First-ever statue of Umberto Eco unveiled—In a bookstore in Sofia

For the first time, a statue of the renowned Italian writer and philosopher Umberto Eco has been unveiled—and not just anywhere, but in a bookstore in Sofia. What inspired the idea, and what lessons does Eco’s legacy continue to teach us?

“I believe that anyone who has a relationship with literature has what you might call a ‘personal library’—those 10 or 15 books they've read, reread, thought about, perhaps even imitated in their own writing. For some reason, Umberto Eco is one of the authors I’ve always greatly admired. He’s undoubtedly a part of my personal library,” shared Daniel Valchev, who initiated the project.

“I only met him once, I think it was back in 2002, when the late Prof. Ivaylo Znepolski invited him to Sofia for two days. We saw each other a few times, including at a dinner at the Italian Embassy. But that’s not what impressed me most. What matters is that Eco was a writer of immense literary talent, and also one of the most socially engaged and profound contemporary philosophers.”

Valchev said he learned a great deal from Eco’s work. When he realised there was no statue of Eco anywhere in the world, the idea came naturally: “Why not make one in our bookshop?”

“One day, while walking down Vitosha Boulevard maybe two years ago, I noticed for the first time—somehow I hadn’t paid attention before—the statue of Aleko Konstantinov. I really liked it. And I told my friends, ‘That’s the sculptor who should do Umberto Eco.’”

That sculptor is Boris Borisov—“an exceptional Bulgarian artist,” Valchev said. Borisov agreed, and the result is a statue of Umberto Eco holding a book and a platypus—a nod to Eco’s book “Kant and the Platypus,” which has also been translated into Bulgarian.

“The first thing I learned from Eco is that a smart story can be told beautifully. Unfortunately, today the world is full of stories that seem shallow to me, or deep, meaningful texts that are hard to read. With Eco, both elements come together naturally.”

Valchev pointed to a wall in the bookstore where visitors can find quotes from great writers. One of them is from Umberto Eco: “The world is full of wonderful books that no one reads, sadly.”

Another key idea Valchev emphasised from Eco’s work is the role of memory in defining who we are.

“We're moving toward offloading everything onto computers—letting them remember for us. But without our memory, what are we? And what do we actually remember? Not facts like the length of the Amazon or how many tributaries the Nile has. Those are important, but we can always look them up—even before the internet. What we do remember, consciously or not, are the things we’ve read, the things we’ve lived. And in that sense, literature is a way of living more than one life.”