23-25 April 2026

City Stage

(underground level)   

 

Fantasy Worlds

of Tekla Aleksieva

 

Opening of the festival and the exhibition:

the 23rd of April | 6:30 p.m. ☰

 

The imagination of thousands Bulgarian readers has been marked by the covers of the Galactica Library, drawn by the artist Tekla Aleksieva. In 1979, the Georgi Bakalov Publishing House began publishing a series of international science fiction works that achieved enormous success and became a true cultural and social phenomenon. The credit for this belongs not only to the works themselves, but also to the visual recreation of themes like utopias and dystopias of the past and the future, the materialism and consumerism of modern society, the relationship nature-human-technology, and the questions of the transcendental and imagination in relation to the construct of political and commonly accepted cultural order.

In the venue you can see prints of the original drawings used as book covers: Future Imperfect by Domingo Santos; The Extra Bait by Robert Young; The Second Invasion from Mars by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky; Cemetery World by Clifford Simak; Chocky by John Wyndham; The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham; Cycle of Fire by Hal Clement; The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov; The Star Diaries by Stanisław Lem; Expeditions in Opposite Direction by Josef Nesvadba; The Time Machine by Herbert Wells; The Large Portrait by Dino Buzzati; What Do the Cyborgs Dream Of? by Pierre Barbet; The Clay God by Anatoly Dneprov; Leap Across the Abyss by Sergey Snegov; Alien Stars by Erik Simon; Portraits of Celestial Bodies by Rosen Bosev; Time and Again by Clifford Simak; The Wrath of the Invisible by Leonid Panasenko; The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams; A Living Soul by Per Christian Jersild; Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur Clarke; The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin; City by Clifford Simak; More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon; The Doomed City by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky; Solaris by Stanisław Lem, as well as the collections of science fiction stories Blue Typhoon, No Alarming Symptoms, Orinofilm.

 

 

Tekla Wilhelm Aleksieva was born on 2 November 1944 in Sofia. She graduated from the National art academy “N. Pavlovich”, Sofia, Department of Monumental-decorative painting, with Prof. Gocho Bogdanov. She worked in the field of painting, tapestry, monumental murals and illustration, makes stamps, tapestries, animated films. The paintings she created are few in number, but today have become iconic and are the property of Sofia City Art Gallery and other collections. Since 1974 she has participated in a number of general art exhibitions in Bulgaria and abroad, in which she shows a vivid development and affinity for the urban theme and its modern, photorealistic transformation.

She became known for the original covers she created between 1979 and 1989 for the books in the science fiction series Galactica Library of the Publishing House from Varna Georgi Bakalov. In addition to the series of covers for Galactica Library, Tekla Aleksieva has contributed to science fiction in Bulgaria by participating in initiatives of the Science fiction clubs in Bulgaria and the Club of the Bulgarian fiction artists "Vassil Ivanov". In the 1980s, Tekla Aleksieva also illustrated the covers of the Eco series and the library Bulgaria, and worked on the design of textbooks. She has received awards from illustration exhibitions in Bulgaria. She is a member of the Union of Bulgarian Artists.