Tag #127626 - Interview #78077 (Adela Hinkova)

Then I went to the junior high school. It was close to Kaleto [the old part of the town dating back from the Middle Ages]. I was happy that now we had a different teacher for every subject. One very nice teacher in mathematics said that I was very good at calculations. I remember her, Miss Vasileva. There were a lot of Wallachian students in the town. They wore bowler hats. They teased me a lot and called me Duda [short for Adela]. They would twist my arms and pull my hair. Once the Bulgarian teacher met me and I was crying because they had teased me. He asked me what my name was. I told him my name was Adela and he said that my name was very nice. He sent me to the teachers’ room to take a sheet of paper and a pen. He wrote down on the paper that there was no Duda at the school, but Adela. Then they stopped calling me Duda and I passed the three junior high school grades as Adela. This man was an idol for me, he taught me Bulgarian, taught me to read, to write and to think.