1. Bulgaria has 540 rivers
2. Burgas on the Black Sea is twinned with San Francisco and Rotterdam
3. The largest furnace in the world for domestic glassware was launched in the north eastern town of Tragovishte in 2005
4. Plovdiv has over 200 archaeological sites
5. Traditionally on Christmas Eve and New Years Eve, Bulgarian cooks insert coins and other lucky charms into food such as pastry
6. Bulgaria joined the EU in 2007
7. Varna is headquarters of the Bulgarian Navy
8. Hristo Stoichkov was Bulgaria’s most famous sportsman recieving the European Footballer of the Year award in 1994
9. Carl Djerassi from the U.S.A but with Bulgarian ancestry developed the oral contraceptive pill
10. Bulgaria used to be known as Silicon Valley of the Eastern Bloc
11. Parts of Bulgaria can be very hot in the summer. A temperature of 45.2 degrees celsius was recorded at Sadovo near Plovdiv in 2000
12. Bulgaria has 8 million tourists per year
13. A banitsa is a Bulgarian pastry filled with sirene, a type of cheese originally made with goats milk
14. Varna was voted the best place in Bulgaria to stay in both 2007 & 2008
15. The Bulgarian-American inventor Peter Petroff invented the first digital watch in 1970
16. Burgas is renowned as a bird watchers haven
17. In 2007 Petar Stoychev from Bulgaria broke the record for the fastest swim across the English Channel
18. Sofia the capital was named after the Hagia Sophia Church in 1376 AD and is situated by Mount Vitosha
19. The premier ski resort in Bulgaria is Borovets
20. Bulgaria is the 19th largest producer of coal in the world
21. Up until the 1990’s Bulgaria were the second largest exporters of bottled wine in the world
22. Sofia’s underground railway network wasn’t introduced until 1998
23. Bulgaria uses the cyrillic alphabet
24. Among Bulgaria’s exports are tobacco leaves, buffalo milk and donkey meat
25. The town of Pleven’s main mode of public transport is trolleybuses
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