Catholic Priest's Pilgrimage Honours Bulgarian Victims of Totalitarianism

Fr Paolo Cortese,  a Catholic priest and head of the "Bishop Evgenii Bosilkov Cultural Centre" in Belene, a Bulgarian town on the Danube, is organising a series of events to commemorate the victims of various totalitarian or authoritarian regimes in the 20th century.

The priest, who became famous for hosting a Syrian refugee family in 2017, and for suffering vicious attacks for this act, will lead a pilgrimage from August 23 to September 9 to eight places of memory across the country.

These include places where the communist regime staged atrocities after World War II, places where the royalist regime of the 1930s and the 1940s persecuted its opponents, as well as locations of Jewish deportations and sites where Ottoman atrocities took place.

"This is not about politics, it's about developing a culture of memory - that's part of our spiritual world. We always need to enter this topic from the side of the victims," Fr Cortese told a press conference in Pleven on Tuesday.

The commemorative pilgrimage will be held under the slogan "All for one, one for all".

The start and the end dates of the pilgrimage are not coincidental.

In 2008, August 23 was proposed to become a Day of the Victims of Communism, Nazism and Fascism at the Prague European Conscience and Communism Conference.

August 23 was selected because it represented the date in 1939 when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact.

Meanwhile, September 9 marks the day when the Soviet Red Army entered Bulgaria in 1944, toppling the monarchy and establishing the Fatherland Front government, which would later give way to a totalitarian communist regime that would kill or imprison thousands of its opponents.

The events...