no clear correlation between dietary variation and the well-attested differentiation in material culture in the graves. Three children had isotopic profile and estimated diets unmatched by any of the adults in the sample. Two scenarios, dubbed ‘regional’ and ‘local’, are presented to explain such dietary variability at Varna.

This article explores the subjective experience of nationality and (trans)national belonging based on biographical interviews with two groups of Jewish participants born in Bulgaria before the Second World War, and residing in Bulgaria and in Israel, respectively. I focus on their retrospective accounts of the mass exodus to Israel in 1948–1949 and the maintenance of transnational family and kinship ties thereafter, during the Cold War. The comparison brings into relief the challenges of their integration into the respective national contexts, and the ways in which the memory cultures in the two countries have molded biographical reminiscences. I argue that despite these differences, a unique case of a transnational generation is at hand, formed by their past experiences as well as by the re-negotiation of these experiences, which was made possible from the 1990s on.

A 3D reconstruction of the principia at Novae (Bulgaria) allows modelling of the inscribed statues, altars and building stones as they used to look. By restoring the inscribed monuments to their original contexts, the model means that Roman military religiosity and its messages can be analysed in the legionary headquarters.