An exhibition called "The Black Sea in European Cartography" opens today at 5:30pm in the main lobby of Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski", the university's press office says. It marks the 23rd anniversary of the foreign ministry's Diplomatic Institute.

The institute put the exhibition together with the university's "St. Kliment Ohridski" library, with help from Bulgaria's State Agency "Archives", the international centre "GEOPAN" and the "Black Sea Strandzha" association.

It has 19 panels, all in English, tracing how European mapmaking in the Black Sea region began and changed over time. The panels show how strategic the area has been from ancient times to today, along with the dialogue and cultural and historical ties between the countries around the Black Sea.

The exhibition is part of the Diplomatic Institute's mapping project "The Sea Brings All Distant Things Together". It has already been shown at high-profile venues in Bulgaria and abroad: at UN headquarters in New York, at the headquarters of the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC) in Istanbul, in Paris, Tbilisi, Tehran, Chisinau and Constanța, and in Bulgaria in Burgas and Nesebar.

It is dedicated to the memory of Svetlozar Kovachev (1958-2025), a longtime member of staff at the Diplomatic Institute, who came up with the idea for the exhibition and curated it.