With united energy and a lot of emotion, the team of Radio Plovdiv and the musicians of the Plovdiv Big Band celebrate today with a special festive programme two anniversaries - the 65^th anniversary of Radio Plovdiv and the 20^th anniversary of the Plovdiv Big Band. The event will take place on the stage of the Ancient Theatre in Plovdiv. It is organized with the assistance of Plovdiv Municipality, the Ancient Plovdiv Municipal Institute and the Plovdiv 2019 Foundation.

Over the past 20 years, the Plovdiv Big Band, a group founded and headed by Nikolay Geshev, has held dozens of concerts across Bulgaria together with almost all of the country's renowned jazz and pop performers. It has created its own recognizable repertoire and has its own loyal audience.

Radio Plovdiv started broadcasting for the first time on June 2, 1955. Over the years, it has gained the reputation of being one of the most popular radios in South Bulgaria. The team of one of the nine regional programmes of the BNR provides reliable, accurate and objective information about the life of this region. Radio Plovdiv was the first radio in the country to start broadcasting its programme online on the Internet - this happened in March, 1998.

“It is important for us to provoke a public debate because the diversity of opinions helps us become better informed, more independent, freer and more tolerant”, Radio Plovdiv's Editor-in-chief Marin Danev says. He repeated the motto of his colleagues in Radio Plovdiv: “We continue a tradition in which nothing is like yesterday.”

Compiled by: Gergana Mancheva

English version: Kostadin Atanasov