Bulgaria, Greece Open Border "Friendship Tunnel"
Date: 12-Dec-05
Country: BULGARIA
Author: Nikolay Doychinov
Hundreds of Greeks and Bulgarians applauded as their presidents cut ribbons in the centre of the 448-metre tunnel, which was created after environmentalists warned a highway would threaten bears in the area.
Only the second crossing between the countries, the delay in opening the tunnel had raised controversy in Bulgaria because it was meant to link two communities virtually cut off since World War Two.
Some 150 residents of the Bulgarian town of Ilinden, mostly old and too poor to own cars, had made a pact to stay alive until they could use the new transit point to cross over to the nearby Greek town of Exohi Drama, where many had been born.
"This is a historical event. For more than 60 years people in the region were waiting to visit the houses they were born in and their family graveyards," said Georgi Gushtanov, a 60-year old engineer from Ilinden.
The older people in Ilinden, some 240 km south of Sofia were refugees whose families fled their homes in northern Greece after the second Balkan War in 1913.
They had close ties to nearby Greek villages until Bulgaria became a Soviet ally and was cut off by the Iron curtain.
Critics of the tunnel, which passes under a low hill created for the bears to pass over, dismissed the environmentalists concern, saying only around 15 bears lived nearby and stayed mostly in mountains that were not near the highway.
Last decade, some Bulgarian politicians also accused Greece of using the bruins as an excuse to delay building the crossing.
But ties between the two countries have warmed significantly during Bulgaria's ongoing progress towards EU accession, planned for 2007, and the tunnel is expected to speed up traffic and reduce the relative geographic isolation of the two neighbours.
"We have shown that we are ready to even bore through the mountains to open the paths of friendship," Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov said after he inaugurated the new border crossing with his Greek counterpart Karolos Papoulias.
According to environmentalists, some 800 brown bears live in Bulgaria and 120 in Greece.
(Additional reporting by Tsvetelia Ilieva in Sofia and Marilena Petrogiannou in Athens)
