Elena Nikolova Tyufekchieva

1. Female, Bulgarian, Christian, the family is important; it gives us direction and teaches the moral values.

2. My identity has not changed over the years. Within the period 18 – 29 years of age the priority was my education and raising my daughter. In search of self, enriching my life with new friends, new teachers, new books.

3. My birth place, it is close to beautiful mountains, Stob - my father’s village. The smells, fragrances, the flower garden planted by my grandparents, Blagoevgrad - I was born there. The Library in Blagoevgrad and my brother who took me there for the first time when I was just six. All the books, Ran Bossilek, Puccini’s Biography, Jane Eyre, Chaplin’s Autobiography, and to not forget Pippi Longstocking, Karlsson from the Roof, The Headless Horseman…
And then the English Language School, the English itself, my wonderful teacher, English philology and again more books.

4. Of a person, girl, woman… who wants to learn, educate herself, communicate, travel, get to know people, new things.

5. Jane Eyre, Pierre Besuhov, Pipi (it got so “seventy” in my throat)

6. Well, I don’t know whether it helps or not. Maybe somewhere in between, depends on a given situation and the intellectual capacity of the people concerned.

7. This is a question of a research paper. If you are among people with same views crossed it is not a problem.

8. I am studying their nature, character; I am interested in people around me. Sometimes their cultural peculiarities can be tiresome but I am always happy when they are interested in my Bulgarian cultural identity.

9. I don’t regret being born in Bulgaria. I want to live there again. But, of course, it is great living in a foreign country and get to know its culture from within.

2016