Shortly thereafter, the Bulgarian government also decided that it would send a 50 person medical mission to North Korea, far exceeding the size of other Eastern European medical teams.
#Korean war hospital free
On 22 February 1951, the Bulgarian government announced that it would send free equipment and drugs for a surgery hospital with 250 beds (valued at 80 million BGN) to North Korea. Establishing the Bulgarian Medical Mission Here, however, I will focus only on the records surrounding the Bulgarian medical missions and their achievements during the Korean War. We can now revisit and study Bulgaria’s political propaganda during the war, the participation of three Bulgarian military medical teams in establishing six hospitals in North Korea, and Sofia’s accommodation of more than 500 orphaned Korean children and 250 Korean students during and after the war. Such sources also enable us to trace the war’s effect on Bulgarian society. A selection of the documents were also published in English translation on .Īs I have previously written, the newly available Bulgarian archives allow for a reexamination of the policies and attitudes of this small Balkan country toward the first global conflict in the postwar era. The project resulted in a trilingual archival reference book, available in Korean, English and Bulgarian, among many other publications that should be a boon to studies of the two Koreas and the Cold War. The details of such wartime assistance are now coming to light, thanks to a joint academic project organized between universities in Sofia and Seoul to mine the Bulgarian political, military and diplomatic archives for any documentary evidence on North and South Korea. But the leadership in Sofia (and in other East European capitals) did lend enormous political and humanitarian assistance to its socialist allies fighting on the Korean Peninsula – some of the details of which are sketched out below.
It did not provide troops or military aid to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Bulgaria’s involvement stands out as a prominent example of the war’s global reach.īulgaria – unlike some other European countries – did not get directly involved in military activity during the war. The Korean War reverberated far beyond the East Asian region from the very beginning, as it became a global military conflict at a time of bitter bi-polar confrontation between the two dominant political systems in the world.
Hyundai Motor-Korea Foundation Center for Korean History and Public Policy.
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