Boryana Hristova

Director of St. St. Cyril and Methodius National Library in Sofia

Prof. Boryana Hristova has been the director of the National Library since 1998.  Under her leadership, the National Library has participated in all national research programs related to the role of the book and of the library in the modern world as well as in many international programs, such as UNESCO’s Memoire du monde and Reading for all (a program for the preservation of library resources) and programs of The Open Society Foundation and of the International Federation of Library Association (IFLA).

Prof. Hirstova is a graduate from the Sofia University (MA in Bulgarian, English, and classic languages) where she became a professor in 1998.  She earned her Ph.D. in Philological Sciences in 1996 with a thesis on the so-called Rila School of the 15^th century.

Prof. Hristova’s main areas of research are Slavic paleography and diplomacy, archive studies, scholarly and spiritual history of the Balkans, early written heritage in the same region, comparative religion and religious tolerance, alternative cultural phenomena (history of European apocrypha), history of the cults of women saints in the Christian world and of East Orthodox saints, monastic libraries during the Middle Ages.  She has discovered and published a number of texts related to the ancient history of the Southern Slavs.