In the early 20th century, the American film producer Charles Urban, who had founded his company in London, sent two of his camera operators out to the Balkans. The Englishman Charles Rider Noble recreated moments from the uprising that had broken out in Macedonia (part of Turkey at that time) and filmed all over Bulgaria, while the Scot John Mackenzie travelled through Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania. As such, thanks to these two Britons, the first sequences of living pictures were filmed in the peninsula from 1903 to 1905. This book deals with this under-researched period, examining in depth, diligently and in detail over 1,200 sources of information (including newspaper reports, film catalogues, and archives). It will appeal to anyone who loves the ‘Seventh Art’ and adores the secrets its early history still holds.

The magnificent Danube both cuts across and connects central Europe, flowing through and alongside ten countries: Romania, Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, and Germany. Travelling its full length from east to west, against the river’s flow, Nick Thorpe embarks on an inspiring year-long journey that leads to a new perspective on Europe today. Thorpe’s account is personal, conversational, funny, immediate, and uniquely observant—everything a reader expects in the best travel writing. Immersing himself in the Danube’s waters during daily morning swims, Thorpe likewise becomes immersed in the histories of the lands linked by the river. He observes the river’s ecological conditions, some discouraging and others hopeful, and encounters archaeological remains that whisper of human communities sustained by the river over eight millennia. Most fascinating of all are the ordinary and extraordinary people along the way—the ferrymen and fishermen, workers in the fields, shopkeepers, beekeepers, waitresses, smugglers and border policemen, legal and illegal immigrants, and many more. For readers who anticipate their own journeys on the Danube, as well as those who only dream of seeing the great river, this book will be a unique and treasured guide.

A boxer-turned-hitman faces an impossible mission to kill his brother; an old lady sets up a gang of her own teenage vigilantes after being mugged herself; a village boy faces the gruesome end of his beloved pet piglet; a retired geography teacher dreams of places he's never been; a clown on the make talks an impoverished lion tamer into selling his lion to gangsters; and, a fading beauty is courted by a suitor with suspiciously scaly hands - Drawing on the monsters and myths of Balkan folklore, the brutal reality of the Communist regime, and the dazzling magic of Enev's own imagination, these stories have an almost hypnotic and surreal quality. Absurd, both painfully funny and deeply sad, Circus Bulgaria, reaches straight into the cracked heart of the Eastern Europe.