Dunav Tours AD, a Bulgarian cruise ship operator based in the Danube River port of Rousse, won today’s auction for the 27.6-meter (91 feet) luxury boat with an offer of 700,000 lev (€358,104; $472,400), the Ministry of State Administration in Sofia said on its Web site. The winner outbid Capman Consulting, a Sofia-based financial broker, in the government’s fourth effort at a sale. “We’ll use the yacht for luxury cruises in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean,” Katia Stoyanova, director of Dunav Tours, said in a phone interview from Rousse.
The company operates five passenger ships along the Danube and Rhine rivers from Bulgaria to Hungary, Austria, Germany and the Netherlands. The yacht, named “Balkan,” was purchased by Zhivkov’s Communist government in 1982 from Italy for $2 million (€1.5 million), while Bulgaria was a Soviet satellite state. It was used by his cohorts for parties and cruises during his rule, and has been kept at the Atia military base on the Black Sea near Bourgas since 1990.
Zhivkov came to power in 1954 and was the longest-serving leader in the Soviet-bloc nations of eastern Europe. As head of the Communist Party, he collectivized the nation’s farms and factories and set up labor camps for dissenters. He was in power at the time of the 1978 assassination in London of dissident writer Georgy Markov, the Bulgarian voice of the BBC. Under his rule, Bulgaria was accused in 1981 of attempting to assassinate Pope John Paul II. Zhivkov was ousted in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall. (Bloomberg)
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