What prevents Bulgarians from attending cultural events and participating in creative activities? How can we address the huge inequality in access to culture based on place of residence and social status? What can be done to change these trends?

Come to our second event related to the 2023 Access to Culture Index on October 16 at 6:30 p.m. at the Goethe-Institut Bulgaria (1 Budapest Street, Sofia)!

Yanina Taneva-Georgieva (from our team) and Diana Andreeva-Popordanova (Observatory for the Economics of Culture) will present the national sociological study on access to culture in 2023, which we commissioned from the Alfa Research agency and called the “Access to Culture Index”. They will present specific policy proposals in the field of culture that respond to the main cases from the study.
It is being carried out in partnership with the Observatory for the Economy of Culture and the Goethe Institute Bulgaria.

Some of the data and conclusions we will go through live:

• 72.6% did not visit the library even once in 2023;

• 62.6% did not go to the theater even once;

• 82.5% did not attend a classical music concert, opera, or ballet even once.

The study itself is available in summary form (in Bulgarian) and can be viewed at this link.

You can learn more about this topic here from Yanina Taneva-Georgieva and Diana Andreeva-Popiordanova in their interview with Maria Chereshova on the program “Who’s Talking?” on Darik Radio.

This is the second national representative survey we have commissioned for a second consecutive year (the first was for 2022 as part of our “Right to Culture Laboratory” project with the National Culture Fund), as these indicators had not been researched for more than seven years prior to that.

Photo – Viktoriya Velcheva / resident in Baba Residence 2023