The mayor of the capital's "Sredets" district Traycho Traykov is starting a debate on changing the name of "Graf Ignatiev" Street in Sofia, BGNES reported.
"I know that practical arguments will be put forward about the complications that will arise (very exaggerated, by the way). There will be tirades in the spirit of "have you finished everything else" and "is this the most important thing" (it always is). And even, I do not exclude, enthusiastic references to the "new world order". But today it is important to say: It is not acceptable, even for purely photogenic reasons, for a central street in Sofia to bear the name of a person with an ambiguous, most likely extremely negative, role in the sentencing of Vasil Levski to death - Count Ignatiev", wrote Traykov and emphasized: Of course, he did not do it out of malice, although his participation in the cruel pogroms against the Jews in Russia may make us doubt this.
"Above all, he acted entirely in the interests of Russian imperial policy, which saw in the independent Bulgarian national liberation movement a danger to achieving its main goal - the conquest of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. Everything else was, so to speak, a matter of calculations and dramaturgy," the mayor of the capital's "Sredets" district also said.
"Levski himself, as well as Botev, Rakovski, Zahari Stoyanov, and a number of other Bulgarian revolutionaries, were fully aware of this. Probably for this reason, after Levski's hanging, Count Ignatiev sent a triumphant telegram about the "happy outcome of the Sofia affair".
Anyway, when a report is submitted to the SOS for changing the name of the street, it is necessary to propose something new, someone who has views on the matter - to speak. Let's think about it," Traycho Traykov also wrote.