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This text launches a series of articles under the image-based project 'With the Aid of an Unidentified Interpreter: Putting Names to Faces on Historical Photos' dedicated to the history of high-level interpreting. Here, the quest is to identify the interpreter at the two encounters between Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro at Harlem's Hotel Theresa and at the Soviet Mission in New York on 20 and 23 September 1960 based on a photo from the personal archive of Khrushchev's assistant Vladimir Lebedev. This interpreter turned out to be Menia Martínez, a historic figure in Cuban ballet. Educated at the Vaganova School in St. Petersburg (Leningrad), she was proficient in Russian. The text looks at other professional and unprofessional interpreters who worked with the two leaders before, on, and after this trip to New York and whose work contributed to the development of Cuban-Soviet and East-West relations. The discussion draws on available visuals, memoirs, newspaper sources, and unclassified documents placing the discussion in the wider context of international relations at the time. The author is grateful to Menia Martínez, who, in a telephone conversation, has helped in clarifying some of the aspects of the matter under investigation.

The Social Media Macroscope (SMM) project presents SMILE (Social Media Intelligence and Learning Environment), a user-friendly and open-source science gateway for social media research. SMILE utilizes CIlogon, an identity management platform, for identity and access control and offers data collection from platforms like Twitter and Reddit, as well as features for natural language processing, sentiment analysis, network analysis, and machine learning classification. It adopts a microservice architecture with Docker containers for portability and scalability, deploying applications using Kubernetes and Helm charts. Additionally, SMILE enables seamless data sharing through integration with NCSA Clowder, a widely adopted framework in science gateways. 

This article focuses on the emergence and development of gerontology in communist Bulgaria, looking at the interplay of various circumstances: scientific and political, national and international. We ask if an apparently ideologically neutral field of knowledge such as gerontology may have had some intrinsic qualities imbued by the regimes of knowledge production under a communist regime. More specifically, we ask to what extent and in which ways the production of such specialized, putatively universal knowledge could be ideologically driven and/or politically controlled. To this end, we unpack the ideological, political, institutional, and epistemic circumstances that may have affected the emergence, the institutionalization, and the paradigm of Bulgarian gerontology. We focus in on the social actors, both individuals and organizations, and the roles they played in the process, as well as on international networking and the uses of international contacts and agendas.

This hands-on half-day tutorial aims to explore the potential of the ParlaMint corpora – openly available collections of parliamentary records, which are uniformly sampled, annotated and rich in individual speaker and institutional group metadata. We show how the resource facilitates research into specific European parliaments and allows for transnational comparisons.

The main focus of this article is to shed light on the challenges to the work-life balance (WLB) caused by school closures due to lockdowns in Bulgaria. Both paid and unpaid jobs occur intensively in the family environment due to anti-epidemic measures of physical distancing. School closures introduce a novel element of unpaid work: intensive parental participation in the educational process during distance schooling, which requires additional competencies, time and effort, as well as the need to reconcile work with these new obligations. The analysis is based on original CAWI pseudo-longitudinal surveys, conducted during the first (April-May 2020) and second lockdowns (November-December 2020) in Bulgaria, as well as data on changes in personal contacts with family and friends, help given and received, personal care given and received from SHARE Survey, Wave 8 COVID-19 Survey 1 (July-August 2020). Terminological distinction is made between online and distance learning, because the pressures on parents vary. A push-pull model is elaborated, which could influence coping patterns when children are in home schooling due to lockdowns. The main coping pattern observed is that families were better prepared for the second lockdown, because by this time they had grandparents living in the same household.

The faunal remains recovered from the Gluhite Kamani site offer the unique opportunity to explore the consumption patterns of the Early Iron Age communities inhabiting the Rhodope Mountains. While a lot high-altitude and rock-cut sanctuaries have been registered within the Rhodope Mountains, this is the only site yielding a larger assemblage (n = 3160) from a stratigraphic sequence dating to the Late Bronze Age - Early Iron Age transition and the Early Iron Age. Domestic animals dominate, with sheep/goat being the main exploited species through all stratigraphic layers. The results show that the percentage of represented domestic animals is relatively continuous, while the number of wild animals seems to vary throughout the different periods., As the site is regarded as a sanctuary during the Iron age, the extent to which we can identify any ritual activity from the osteological assemblage is commented on in the discussion regarding the cull patterns observed, and taphonomy.

The assessment and mapping of ecosystems and their services is considered an important action that effectively contributes to proper understanding of how ecosystems support human well-being, and furthermore – to promote the sustainable use of natural resources. The diversity of cultural landscapes, especially in mountain areas, is a significant prerequisite for a variety of cultural ecosystem services that are valuable for the society. This evaluation is the basis for environmental management practices and policymaking. The study presents an approach for assessment and mapping of cultural ecosystem service (CES) “Cultural heritage” that is recognised as important and is provided by mountain protected areas (PAs) in “Pirin” National Park. The data from the Management Plan of “Pirin” NP were used for characterization and biophysical assessment of the condition of forest ecosystems and their potential to provide CESs. The analysis of the results revealed that the conservation regime allowed the territories to preserve a high degree of naturalness and a very good ecological condition as 94.80% of forest ecosystems are assessed with score 4 –“good” condition and 0.44% are with “very good” condition – score 5. The majority of forest ecosystems with “very good” ecological condition are Pinus peuce forests, located mainly on the territory of the reserves “Bayuvi Dupki- Dzhindzhiritsa” and “Yulen”, proving the importance of the protective regime of the territories. Forest ecosystems with average and high capacity to provide ES "Cultural heritage" prevailed, which is consistent with well-preserved and unique nature, the diversity of landscapes, and species richness. Considerable areas were assessed with score 5 – very high capacity, mostly on the territory of the reserves “Bayuvi Dupki- Dzhindzhiritsa” and “Yulen”, and at the foothill of the huts.

The paper presents information about 35 dolichopodid flies collected from 12 localities in the Balkan Mountains at the territory of Bulgaria. Two species, Campsicnemus pusillus and Sciapus maritimus, are recorded for the first time in Bulgaria and on the Balkan Peninsula. Another nine ones are listed for the first time to the Balkan Mountains range.

After the Second World War and until 1990, Bulgaria, as most of the former communist countries from the Eastern Europe, implemented a Semashko healthcare system developed in the USSR. Named after the First People’s Commissar of Health of the Soviet Russia, Nikolai Semashko, Soviet health care was developed as “social health care”, trying also to eliminate the social reasons for illness, thus transforming society and economy as a whole. This type of system was based on the centrally planned principles, on rigid management and on the state monopoly. Consequently, the healthcare system created by the Ministry of Health was integrated and centralized, completely controlled by the state. The system of health services in Bulgara from 1944 to 1990 was inspired by the Soviet model Semashko, a centralized state system, which seemed to guarantee “free access to health services for the entire population”. In the research the author focuses on the policies in the field of public health in Bulgaria between 1944 and 1951, when the "Sovietization" in this field took place.