Serbian Bulgarians Want Town's Old Name Back

Members of the ethnic Bulgarian community in eastern Serbia want the town of Dimitrovgrad - where they make up the majority of the population - to regain its old name Tsaribrod, they told a press conference in Sofia on Wednesday.

The activists from the committee for the "Western Outlands" , as Bulgaria often refers to its former territories in Serbia, and the Bulgarian cultural and information centre in Bosilegrad, another mainly Bulgarian town in Serbia, organised the event on Wednesday to mark November 8 as the "Day of the Western Outlands".

This commemorates the day in 1919 when, Bulgaria ceded border territories to Serbia as a result of the Treaty of Neuilly, imposed after the country's defeat in World War I.

Zdenka Todorova, a member of the "Western Outlands" committee said the town had declined since Yugoslavia renamed it Dimitrovgrad in the 1950s, after Georgi Dimitrov, Bulgaria's first communist leader and a leader of the Communist International between 1934 and 1943.

The activists insisted that since losing its old name of Tsaribrod, the town has also been subjected to assimilation by Serbia, with its streets also renamed and schools and cultural institutions shut down.

The idea to switch the name back to Tsaribrod, which has been on the agenda of the Bulgarian minority for decades, has sparked controversy in Bulgaria, however.

On 31 October, on a visit to Belgrade, the Speaker of the Bulgarian Parliament, Dimitar Glavchev, from the ruling GERB party, informed Serbia's President, Alexander Vucic, about the wish of the people of Dimitrovgrad to restore the old name of their town.

According to the Bulgarian parliamentary press service, Vucic told Glavchev that there was no problem about this happening, "as long as...