Human beings need not only material food and this is a well-known fact to those guardians of the written word who have taken on their mission to push us, guide us, and connect us to unknown worlds.

With the end of the state of emergency in Bulgaria, libraries have reopened for visitors. But one of them, the library in the town of Veliko Tarnovo (Central Bulgaria), did not forget about its avid readers even during the days of forced solitude.

The regional library in the medieval capital of Bulgaria came up with a novel approach in that unusual period – sending books to its subscribers at home:

"This experiment turned out to be quite successful”, says Assoc. Prof. Kalina Ivanova, director of the Petko Rachev Slaveykov Regional Library in Veliko Tarnovo. “We wanted to be useful to our readers, because it is not enough just to provide them with online resources and electroniccatalogues. Sometimes people need to enjoy reading a favourite book, and we were right because most of the desired literature was fiction. Our home delivery campaigns took place on eight consecutive Fridays - from March 16 to May 8, and during this period we managed to bring 1,100 volumes to 215 readers."

Ever since visits to the library have been allowed, enthusiastic readers don’t stop coming. "In just four days, 555 people have borrowed new books," KalinaIvanova says. But this is hardly unusual, because behind this fidelity lies the long-lasting tradition of a true spiritual repository.

The Regional Library in the town of Veliko Tarnovo chose the Revival period writer and post-Liberation politician Petko Rachev Slaveykov as its patron in the middle of the last century. But the library itself was founded much earlier, in 1889, as the third most important institution of this type after the National Library in Sofia and the National Library in Plovdiv. One of its prominent directors over the years, Mosko Moskov, launched a charity campaign for collecting valuable old printed books and manuscripts, which were first displayed in 1940. This precious collection of 1,200 copies includes the 14^th-century manuscript The Lenten Triodion. the first old printed book in modern Bulgarian "Nedelnik" (The Sunday Book) by Bishop Sofronius of Vratsa (1806), the first edition of the "Riben Bukvar" (The Fish Primer) by Petar Beron (1824).

In addition to enriching its funds and lending books to readers, the institution carries out many other activities - the summer campaign to promote children's reading "Come to the library", the literary fair "The Lobby of Books with an Autograph", which this year will be held from May 25 to July 10 remotely through online conversations with writers, the creation of electronic catalogues, the implementation of numerous projects such as gender identity, children readers and library collections under the Creative Europe programme.

"The main focus of this project is gender equality and the lack of restrictions in the choice of professions, games, behaviour”, says Assoc. Prof. Kalina Ivanova. “For this purpose we have prepared an online catalogue and bibliography on the topic. This is what we have done, and there is no conspiracy here, although there was the word "gender" in the title of the project. The project was met with resistance - mostly by the library guild, which saw the devil in our faces. But after seeing what activities and meetings we were holding, and that the children were interested in reading these books, the criticism stopped."

In the realm of literature, the Veliko Tarnovo library often turns into a stage where all sorts of events, even murders, take place. However, with whatever mystery, mythology and destiny writers surround it with, one thing is for sure - somewhere, in one of its labyrinths, each of us will find the book that might change them forever.

Does the Veliko Tarnovo library have its own labyrinth?

"Unfortunately, the material base of our library is very traditional and there are no such big spaces in which a reader can get lost," said the director. "But it has certain nooks, and in them we often find a person fully immersed in the book they have chosen."

English Rossitsa Petcova

Photos: BGNES, Faceebook/Petko Rachev Slaveykov Regional Library, Veliko Tarnovo and BNR-archive