The president's website has no Cyrillic address ("президент.бг") and uses the Russian form of Cyrillic letters, not the Bulgarian one, Bozhidar Bozhanov, co-chair of the "Yes, Bulgaria" party, wrote on Facebook. The party's press office shared his post.
He aimed his criticism at President Iliana Iotova, who launched the third International Forum on the Cyrillic Script at the end of March. "If Iotova wants everything to be in Cyrillic so much, why does the presidency not have the domain 'президент.бг'? This is not just something kept up for technical reasons, it is an obligation," Bozhanov wrote.
He cites a regulation under the Electronic Governance Act, which he wrote himself a decade ago. It says the official domains of government bodies must be in the national top-level domains: ".bg" in Latin letters and ".бг" in Cyrillic.
Bozhanov admits that the president is not formally a government body. But he says that for someone so firm in defending Cyrillic, the rule should have applied to the presidency during the nine years Iotova was vice president and the nine months she has been president.
As minister of e-government, Bozhanov started an initiative for the Bulgarian form of Cyrillic. His rules went through public consultation first and were then adopted. Under them, websites use only fonts with the Bulgarian form of the letters, in which the lower-case "г" and "т" look handwritten, not like the printed capitals.
Bozhanov said a number of institutions have already switched their website fonts to the Bulgarian form. "But the presidency's website still does not use the Bulgarian form of Cyrillic and goes on with the Russian one. The fight for Cyrillic is clearly only in words," he wrote. He said the Bulgarian form of the letters is coming into real use because it has relied on initiatives over the years.
The third International Forum on the Cyrillic Script, titled "Spiritual Heritage in the Digital Age", took place at the end of March on Iotova's initiative. In her address, the president spoke about the responsibility to protect and develop the Bulgarian language in the digital era. She called the alphabet and the language Bulgaria's most valuable heritage and the basis of national identity, and urged people to take care of the Bulgarian language.