Present
There remain two Bulgarian Orthodox churches in the city of Edirne: Saint George (dating to 1880) and Saints Constantine and Helena (built in 1869). The Bulgarian churches were reconstructed in the 2000s with the cooperation of Turkey, using mostly Bulgarian state funds. They are both in a good condition today; Saint George also has a Bulgarian library and an ethnographic collection.
In September 2007 Evgeni Kirilov, Bulgarian deputy in the European Parliament, proposed an amendment to the resolution concerning the EU-Turkish relations, which refers to the property of the Thracian Bulgarians and the obligations of Turkish authorities according to the Treaty of Ankara. In January 2010, Turkish daily Milliyet reported that Bulgarian minister Bozhidar Dimitrov (himself a son of Thracian refugees) talked on a prospect to demand compensation from Turkey in return for the property of expelled Bulgarians. In a response the Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoğlu has underlined that Bulgaria has not filed any official claim and that any such demand needs to be viewed as a whole to also envisage the rights of the two million Turkish refugees from Bulgaria based on the Treaty of Ankara. Bulgarian prime minister Boyko Borisov stated that Bulgarian government had no prospects for demanding compensation from Turkey and Dimitrov was forced to publicly apologise for his statement.
Read more about this topic: Bulgarians In Turkey
Famous quotes containing the word present:
“The salt person and blasted place
I furnish with the meat of a fable;
If the dead starve, their stomachs turn to tumble
An upright man in the antipodes
Or spray-based and rock-chested sea:
Over the past table I repeat this present grace.”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“That neither present time, nor years unborn
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“I fear ... that both dictators [Hitler and Mussolini] think their present methods are succeeding because of the gains they have made in Albania, Hungary and Yugoslavia.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)