The Peculiar Truth about the Bulgarian Nostradamus

• For decades during the Cold War era, Eastern Europeans traveled to a remote village in southwestern Bulgaria. The town had nothing special to offer in terms of commerce, resources, or natural beauty. The only reason people visited was to seek out a blind woman.

• Her name was Vangeliya Pandeva Surcheva. Everyone knew her as Baba Vanga. (Grandma Vanga)

• She became famous for making predictions about the future that rivaled Nostradamus and Edgar Cayce. Some were believed to be quite accurate. (See below)

• Young Vanga went blind at age 13 when strong winds knocked her off her feet and her eyes were damaged. Surgeries to save her eyesight failed. Despite her blindness, she helped raise her siblings in abject poverty.

• She came to local prominence as a clairvoyant during WWII. At that time of uncertainty, people asked her whether their loved ones had survived the war.

• She married a soldier in 1942, and they moved to Petrich close to the borders with Greece and North Macedonia. They stayed together for 20 years until he died from alcoholism.

• Her legend grew, though, and she kept receiving visitors long after the war. Among those who supposedly consulted her - although there’s little verification - were high-ranking heads of state, including Soviet leaders. Bulgaria was not a Soviet satellite country but was part of the Eastern Bloc which aligned with the Communist state.

• Todor Zhivkov was Bulgaria’s Communist leader for 35 years from 1954 through 1989. He was the only confirmed politician to have met Baba Vanga. But local folklore suggested that several top Soviets contacted her, too. They included Leonid Brezhnev, his successor Yuri Andropov, and Russian president Boris Yeltsin.

• KGB members reached out to her, as well as Bulgarian military officers. So did local artists and the Minister of Culture (who was Zhivkov’s daughter).

• In the 1960s, a psychologist was granted state permission to study Baba Vanga. He headed the Institute of Suggestology, a pseudo-scientific organization based on the dubious idea of superior learning through suggestions.

• That made Baba Vanga even more famous, which brought her more visitors. So the town imposed a fee to see her, most of which they kept for themselves. Baba Vanga became a cottage industry - in a Communist country.

• In 1990, she moved a few miles away to an even smaller town and had a church built in her honor, complete with artists’ renderings of her inside and out.

• Baba Vanga died at age 84, and today her house is a museum.

• Her predictions supposedly include the following, some of which came long after her life ended:

• The date of Josef Stalin’s death.

• Indira Ghandi’s 1984 assassination.

• The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl.

• The death of Princess Diana.

• The end of the Soviet Union.

• The attacks of September 11, 2001 (“steel birds” over the US)

• The Indonesian tsunami on the day after Christmas 2004.

• An African-American elected the 44th President of the United States.

• Baba Vanga also supposedly accurately predicted the date of her own death - August 11, 1996.

  ALSO:

• She predicted a “large spacecraft” visiting earth in 2025.

• Did she envision the recent comet called 3I/Atlas?