Zlatarski autumn fest

On the 14^th of November, as it is done every year, Zlatarski International School celebrated its autumn fest – the birthday of the school patron Professor Doctor Vassil Zlatarski. The humanitarian departments made a very intensive and interesting 2-day program, during which we had the honour to host some very special guests. The students of the school were hosts and initiators in many interesting events.

The celebrations started on the 13^th November when the school greeted two very memorable guests. The first one was the writer Ioto Pacov, who caught the attention of the ninth graders with his very interesting talk on “the dimensions of the Bulgarian”. In his new book he discusses and tells stories about the events that took place the past twenty years, which are becoming more and more distant for the new generations of young people in Bulgaria.

At half past one the school gym was crowded, because of the huge number of students, who wanted to participate in the conversation with the successors of Nikola Vaptsarov – Nikola, and Boris, who graduated our school just ten years ago. The two authors of the new documentary book about Nikola Vaptsarov, which includes many facsimiles from the investigation and the case against this famous Bulgarian writer, caught the attention of many Zlatarski students and teachers with its curious facts about the process of writing the book and also the whole case against Vaptsarov. The students from 8^th and 11^th grades moved and touched the guests by their emotional and passionate reciting of verses by Vaptsarov.

On the next day, the school was visited by Professor Margarita Pesheva, a long-standing member of the Council for Electronic Media and a teacher at the Veliko Turnovo University “St. St. Cyril & Methodius”, author of many books and research in the field of media. The topic of her lecture was How does regulation raise freedom?, in which she presented some interesting facts about the involvement of developing technologies, and warned the students about the dangers and crimes committed in this field, which lead to many restrictions and limitations. Most of the participants in this lecture were students from the 10^th grade who have been studying Ethics and law over the last three months and who have already been introduced to the concept of the basic human rights, such as the right of information, freedom of speech, conscience, intelligence and the press. After professor Pesheva’s lecture the school gymnasium turned into a place for reading and discussions on the essays written by students from the 11^th and 12^th grades. The interesting topics of these modern studies were summarised in the lecture of the IB-coordinator, history and philosophy teacher Daniel Parsons, whose lecture was dedicated to humanism and humanity.