lake", testifying to the necessity for new forms of expressing complex problems, until we reach your new book, "Cricket on the Pole" – displaying creative maturity." ibid. "Your creative activity is inseparable from our socialist literary seal. For many years you are an editor in the newspapers "Evening news", "Literature Front", "National culture", in the literary journal "Plamuk". Your work in publishers "Georgi Bakalov" – Varna, and "Bulgarian Writer" is an expression of your diligence.″ "Азбуки" 5 май 1993,бр.18 Георги Цанков ″Озарения-Изповед след осмата лодка″, Az-buki 5 May 1993, Georgi Tsankov "Illuminations-Confessions after the 8th boat" "In the fog is a literary work of enormous factual and philosophical value. This is an effort to make sense of the Bulgarian character through the prism of maritime influence in the life of our people. The author, [Varban Stamatov] has turned upside down the libraries of Sofia, St.Petersburg, Warsaw, Berlin, Tbilisi, Rieka, London, Paris and Genoa, for decades gathering material, not missing any important publication on marine navigation whatsoever, and covering centuries of national history. He emerges before the reader's court with a subjective though hard to disprove theory. He tells inspiringly of the First and Second Bulgarian Kingdoms, yet quite generally his reasoning is at cross purposes with that of the history textbooks. Stamatov cannot be a bombastic, blinded patriot, he sees the megalomaniacal ambitions of our potentates who dreamt of overtaking Byzantium. He speaks with confidence of three centuries of bloodshedding wars, whose sole purpose had not been the defence of the native land. He examines them as a feature of bracing energy, as a will of state establishment and ambition to include more land for the Slavic people. Isn't it true, as in our past – since Tsar Samuil destroyed his brother Aaron's family, all the way to the "September Uprising" and "the people's law-court" – that there has ever been the sinister sequence of fratricidal brawls, is it not true, that for eleven centuries we lived at the heart of the now extinct church cannon of Byzantium, of the re-introduced heresies, of the translated semi-scientific compilations within monastic-cell tuition. The author does not bypass the frozen by canonical dictum restrictions in art and culture, but he discovers just one truly illuminated figure, that of the great John Exarch, author of the unique in breadth and volume work of enlightenment in Middle Ages Bulgaria, "The Six Days". Quite probably all