BELGIAN diplomats and business people were in at the foundations of Bulgaria's modern statehood.
As noted in Alexander Kostov's 2004 book, Bulgaria and Belgium At The Turn of the 20th Century, the Bulgaria emerging from the Ottoman Empire aspired to becoming a modern European state.
It was quite natural, Kostov said, that Bulgarians turned their eyes to Belgium "comparable in size, with a relatively young state system but also boasting huge achievements in social, political, economic and cultural life".
Diplomatic relations between Bulgaria and Belgium were established on December 11 1879.
Belgians facilitated Bulgaria's participation in the World Fairs in Antwerp in 1894 and Liege and in Brussels at the start of the 20th century, building new links to the markets of Western Europe.
At the same time, Belgian investments saw the opening of sugar factories in Sofia (1898) and Rousse (1912) – established by Ernest Solvay, whose name was to become an icon of Belgian investment in modern Bulgaria; an electrical enterprise in Sofia, the first match factory in Kostenets, the Penkov and Popov leather factory in Rousse, among others. Belgium's role in the establishment in 1901 of the first tramway company in Sofia was a decisive move forward for Bulgaria's fledgling capital city. In 1909, a Belgian group took over the Electrical Company, set up a few years earlier in Sofia.
With Belgian interests also extending to other areas of the economy, including coal mining, by the eve of World War 1, Belgium was the biggest foreign investor in Bulgarian industry, and its firms represented the biggest in terms of fixed capital investment in the country. During this time, a firm from Liege built and operated the water supply operation in Plovdiv. Belgium's Credit Anversois held considerable shares in the Balkan Bank, the biggest private commercial bank in Bulgaria, which was established in 1906.
Belgium, Kostov records, also played a vital role in education, with more than 1000 young Bulgarians travelling to Belgium for specialist education in the years leading up to World War 2. Many engineers got their training at Belgian schools, and a great number of specialists in commerce and economics graduated from the Higher Institute of Commerce in Antwerp and the universities of Brussels, Ghent, Liege and Leuven.
Also among those receiving professional training were many of Bulgaria's new generation of lawyers, physicians, scientists and mathematicians.
In the 1920s, Belgian groups held majority or significant shares in many industrial, credit, commercial or transport enterprises in Bulgaria, according to Kostov. Belgium was an important market for various Bulgarian goods, including tobacco and cereals.
However, in the 1930s, Bulgaria's economy became increasingly orientated towards Germany, and this was a major factor in the decline in Belgian involvement. After World War 2, communist seizure of the remaining Belgian enterprises brought a dark age for bilateral economic ties, with a rebirth following Bulgaria's transition towards democracy at the beginning of the 1990s.
As a matter to note, the two countries have another connection: Bulgaria's former monarch and former prime minister, Simeon Saxe-Coburg, is a third cousin once removed of Belgian King Albert II; both are descendants of French King Louis Philippe I.