The Bulgarian Fund for Women is releasing one of a kind album, “The Eternal Hits of Bulgaria”, in which eleven music hits will sound the same way that millions of Bulgarian women have heard them, but never before on the radio. The official premiere will be on November 25 at 6.30 pm in a special event on the organization’s Facebook page, and subsequently available online and released on a record.

The album “The Eternal Hits of Bulgaria” is a compilation of monologues by oppressors to women victims. Each of them has a title that coincides with that of a Bulgarian pop hit from the recent and distant past and that are often associated with love thrills. However, these are not cover versions, but plain, unpolished expressions of humiliation and mockery of women, which show how love sometimes degenerates into aggression. The texts describe literally cases of different types of violence. Unfortunately, it is highly likely, that everyone recognizes their relatives and acquaintances in the recordings.

The grim inspiration behind the project is the fact that every two weeks a woman is killed in Bulgaria, while listening to one of these or to a similar piece. Every year over 1 000 000 Bulgarian daughters, sisters, mothers, grandmothers, granddaughters, cousins, nieces, colleagues and girlfriends are subject to violence. Every year, dozens of Bulgarian women are killed by their current or former husbands or partners and by the pandemic called violence against women.

Why an entire album? Mostly because cases of violence against women are often regularly downplayed, silenced and even tolerated. Most of them are isolated – each of them in three lines in the narrow anonymous columns of the criminal chronicle of the newspaper. Reactions to them and their normalization make them an uncritical part of the information flow.

The project “The Eternal Hits of Bulgaria” tries to systematize them and shows the different cases and nuances since violence is not only physical, but has a much wider range of toxic manifestations. Ten of them find a place in the compilation – sexual assault, beating, persecution (stalking), stereotyping, trafficking of women, sexist insults and those on a racial-ethnic basis and in relation to appearance. Five Bulgarian actors recorded two songs, but the real favorite was the eleventh piece. The Turbo Hit Mega mix is a real top hit from the “top of the charts” – a mix of quotes from the speeches of those who govern us and on whose decisions our lives depend: representatives of the government, the parliament, law enforcement and jurisdiction institutions.

The campaign calls on everyone to change the shabby record that has been spinning non-stop for years. To be the change, to talk about violence, to recognize it, to expose it and to prevent it when and wherever they can. Anyone who wants to join the campaign, can do it on social media and with real action – in life.

With the audio installation “The Eternal Hits of Bulgaria”, The Bulgarian Fund for Women tries to amplify to intolerance the screams of abusers, so that such words are no longer accepted and to encourage victims to talk about the problems. The Fund also calls on all institutions to stop with the shabby roar of empty promises and propose effective solutions to prevent the pandemic of violence against women. These include: prevention through education for non-violent communication and gender stereotypes, changes to the Law on Protection against Domestic Violence and the Penal Code, the establishment of a National Agency for Combating Domestic Violence, the collection of official statistics and the conduct of a nationally representative survey on the scale and specificities of violence against women, improvement of the Law on Equality between Women and Men and the Equality Strategy, etc. 

BFW thanks the partners, friends and volunteers who helped implement the project “The Eternal Hits of Bulgaria”: Dukyan Meloman, Kaloyan Dimitrov (music, studio engineer), Iva Papazova (casting), actors Galin Naydenov, Stoyan Petlanov, Nikola Kutsev, Vasil Draganov, Nikola Parashkevov; Alexander Evgeniev, Maria Donchevska (artistic design), Vera Gotseva – Lomovera (photography), outdoor advertising company IDEA Comm, BG-Mamma and Ogilvy Sofia.