A hundred years ago, Bulgarian mail first took to the skies. On September 28, 1926, a three-seat "Potez 17" aircraft lifted off from a field near Sofia and, after roughly two and a half hours, landed in Varna carrying something unheard of at the time - that same morning's capital newspaper, delivered in time for the afternoon. The Museum of Contemporary History in Varna opened its doors for a public lecture on the subject, organized jointly with the Varna Philatelic Society. The speakers were the museum's curator, Teo Rokov, and the chairman of the Varna Philatelic Society, Nikolay Penev.
According to Rokov and Penev, airmail was a major step forward for the country, as it drastically cut the time needed to transport correspondence and printed matter between Sofia and Varna - then Bulgaria's two largest cities. They recalled that after World War I, the country's aviation development had been heavily restricted under the terms of the postwar treaties, and that civilian flights became one of the few ways to preserve the aviation expertise that had already been accumulated.
In 1926, Bulgaria ratified an international convention regulating aviation and received its own aircraft registration code. Later that year, the aviation department was reorganized into a Directorate of Civil Aviation. It was in this context that the idea of a trial postal route between Sofia and Varna took shape.
The experiment itself ran from September 28 to October 9, 1926, during which eleven test flights were carried out in both directions. The aircraft did not carry regular mail, which continued to travel by train, but only selected letters and newspapers - enough to let the capital's papers reach Varna the same day, instead of the usual delay of several days by rail.
Among the items on display during the lecture was a specially issued commemorative postcard marking the centenary, along with envelopes and cards bearing an original 1926 postal stamp. Among the most valuable items shown, Nikolay Penev pointed to an original postcard sent from abroad to Varna resident Anton Novak - one of the few surviving authentic traces of the flights.
Penev also addressed the challenge of distinguishing genuine philatelic items from the period from later-made ones, a subject on which specialists rely on details in the postmarks and the paper itself to verify authenticity. He noted that such cases of philatelic forgery were not unique to Bulgaria - a phenomenon also known from other European countries of the same era.
The Varna Philatelic Society plans to continue the lecture series in the coming years, covering further stages in the development of Bulgarian airmail. According to the organizers, today's talk is the first in a series that will trace the broader path of Bulgarian aviation.
