The history of coca-cola and ice-cream in Bulgaria

Interview with Eng. Toncho Mihailov, president of “Royal T.M.” Ltd His factory is situated in Nadezhda district in the place of a former supermarket. Shining in white, neat and clean in the winter sun. Snowdrop and hyacinths are already popping up in the yard. In the corners stand three alder trees. Someone has ruthlessly and badly cut the fourth off for Christmas. Mr. Mihailov meets us and says not without pain: “If someone had told me that he had no money for a Christmas tree I would have bought him one, but to cut it off like this…” Near the entrance is the stand with the company’s production – ice-cream and instant hot drinks: packages of ice-cream, chocolate, cappuccino, caramel, tea. But his pride is the ice-cream for diabetics – sugar free.

Our conversation starts lightly and spontaneously. “In Bulgaria everybody is used to rely on the state. Some generations from the times of socialism are simply lost. The mothers repeated all the time: “Study in order not to work!” We passed to another subject about the situation in Bulgaria. “The UDF and especially Philip Dimitrov made a fatal mistake dissolving the cooperatives. The consolidation of the land was a problem all over the world. And here the people had already suffered it. And after everything was ready, instead of keeping it we destroyed it. We had to give the land back to the people but we should have kept the cooperatives. Now we would have had an economy as no other country. But – a mistake. A mistake of the development.” Another mistake in Toncho Mihailov’s opinion is that in the moment Simeon Saxe-Cobug-Gotha is Prime Minister. With his authority he would have been much more useful for Bulgaria as President. Our conversation switched to the many Bulgarian businessmen who hide their profits. “We want the state to do this, to fix that. It is always state’s fault. And who is the state? We are. To have a good state there should be conscientious and hard-working people. For example, not long ago a truck full of products arrived – an order. I sent the workers to unload it. A little later I went there and saw them standing in the store-house and the truck was still outside – loaded. Because I had not told them to open the door and step on the loading platform. For 45 years the Bulgarians have learnt not to undertake anything on their own. Not to take responsibility. I myself had so many troubles risking!” This is how we tackled one of the reasons for our visit to the man who brought coca-cola to Bulgaria as early as in 1965! First in the socialist camp, even first on the Balkans! We asked him to tell us about it but before that he shared another thing: “I have never wanted to be a member of the party. I haven’t even applied. The ideology is good but the implementation is impossible. The world is not yet up to this ideology. And they wouldn’t have accepted me for my family background anyway.”

Mara Mihailova – it is not easy to be Bulgarian

The famous writer and journalist is his mother. Editor-in-chief of Arda and later of Trakia newspapers, author of the books “Chobankyoy Village”, “Kardjali”, “The Writers and the War”. Ethnographer, folklorist, one of the most fascinating personalities related to Kardjali and the Eastern Rhodopes. Personal acquaintance of Tanyu Nikolov voivode. She was the first woman riding around the Rhodopes on the back of an unruly horse. She organised free public kitchens for poor children and elderly people. And she met King Boris on horseback all covered with tobacco leaves. Before 1944 she was accused of being a communist and afterwards she was arrested and declared a fascist. Ever uncomfortable for the authorities, Mara Mihailova died in Kardjali in 1989. But before September 9, 1944, she wrote in Arda newspaper: “To be a Bulgarian means to combine all differences, disagreements and contradictions in the same focus. Refine them there. So that from the dark, from the mud, from the low one sun should rise, of a definite colour, and its heat should exude warmth equally on everyone… This is how hard it is to be a Bulgarian!” They say she possessed talent in excess. And we understand this reading her words: “The man is transient, the people is eternal… It is easy to be a partisan, it is hard to be a Bulgarian.” This was the mother who inculcated in her son the idea that being a Bulgarian is not easy. And he understood it and felt it through his own life experience.

The memory of Prince Kiril

While he was telling us about his mother, Toncho Mihailov took us to his archive and as there rules perfect order he quickly found the photocopies of Trakia newspaper from the years his mother was its owner and editor-in-chief. He showed us a picture of him and Prince Kiril published in the newspaper. “In 1943 the partisan movement was at its zenith. Three of us 16-year-old boys, left from Gyumurdhina to Momchilgrad by bus, from there to Kostenets by train, then to Raduil village by bus again and then to Chamkoriya – on foot. We stopped a motorman with a side-car and asked him for a ride. He told us that he could only take one of us because his side-car was full. He took the whole luggage. In 20–25 minutes he came back to take the rest of us. When we arrived we asked him whom we had had the honour of traveling with. He answered he was Prince Kiril. We all kissed his hand and asked him to take a picture together. We could have been partisans, we could have shot him, but still he gave us a ride. I was strongly impressed by his attention and his manners. Later this man was sentenced to death.”

Years later Simeon would leave the same impression. And Mara Mihailova published the picture in Trakia newspaper under the title of “The Regent Prince Kiril with our soldiers”.