Biennial of Bulgarian Humour once again brings smiles to Hamburg

What are Bulgarians laughing at in Hamburg? This will become clear during the 19th Biennial of Bulgarian Humour. This year in April, at the invitation of the Club of Bulgarian Women and Families in Hamburg, smiling faces will gather in the German city to read humorous works of Bulgarian writers, jokes and aphorisms. The event will take place on April 26 at the Aura25 restaurant.

Cartoonist from Hamburg Plamen Bakardzhiev will present his own work, while guests will also see the work of Maria-Rozaliya Vladimirova from Lom - awarded in 2025 in the "Humour" section of the annual literary competition for artistic mastery of Bulgarians in Hamburg.

Maintaining the Bulgarian literary word and the interest of Bulgarians in Hamburg and the surrounding area in the native language and culture is the main mission of the association founded two decades ago by the family of Emilia and Manfred Jucker. In June, the fourth edition of the Festival of Bulgarian Fiction is coming up, which will once again bring together Bulgarian authors from all over the world. The deadline for sending works for participation in the literary competition is until the end of April. But now the Biennial of Bulgarian Humor is at the forefront of the program.

“The Biennial of Bulgarian Humour brings together smiling faces from all over Hamburg, even from the surrounding cities. People also come from Berlin, Hanover, Bremen. We are very happy to have such people and everyone who comes must bring a literary work or a joke, funny stories that happened with them,” Emilia Jucker tells Radio Bulgaria. “We are very proud of our cooperation with the Museum of Humour and Satire in Gabrovo and Starshel newspaper. The biennial is so popular not only because people laugh, but because they read. We distribute printed texts of all our classical writers, Gabrovo humor, Shopi humor, etc. Here's how it goes: you sit and drink your beer and someone shoves this text into your hands. Come on now! We turn on the microphone and they start reading. The important thing is there's much laughter all the time! This is how we maintain the Bulgarian language – a wonderful form of contact, because in communication lies the truth."

Emilia Jucker took the opportunity to invite Bulgarians in Hamburg and around the world to join the literary competition organized by the Club of Bulgarian Women and Families. Authors over the age of 18 from Germany, but also anywhere else in the world, can send their works of up to 20 pages in Bulgarian or in German. The works should be dedicated to Bulgaria. The deadline for sending the works is April 30 and the names of the winners will be announced during the next major event for the Bulgarian community in Hamburg – the Festival of Bulgarian Literature, which will be held on June 27. Before that, however, all attention is focused on the 19th Biennial of Bulgarian Humour.