The Bulgarian Orthodox church has not given its blessing for providing Christian artifacts for the exhibition in the Louvre.

This is a principled position that items must not be taken out of the church repositories and taken abroad unless it is for pilgrimages, said Gerasim,Bishop of Melnik, secretary of the Holy Synod.

The future exhibition at the Louvre: Bulgarian 16^th-18^th century art, roused the indignation of Prof. Emmanuel Mutafov, director of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Art Studies. He spoke out against providing exhibits because the exhibition will be arranged in the Islamic Art department of the museum in Paris.

The processes connected with the forthcoming Bulgarian exhibition at the Louvre are going ahead smoothly, the parliamentary committee on culture and the media declared after a meeting between the committee’s chairperson Vezhdi Rashidov and the French Ambassador to Bulgaria Florence Robin.