Seeing as it's a National Liberation Day for Bulgaria, some Bulgaria facts!
The MENSA record for their intelligence test is 192 out of a maximum of 200, the record holder being Daniela Simidchieva.
Apparently a Bulgarian - Georgi Georgiev - is the first and only seaman to go through the tropical depressions (probably lost in translation here, my terminology might be crap, hopefully someone pops up and fixes this, as I am translating things from Bulgarian) in the Pacific ocean during storm season, something thought of as impossible at the time, and also mental.
333 bagpipers set the world record for most bagpipers playing a song together a few years ago in Bulgaria. And yes, one of our national instruments is the bagpipe, but not the annoying Scottish one, but the kaba-bagpipes, which sounds much better. lol
The Varna Necropolis is where the oldest gold in the world was found a few years ago.
Bulgaria is the only European country that has not changed it's name in any way since it become a country - in the year 681... even though technically and historically Bulgarians and Bulgaria existed LONG before that, but the locations were different.
Plovdiv is one of the country's most beautiful cities, and according to historians, is the 6th oldest city in the world, and the oldest in Europe!
We invented the Cyrillic alphabet - the person who invented it is St. Kliment of Ohrid, who named it after his teacher - Cyril (Constantine-Cyril the Philosopher). It is the third official alphabet in the EU, after the Latin and Greek ones. Over 250 million people over the world use it!
Bulgaria is one of the few countries where you have great summer and winter tourism - over 50 summer and over 10 quality winter resorts, as well as well developed eco-tourism. The country also has 227 mountains, 800 waterfalls, 4500 caves, 200 mineral water springs, as well as, obviously, the Black Sea. Rich in nature, I'd call that lol
Antonio Krastev used to hold the record for the heaviest snatch ever at 216kg, but the record is no longer official... so technically he's holding it forever? lol
The only wrestler with 10 medals from world championships is Valentin Yordanov - 7 gold, 2 silver, 1 bronze.
Yordan Yovchev is the only gymnast to take part in 6 consecutive Olympic games.
Stefka Kostadinova broke the Olympic high jump record in 1987 in Rome, by jumping 209cm. Side-fact to that is that she was pregnant at the time!
Yordanka Donkova holds the 100m hurdles World record still, after setting it in 1988, with time of 12.21sec. Oddly enough the previous record was set by a Bulgarian again, the year before, at 12.25.
Bulgaria also gave the world yoghurt, the car air bag and rose oil, amongst many things. I could've included the programmable computer in this, as John Atanasoff is from a Bulgarian family and used to live in the country, but he's not really Bulgarian imo, so...
We're also credited with one of the first bombings in the world during WWI or one of the Balkan wars - one of our plane pilots just got a bunch of grenades with them and flew over enemy territory and dropped them over people lol
