About
The municipality of Veliki Preslav is a small municipality located in North-Eastern Bulgaria and belongs to the Shumen province. The administrative center - the city of Veliki Preslav was founded for the first time between 852 and 889 as a military fortress and after turbulent events, such as wars, the conversion of the Bulgarians and reaction of the nobles ("boylars"), attempts to restore paganism, became the second capital of the First Bulgarian Kingdom in 893. The Council of Preslav proclaimed the Bulgarian language official in worship, the new capital Preslav and the highly educated Simeon as the Bulgarian king. Year after year, the Bulgarian capital grew up on the site of the military camp. At that time, medieval Bulgaria reached its cultural heyday as the literary and spiritual center of Slavic Europe. Preslav is also known as the actual birthplace of the Cyrillic alphabet and the seat of the first Bulgarian literary school in the 800s. The modern city of Veliki Preslav and the territory of the entire municipality are distinguished both by clean and well-preserved nature, as well as by negative demographic trends, an underdeveloped economy, an unsatisfactory state of infrastructure and low incomes of the population. In an attempt to combat negative characteristics, the local government for several mandates has been committed to attracting additional financial resources for the realization of investments through participation in various programs. From 2005 to the present moment, dozens of infrastructure and social projects have been implemented in the municipality, financed both with funds from the pre-accession programs (before 2007) and from the instruments of the EU's cohesion policy after 2007, in which the Republic of Bulgaria became a full member of the EU. Some of the more significant successfully implemented projects of the Municipality are projects related to increasing the energy efficiency of the building stock, reducing the risk of flooding, improving and developing the infrastructure for drinking and waste water, building cultural and historical tourist attractions, building objects of the social infrastructure, etc. In 2022, the Municipality of Veliki Preslav implemented its first transnational project, financed under the URBACT III program, within which an Integrated Action Plan was developed, entirely based on the UN Agenda 2030 and the 17 goals for sustainable development. In search of funding for the implementation of some of the identified actions, as well as other measures provided for in the current strategic documents of the Municipality, the local government has adopted an approach to intensify participation in partner networks for the implementation of transnational projects.
