My family was close to Baba Vanga since 1943. Our houses were one beside the other. My father was a lawyer, and often he visited Baba Vanga. My mother, when she was pregnant with my sister, wasn’t feeling very well, and that made her to go and visit the prophetess more often. Baba Vanga was advising her what to do, and over the years our families became very close. Baba Vanga eventually became my spiritual mother, and she was the Godmother of my first daughter.
I had a lot of hardship in my life, and Baba Vanga was always there to comfort me. I graduated majoring in Defectology – all my life I worked with children that had speech defects. Later I became a principal of a school that was specifically for children with speech problems. I tried everything I could to help those wretched souls. Unfortunately me and my husband divorced, and I was left alone to take care of my children.
Over the years, Baba Vanga had shared with me many personal and public stories. When she built the St. Petka Church in 1994, she called me at the ceremony, and asked me to become one of the guardians: “Katya you will be selling candles, counting the money, you will lock and unlock everything at the Church.” At first I was startled because I am not a spiritual person –ie. I was not a priest to take such a responsibility and role. Baba Vanga insisted, telling me that she knew I was going to be the one in the moment she first saw me in 1943 when I was very little.
Such words really make you feel obliged to do it. I came back to Petrich – coming back from Varna where I lived with my daughters. Since the church opened doors, every morning I had to go to Rupite, to open the complex.
I am thankful to my destiny that I had the opportunity to be so close to Baba Vanga, over the last two years of her life.
Baba Vanga was very pedantic when it comes to cleanliness and order. When she was younger, she did everything by herself – cooking, washing, cleaning. Even though she was blind, she did everything perfectly. When she got older, and her stamina and liveliness got lower, she found people to take care of the housework.
That is why Vitka was helping Baba Vanga for so many years. But there were other people close to her that were helping her all the time – one will buy her the groceries, another will sweep the yard, third will wash the dishes.
One afternoon, it was 1995, she asked me to mount a couple of brand new Greek curtains that someone gave her as a gift. I put them all, and on my way home Baba Vanga told me that I’ve forgotten to attach the very last ring of the last curtain on the rod.
This really surprised me, as she was blind, yet she couldn’t get up there to touch if all rings were attached…
In fact Baba Vanga was seeing it all, and you couldn’t hide anything from her. It is a different story if she was saying everything out loud. Sometimes the big truths that she was seeing were kept a secret. Another time, for very simple things like the case with the curtains she would yell at you!
Zheni Kostadinova graduated Philosophy at the Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. She has worked as an editor at the student TV show “Ku-Ku”, and as a reporter at the National Radio “Horizon”. For over 15 years she is a columnist at “Weekly Trud” newspaper writing about esoteric and psychology. In the same newspaper she is maintaining a page on literature. Zheni Kostadinova is the author of some of the most popular books written on Baba Vanga including “Baba Vanga The Prophetess”, “Baba Vanga Predictions”, “The Secret of Baba Vanga”. Her first book was translated into Russian, Polish, Latvian, Serbian, and Albanian. Zheni is a member of the Union of Bulgarian Writers. She had published three books of poetry: “Fire Sticks (2002), “17 love colors” (2007), and “Fig Jam” (2008). In 2012 Zheni has founded the art-house “Kuklite”. It is a doll gallery and a mini-museum located in the old downtown of Sofia. The gallery exhibits different dolls placed in specific categories. Besides the exhibitions, the art-house “Kuklite” also have the priority to work with children from the local schools, so they learn more about the traditions and customs of the different nations. The main idea is to transform the art-house “Kuklite” into a centre for cultural exchange, creative collaboration between representatives of different fields of art, science and philosophy. The art-house will hold meetings with interesting personalities, and will be a place of exhibitions, seminars, workshops, premieres of books and documentary movies, puppetry, and many other great events. The art-house “Kuklite” will also be a place where collectors can display their favourite artefacts and can share the history associated with them.
