120 years BTA
Bulgarian News Agency (BTA) celebrated its 120th birthday. On this occasion the President Rumen Radev visited the Agency. He attended BTA's daily editorial meeting. He talked with the agency's Director General Maxim Minchev (ABUJET President) and other senior officers.
During the meeting Radev said: "As head of state, I am glad that the Bulgarian News Agency exists and has its history, traditions, experience, professionalism and high standards."
BTA is one of the first news agencies in Europe and the world. It is among the ten agencies that operated in the 1890s, along with Havas (established in 1835, predecessor to Agence France-Presse, which was set up in 1944), Reuters (established 1851) and Press Association (1868), the Danish Ritzaus Bureau (1866), the Norwegian Telegraph Bureau (1867), the Hungarian Telegraph Agency (1880), the Lehtikuva Finnish Telegraph Bureau (1887), the Swiss Telegraph Agency (1894), and Harbour News Association (est. New York, 1848, ultimately becoming Associated Press). 
BTA is the world's only news agency that has not changed its name. It has existed without interruption, surviving three coups d'etat, four wars and four changes of the country's form of
government (from principality to kingdom to people's republic to republic). BTA boasts Bulgaria's largest photo archive, with over 5 million pictures. The Agency Reference Library Department keeps the country's richest systematized archive, collected since 1950: over 500,000 items. BTA processes news feed in 15 foreign languages, including Chinese, Arabic, Greek, Turkish, Polish, Czech and Hungarian.
