I have recently been in Bulgaria, a delightful country that I would recommend to all readers who like good food, friendly people, spectacular mountain scenery, and interesting and beautiful historic cities. While in Bulgaria, I met up with several clerics, both Orthodox and Catholic, and got something of a feel for the religious temperature of the country. What follows will necessarily be a personal impression rather than the result of deep research, but will, perhaps, still be of interest.

Bulgaria is a country that has been gravely damaged by 500 years of Ottoman rule, as well as 50 years of communist rule, the latter generally considered to be far the worse experience. The country is still marked with Soviet-style monuments, though many have been relegated to a very interesting museum in a suburb of Sofia. Quite a lot of the roads have now got royalist names, and there is a Gladstone Street in both Sofia and Plovdv. This represents an attempt to reappropriate a historical era that was blotted out by communist propaganda.