- In Blagoevgrad & Beyond
- 16/04/2026 13:43
- 185 Views
- 0 Comments
Street dogs were Blagoevgrad’s only midnight threat. Or so we thought. The recent case of Silvio Kostadinov, a sophomore who was beaten off-campus, shook people’s perception of the city.
But his story was not the only one.
Mihail Aleksandrov, a senior student, was going back home from a night out in Underground when he and his friend were provoked by six guys near the nightclub.
"Some guys came to us and were like, "Do you want problems?"... they just have a very drunk friend in the friend group, who, I guess, wanted to have a little fight," explains Mihail. He told them to go away, but this did not stop them.
"I moved a little bit, but my friend didn't. [He] got punched a couple of times. Then I went to separate them... as I turned around, I got hit," he said that after two punches, the guys decided to leave them because they saw that Mihail and his friend did not want to fight back.
Egor Golovin, a senior international student at AUBG, shared his experience. One evening this March, he was chased by a guy who followed him from Billa to his home.
“I saw a person who started weirdly looking at me. Then he started chasing me, basically at a very fast pace... I was going back and forth from street to street to check if he was chasing me. He was.”
When Egor reached his home, he felt scared to enter the building because the guy was still nearby. He feared that the guy would find out that Egor lives there and rob him. To protect himself, Egor started screaming at the stranger in English and Russian, and the chaser kept responding “Ne razbiram” [I do not understand].
Then the guy turned back and started slowly moving away, but every five seconds, he looked behind his back to stare at Egor. Egor waited for the guy to completely disappear before entering the building.
The mayor of Blagoevgrad, Metodi Baykushev, claims that the city is one of the safest in Europe.
The city possesses more than 100 CCTV points and approximately 300 cameras. These are surveillance systems used by the police during accidents. They help when accidents occur, but how can we prevent them?
One way would be to submit signals to the police and the website https://signalin.blagoevgrad.bg. In this way, the municipality will be notified about irregularities, identified dangers, or violations affecting public interests.
The mayor says that “some of the problems may be fixed very easily. Some others may require infrastructure investment, which takes a lot of time but still needs to be identified as an issue and then planned accordingly.”
Egor did not report his case because the guy who followed him did not harm him, but he decided to raise awareness by posting a story on his Instagram.
“I think this was a quite effective method of telling people that there is a problem. A lot of people responded to me, who wanted to know more about how he looked, about where it happened, about if I did something or not,” he adds that people should talk when something like this happens.
The mayor recommends that students finish the night early, Egor suggests that people should buy pepper spray, while Mihail advises never going back home alone after a night out. Yet, Silvio was attacked at 2 AM, Egor did not need to spray his follower to be terrified, and Mihail was already with a friend.
Safety is never guaranteed.
Editors: Vasil Paskov and Kaloyan Ivanov
This article was brought to you by AUBG Daily's title sponsors:
- United Bulgarian Bank (Member of KBC group)
And