Plovdiv 2019: The First European Capital of Culture from Bulgaria

Plovdiv, a city with about 350,000 inhabitants and 8,000 years of history is now the first European Capital of Culture from Bulgaria. This paper describes the process that led, from September 2011 with an unanimous vote of the City Council, to the choice of the city as ECoC 2019. An independent foundation, called "Plovdiv 2019", was set up by a group of local artists and intellectuals who persuaded the municipal authorities to participate in the ECoC bidding process. The structure of the programme, based on four platforms FUSE, TRANSFORM, REVIVE, and RELAX, as well the budgets for capital and operating expenditures are particularly stressed - a total of 12 project clusters with over 60 initiatives, events, festivals, framework programmes, and social activities, big, medium and small projects; the total budget for the ECoC event set at 38,177,638 euros, 90.8% of which expected to come from the public sector. For the evaluation and monitoring of the event, Plovdiv will develop an innovative system that combines existing and new methods of assessment in the next few years before the event and will involve institutions able to continue the evaluation process, in the crucial years following 2019.