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Administrative capital of the Pirin region, BLAGOEVGRAD 's concrete suburbs and factories suggest a workaday town with little to tempt you away from the highway, but in reality it's the coolest place in southwest Bulgaria. While the lovingly restored old quarter and modern civic centre are the legacy of Zhivkov's decision to host an international summit here in 1988, the buzz is generated by 16,000 university students , the vast majority of them female (males brag of a ratio of 14:1, but six or seven to one seems likelier), making Blagoevgrad's cafes and clubs the most stylish - and flirtatious - in Bulgaria. With its lively cultural life and useful transport links to the rest of the Pirin, Blagoevgrad makes an ideal base. Hang around for a few days and you'll start to recognize (and be recognized by) the people you saw last night in a bar. Historically Blagoevgrad was an important crafts town, predominantly inhabited by Turks from the sixteenth century until their flight in 1912, after which it was settled by local peasants and displaced Bulgarians from Macedonia and the Aegean seaboard. In 1950 it was renamed Blagoevgrad in honour of Dimitar Blagoev , the founder of Bulgarian (and Russian) Marxism, and has chosen to stick with it in the post-Communist era because citizens either absolved Blagoev of any blame for Communism, or rejected restoring the former Turkish name, Gorna Dzhumaya - bestowed instead on a vile brand of cigarettes from one of the local tobacco factories.
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