A hundred and four years after the remarkable story “Dyado Yotso Sees” by the Patriarch of Bulgarian literature Ivan Vazov, the grateful descendants erected a monument to its protagonist. In England they have a museum of Sherlock Holms, also a literary character. So, we come up to European standards. The blind old man Yotso “saw” the progress coming in the Bulgarian lands as a rattling train on the railway in the Iskar Gorge.

By a strange providence, the next day after the unveiling of the “Dyado Yotso” monument, Bulgaria was given the opportunity, through its 18 MPs, to observe the work of the European Parliament in the autumn of 2005. Coincidence or not, 100 years later Bulgaria again has the chance at first to be an observer of what is happening in the European Union.

What will happen to the Union when it passes through the narrow Iskar Gorge? Will even the blind see the coming progress, and the seeing open their eyes for the long cherished European standards?

A hundred years after Dyado Yotso, the symbol of progress – the railways – were drowned by the floods in the year of our Lord 2005. The Bulgarian MP observers in the European Parliament will have to be very watchful to see before the whole Bulgarian people just what kind of progress is coming from united Europe. And if they keep their eyes wide open and really succeed in dipping into the future, the grateful descendants may erect sooner a monument to the first “seeing” Bulgarians, standing over the Euro Gorge at elevation Strasbourg.