Varban Stamatov

[1] He travelled extensively to as far as the Arctic circle, including the USA, China, Japan, Indonesia, Somalia, Egypt, Poland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the former USSR, Armenia, England, France, gathering material for his publications.

His mother, widowed young, was a teacher, who encouraged her children to read those "eternal books", essential as bread itself, literary works by authors such as Ivan Vazov, Dostoyevski, Jack London, Cervantes, Rabelais and Homer.

When he was not at sea, he mostly lived and worked in Sofia, within a circle of Bulgarian intellectuals, dramatists, film directors, theatre producers, artists, composers, conductors, poets, literary editors, critics and authors.

His colleagues and friends included Bancho Banov, Georges Tutev, Mladen Isaev, Emil Manov, Valeri Petrov, Nikolai Popov, Ducho Mundrov, Leda Mileva, (daughter of poet Geo Milev), Dora Gabe, Pavel Vezhinov and Boris Aprilov.

All of us in the final reckoning, no matter how vain, are merely dust for the wind, to be blown about whilst yet alive along with all our absurd passions, misapprehensions, intolerances, manias for achieving justice, fears, tom-foolery....″[6] He died in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1998.