A Bulgarian who married in Poland has written a book fixed on both the past and the future. In fact, he dictated his Langaria after he lost a battle with glaucoma and went blind. Veneta Pavlova asked him about the meaning of the book for him:

“Langaria is a land without specific geographic whereabouts, without any political purpose, just a lovely place where I would readily live”, explains the author.

Langaria's “timing”

“The time in the book is unspecified: I have tried not to fix any time in history or any point in space. It is up to the readers' imagination to guess the timing, what kind of people must have lived then and what their habits and ways used to be.”

Wisdom, bravery, patriotism: the lost values?

“These are values that we need more today and that we come across sonly seldom. I myself lived a childhood full of hardship. In my experience I have missed things that I have made available in the book, as some sort of compensation.”

Work with language

“I have used a language that I have heard from ordinary people, like my grandparents, my village friends, or the guys from the neighborhood. Language is important for me, and my goal has been to demonstrate the wealth and beauty of the Bulgarian language.”

Sport & Engineering:

„I was a player of the Slavia volleyball club and have played with some of Bulgaria's volleyball stars of the past: Panayot Pondalov, Brunko Iliev, who played for the national side and later was appointed national coach, and Todor Piperkov, coach of the national team that won silver at the Olympic Games. Later in life I was one of the few engineers who exported greenhouses. The greenhouses were made under a Dutch license. As an engineer I have worked in Bulgaria and abroad alike.”

Langaria: a healing job

“Writing the book was the remedy for the disaster that struck me, as I lost my sight. I could not sleep trying to get accustomed to permanent darkness. Being sleepless I gave much more time to thinking. The result is the book: it matured in me for about ten days. It was as if everything was already written somewhere. At night I gave the final touches to my work, and during the day I dictated the text on a recorder”, concludes Emil Georgiev, the author of Langaria. The message of the book is to protect the young from evil and to respect the elderly who are the keepers of distilled wisdom of centuries.

English Daniela Konstantinova