There are places charged with strong spiritual energy, piled up there for centuries. Energy coming from the broad horizons of the people who visit them, from their positive attitude to the world and the joy of life. Such a place, completely appropriate for the occasion chose the Director of St. Kliment Ohridski University Press Dimitar Tomov to present before adherents, colleagues and friends his last book “The Eternal Katun”. “The Egg” of the Sofia University hardly managed to accommodate in its shell the admirers of the writer and the man Mitko Tomov for the promotion of the story collection where the most of the personages are of Roma descent.

The “Gypsy stories” as is the subtitle of the book are not much of a topic at the first sight but from under the golden pen of the storyteller a real miracle has happened. A miracle judged on its merits by the people who know about these “stories”. The Sofia University Rector Prof. Boyan Biolchev in his welcoming speech assessed the “Gypsy” book as emblematic: “In this book appears the man. The man who can come from the minorities but in the skilful hands of the writer starts to live in his fool-blooded image, in his sometimes comical but in fact big human hope to remain, to exist as a human being. I think this book makes from a minority a group of images that remain as typical personages in literature.” Prof. Biolchev is author of the preface to the first book of Dimitar Tomov. And this made more understandable his sincere joy for his friend and writer.

Dimitar Tomov’s stories are breathing with an incredible vitality and joy of the sweetest and in fact the most ordinary things in life. They are so real and natural that many people asked him if he was of a Roma origin. “I take this question as a compliment,” the author modestly answered. “Because in this book I am speaking in first person, singular, on behalf of a bear, a young girl and a gypsy… Since people think that I have managed to merge so well with the Gypsy images, this means that I have succeeded.”

The big success of the author is also in the suggestion that our people has never been intolerant to the people of different religion and origin in terms of faith, moral or ethnos. We believe him that we are indeed “born cosmopolites, that we are open-minded and we lack the nationalism in the best meaning of the word. We lack the reflex of the chauvinism, of national superiority over other people. We are not able to look down on the man of a different ethnos who lives next to us. We have always been globalists.” Like this, quite naturally the master storyteller reveals his starting point and himself as a man, who in his infinite tolerance to others loves them so much that he can make out of what seems to be the most unattractive personage a hero we would like to act like.

The stories in the collection are written in the course of almost twenty years. Their publishing was a birthday present for the wife of Mr. Tomov. And the ceremony was on the Day of the City of Pavlikeni itself, the birthplace of the writer, from where he has drawn big part of his subjects. But this book’s publishing hides another deeply intimate meaning which the author revealed very figuratively: “While a man lives, he grows over with some kind of polyps, clam shells… as the bottom of a ship, and loses his real nature. In the last years, years not only of transition for the country but of personal and professional pursuits, different distractions have been distracting us from this internal real nature. And I thought that my image was quite overgrown with someone else’s residues. And I tried to clean my little boat, which meanders about, with the only tool, this is the stories where I have tried to be as honest as possible. I would like you to believe that in the book I wrote it is me. I only have to be able to clean my humble boat more often because there are people I trust and care about. This is my wife, to whom I owe the writing of this book in an accelerated pace. This is my whole big family.”

And although somebody hinted by the way of a joke that his incubation period of writing is 18 years – the period of time between his first published book and the present one, the author intends to surprise us much sooner with a new book of stories and with a novel, dedicated to the Balkan War.

Prof. Nikolay Vasilev called the friend and the writer Dimitar Tomov “keeper of the traditions in Bulgarian literary heritage”.

The door to the Pavlikeni trace was set ajar by another friend – the poetess Ivanichka Dragieva from Pavlikeni, with her exciting story about the small boy that used to sit for hours to listen to the interesting worldly stories, the nurse used to tell him. And at the end he used to ask her “Why don’t you write them?”

We definitely have to believe another Bulgarian eminent writer and scholar Kiril Topalov, who said: “Here we all have rich libraries and to anyone of us has happened to be asked “Have you read all these books you have?” With this book Mitko has proved that he could answer: “I haven’t read them but I could have written them.”

Neli Kostadinova