Welcome to Open Sofia!
Written by Anastasiia Dehtiarova and Giuseppe Di Benedetto, edited by Lindsay Martin.
We hope it becomes the main point of reference for the international community in Bulgaria. That has been our core idea since the very beginning of “Foreigners in Sofia & Friends” back in 2015. You can find our history on the Team page.
Long story short, it’s been five long years to get to this point. What you see is an online platform to answer people’s questions about the countless situations they face every day: how to settle and find a job, what documents to prepare, where to study Bulgarian, what leisure activities to do in English, and many more.
For months our team has been developing and designing the website, writing and curating articles, capturing videos and photos, planning events, and talking to prospective partners.
Together, our excitement for this project continues to grow. It’s not easy to truly express how happy we are to share what we’ve created!
We decided to launch the website earlier than expected to support our community, especially in light of recent events and the COVID-19 outbreak. The current situation made it more evident that the primary goal of the project is to give readers reliable information about these challenging days.
We’re not quite ready yet for our big debut. Many features of the website are still in the development phase: jobs, real estate offers, lists of services from our partners with discounts for our readers. Even this team picture is not the one we’d love to use because so many of the team members are missing!
We’d like to offer more travel and leisure information – our wonderful writers and editors have been busing writing numerous articles about beautiful Bulgaria. We’ll have to wait for those, though.
We will continue building the website. Later, it will contain more and more information about the everyday life of an international citizen in Bulgaria: healthcare, legal matters, real estate, business, culture and leisure, and much more. In addition to the website, the Open Sofia Foundation will focus on cultural, corporate, networking events, trips, and social gatherings.
We are already collaborating with many non-profit organizations, government institutions, businesses. Others will soon join us.
Our outstanding team will grow bigger and our doors are always open for more volunteers. There will soon be more motivated contributors in the fields of journalism, production and design, editing, IT, communications, social sciences, legal, event management, and business development.
Open Sofia, an international family.
All together – Altogether.
