St. Cyril & St. Methodius Foundation

Established on 20 October 1982, the St. Cyril and St. Methodius International Foundation is a non-governmental, non-profit, publicly supported charity headquartered in Sofia — one of the country’s longest-standing patrons of education and culture.

Its mission, in its own words, is to build intellectual capacity: securing access to the best academic centres in the world for young and capable Bulgarians. Its endowment has been gathered through donations from organisations and individuals in Bulgaria and abroad — a large part of them works of art.

The scholarship record reads like a map of doors opened: the Gipson Scholarships support a hundred students each year; a 21-year partnership with Japan’s Ministry of Education has carried more than 350 scholars; over 110 young Bulgarians have gone to the United World Colleges; more than 500 people have been assisted through the North-American Educational Program since 1990.

Music has its own place in the Foundation’s story — a music programme has run since the founding year of 1982, the Lidia Kuteva scholarship supports young pianists at the Lubomir Pipkov National School of Music in Sofia, and an annual visual-arts competition gathers more than a hundred young artists around a 10,000-dollar award fund.

That is the kinship we feel most directly: a foundation that has spent four decades believing gifted young Bulgarians deserve the world’s best rooms — a conviction every Camerata Bulgarica production shares from the stage.