Bulgaria

Bulgaria

Bulgaria / a country located in southeastern Europe overlooking the Black Sea on its western side. It is bordered by Romania to the north, Turkey and Greece to the south, the Republic of Serbia and the Republic of Macedonia to the west. With an area of ​​110,994 square kilometers, Bulgaria is the 16th largest country in Europe

The Balkan mountains run horizontally through the middle of the country. The mountainous southwest of the country has two alpine ranges Rila and Pirin, which are located on the borders of the fewer but more extensive mountains of Rhodope to the east. Bulgaria is home to the highest point on the Balkan Peninsula, Al-Musalla, at 2925 meters (9596 feet) and the lowest point is sea level. The plains occupy about a third of the land, while the plateaus and hills occupy 41 percent. The country has a dense network of about 540 rivers, most of which are relatively small and with low water levels. The longest river is located only in the Bulgarian lands, and Askar, is 368 km (229 mi) long. Other major rivers include the Stroma and Maritza in the south

Bulgaria is a member of the United Nations in 1955 and since 1966 he has been a non-permanent member of the Security Council three times, most recently from 2002 to 2003. Bulgaria was also among the founding countries of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in 1975. He joined the North Alliance The Atlantic On March 29, 2004, it signed the European Union Treaty of Accession on April 25, 2005, and became a full member of the European Union on January 1, 2007

Opinion polls conducted seven years after the country joined the founding of the European Union only 15% of Bulgarians felt they personally benefited from membership, with nearly 40% of the population saying they would not bother to vote in the 2014 European Union elections. European-Atlantic integration became A priority for this country since the fall of Communism, although the Communist leadership also had aspirations to leave the Warsaw Pact and join the European societies that he wrote in 1987

Bulgaria has an active tripartite economic and diplomatic cooperation with Romania and Greece, maintains strong ties with European Union countries, the United States and Russia, and continues to improve its capacity traditionally good relations with China and Vietnam. The HIV trial in Libya, which followed after the imprisonment of several Bulgarian nurses in Benghazi in 1998, had a major impact on relations between Bulgaria, the European Union, and Libya. The release of the nurses resulted before the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's government, which awarded a contract to acquire the nuclear reactor and supply weapons from France in return

Bulgaria is a unitary country. Since 1880 in, the number of regional administrative units varied from seven to 26. Between 1987 and 1999 the administrative structure consisted of nine provinces. A new administrative structure was adopted in parallel with the decentralization of the economic system. It includes 27 provinces and the capital city (Sofia-Grad). All regions have their names from their respective capitals. The provinces is divided into 264 municipalities

Municipalities are run by mayors, who are elected for a four-year term, and directly-elected municipal councils. Bulgaria is a largely centralized country, with the National Council directly appointing ministers from regional rulers and all provinces and municipalities heavily dependent on it for funding

Bulgaria is defined as a secular state with religious freedom guaranteed, but Orthodoxy is designated as a "traditional" religion. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church gained its independent status in the year 927 AD, and currently it has 12 dioceses and more than 2000 priests. More than three quarters of the Bulgarians participate in the Eastern Orthodox. Sunni Muslims are the second largest community and make up 10 percent of the religious makeup, although the majority of them do not pray and find the use of Islamic headscarves in schools is unacceptable. Less than three percent are affiliated with other religions, 11.8 percent do not know themselves with religion and 21.8 percent refuse to say their beliefs

Bulgaria has a comprehensive health system funded from taxes and contributions. The National Health Insurance Fund pays a progressively increasing proportion of the costs of primary health care. Expected health care expenditures for 2013 are 4.1 percent of GDP. The number of doctors is above average in the European Union with 181 doctors per 100,000 people, but the distribution according to areas of practice is uneven, and there is an acute shortage of nurses and other medical personnel, and the quality of most medical facilities is poor

Staff shortages in some fields are so severe that patients turn to seek treatment in neighboring countries. Bulgaria is ranked 113th in the world by life expectancy, which is 73.6 years for both sexes. The main causes of death are similar to those in other industrialized countries, mainly cardiovascular diseases, tumors and respiratory diseases

Bulgaria is in a state of demographic crisis. It has had negative population growth since the early 1990s, when the long-term economic meltdown caused the wave of migration. Some 937,000 to 1,200,000 people are mostly young people - left of the country by 2005. The total total fertility rate in 2013 is estimated at 1.43 children born / woman, which is lower than the replacement rate of 2.1

A third of all families consist of only one person and 75.5 per cent of families do not have children under the age of 16. As a result, population growth and childbirth prices are among the lowest in the world while death rates are among the highest. The majority of children are born to unmarried women (of all births it was 57.4 percent outside of marriage in 2012

Traditional Bulgarian culture is mainly Thracian, Slavic and Bulgarian heritage, along with Greek, Roman, Ottoman, Persian and Celtic influences. Nine historical and natural objects have been inscribed in the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites: the Madara knight, the Thracian tombs of Svistari and Kazanlak, the Poiana Church, the Rila Monastery, and the churches Engraved in the rock of Ivanovo, Pirin National Park, Srebrna Reserve and the ancient city of Nessebar Nestenarvestvo

Ritual fire dance of Thracian origin is included in the list of UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. Fire is an essential component of Bulgarian folklore, and is used to drive away evil spirits and diseases. Bulgarian folklore has in its person diseases like magicians and has a wide range of creatures, including Lamia, Samadeva (Vela) and Karkandzla. Some customs and rituals against these spirits are alive and still practiced, most notably Kukri and Sarfakr. Martinica is also widely celebrated

It was the center of Slavic culture in both the First and the Second Bulgarian Empire during most of the Middle Ages. Preslav schools, Ohrid and Turnovo literary schools that exert great cultural influence throughout the Eastern Orthodox world. Many languages ​​in Eastern Europe and Asia use the Cyrillic script, which originated at the Preslav Literary School around the 9th century. It advanced in the Middle Ages in arts and literature and ended with the Ottoman conquest when many masterpieces were destroyed, and artistic activities did not reappear until the national renaissance of the century. 19

After the liberation, Bulgarian literature quickly adopted European literary styles such as romance and symbolism. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, many Bulgarian writers, such as Ivan Vazov, flavored with Slavkov, Bio Yervaf, Yordan Radcliffe and Tzvetan Todorov have gained importance. In 1981 the Bulgarian-Elias Canetti writer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature