The President of the Luwian Studies Foundation, Dr. Eberhard Zangger, completed a lecture tour of Bulgaria from April 20 to 29, 2023. At the invitation of Professor Maya Vassileva, he first gave lectures at the New Bulgarian University entitled “The Luwian Culture – The Missing Link in the Aegean Bronze Age” and “The Earth, the Sky and the Netherworld: Cosmology 3200 Years Ago.” The trip was initiated and facilitated by Dr. Alexei Stoev and Dr. Penka Maglova of the National Academy of Sciences. They hosted the lectures in the ballrooms of the Regional Library and Historical Museum in Stara Zagora. Professor Anton Genov made possible that the lecture on cosmology could be held for students and faculty members at the Southwest University “Neofit Rilski” in Blagoevgrad. This lecture could also be attended during live web-broadcast; in addition, television reported.
The lecture invitations resulted from the conference of the European Society for Astronomy in Culture (SEAC) held in Stara Zagora in September 2021. Bulgaria, as one of the homelands of the Thracian culture, is an important region with which the Luwian culture interacted in the second millennium BCE. At the same time, Bulgaria has rock sanctuaries and Neolithic cave paintings that prove an early preoccupation with calendar systems.