MC: Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, thank you for turning to this page of The Sofia Echo's Year in Review. On it, you will experience flashing lights, celebrity misadventures, wardrobes of costume, scandalous art and humbling speech.

Let us turn our attention to the best concert of the year. You experienced the thrill of buying a ticket online, the rush of trying to be the first to get to your seat, the awe of actually seeing her in person. Ladies and Gentlemen, let's hear it for Kylie Minogue!

Kylie: Guys, girls, everybody, hello Bulgaria! Thank you for choosing my May 18 concert as your tops for 2008. I'll transmit your raves about my seven costumes to their designer, my beloved Jean-Paul Gaultier.

MC: Thank you, Kylie, and, uh, nice dress. After Kylie, ladies and gentlemen, in second place is the heavy metal band that graced Bulgaria twice in the past year. Two of its members participated in the 2007/08 New Year's concert in Kavarna and then the full band graced Kavarna at the Kaliakra Rock Festival 2008, where, in its July 5 opening, their concert lasted for five hours and one minute. Give a hand for Manowar!

Joey DeMaio: Yo, thanks dude.

MC: We could not forget about our perennial favourites, however. Because it was such a hard choice, we awarded the entire weekend! Congratulate Metallica for its July 25 concert and Lenny Kravitz for his July 27 gig. Hope to see you around soon, boys.

We must be moving on; ladies and gentlemen, but before announcing the winners for art exhibition, let's not forget the March concert of Bulgaria's boy-star violinist Vasko Vassilev, DeeDee Bridgewater, the fado of Estrella Morente and Misia. Now, let us move on.

Just like ice cream goes with an ice cream cone, so do these two artists complement each other to sweet perfection. Their gaudy-kitsch photographs of our beloved celebrity icons gets fitted into equally gaudy-kitsch hand-made frames, coming together for a sort of surrealist adult fairytale. Their May exhibition at Sofia City Art Gallery marked the first time that the French duo had had a show in Eastern Europe. Ladies and gentlemen, let's hear you give it up for Pierre et Gilles.

Pierre et Gilles: Merci beaucoup, everyone, with a particular hug and kiss to the French embassy in Bulgaria, Sofia City Art Gallery director Adelina Fileva, French Institute director Catherine Suard, Assen Assenov from the magazine Edno, and the curator of our show here, the Parisian gallerist Jerome de Noirmont.

MC: You're wonderful, boys. Hope you enjoyed your time at Sin City. Because, ladies and gentlemen, we may be sinners, but we all love a good painting. They called him a fake and he proved them right. A copy might never be as good as an original, but this Italian artist's reproductions of famous paintings sure come close. The July exhibition in Varna brought together perfect imitations of paintings by names like Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Paul Gaugin, Gustav Klimt, Amedeo Modigliani, Edgar Degas and Leonardo da Vinci. Daniele Donde, you're a star.

Unfortunately, Donde's starlight is not visible here tonight, due to heavy fog at Sofia Airport.

Back on planet Earth, we move on to our third awardee of the evening. He celebrated his 75th birthday this year, making him one of Bulgaria's longest-working artists to be still alive. His name is associated with beauty, searching, influence and instruction. Themes like the meaning of life and the individual's mission here on earth have served as the foundations of his work. A retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery for Foreign Art in June showed the breadth of his skill. With all our love, and all our respect, we confer this honour on... Svetlin Roussev.

Svetlin Roussev: It's an honour, sir.

MC: The honour is all mine. Other contenders in this category were the inclusion of a 60-second Bulgarian film in the World One Minutes exhibition at Today Art Museum in Beijing; the All About Him project, founded by Ventsislav Zankov, which used contemporary art to explore the place of males in modern society; the extended run of Lawrence Schiller's exhibition Marilyn Monroe and America in the 1960s; Chagall at the National Gallery for Foreign Art in March; Sofia-based GreenCat Gallery buying a gallery in Antwerp in June, making it the first Bulgarian gallery to open doors abroad; Stay, Stay, an exhibition of contemporary art resulting from an InterSpace residency programme, held at Sofia Central Baths in October; and the show of selected works from Pablo Picasso, starting in mid-December.

For what it's worth, ladies and gentlemen, it looks like that central bath building will be split down the middle, or so it was decided in July. We're waiting to see if they allow bathers from the day spa to tour the museum in their towels.

Sounds like it might make for a good reality TV programme - The Day Spa. Not like we were lacking in such shows this year! You, miss, in the violet blouse. Which one was your favourite? Ah, Dancing Stars, you say, because you like to watch how the men move with such elegance? You did not find that on Survivor? No? Those muscled hunks chopping wood are not your type? You probably did not like Big Brother 4, either, or The Life of Others. Well, ladies and gentlemen, perhaps this miss will be more interested in the next category.

It's old. It's hidden. It's dirty. It's... archaeology! And archaeology saw a change of faces in 2008. Sobering news came on September 14: Georgi Kitov, hunter of Thracian kings, died at 65. This country owes much to his expertise and to his discoveries. Please join me in a moment of silence. We would like to dedicate this double award to him: in a period of four months, two of them were found, both in near-perfect condition, both in different locations. We're talking about four-wheeled Thracian chariots, one bronze-covered, found near Nova Zagora in November, the other one found in August near Borissovo in the Elhovo region, both dating to the first half of the second century CE. Congratulations to the teams that worked on these digs.

Our second place goes to the temple to Isis and Osiris, unearthed near the Black Sea in October, dating to the mid-second century CE. Third place is a tie for the Thracian tomb excavated in Tsarevo municipality in June and the unique medieval seal belonging to the Byzantium emperor Andronic II Palaiologos (1282-1321) found at Perperikon in August.

Let's hear it for all the effort that went into uncovering these pieces of history! As you probably know, history is something we might often like to reverse. In October, plans for the preservation and exposure of the archaeological site Seuthopolis, founded in 323 BCE by Thracian king Seuthes III and positioned underwater, from 1954, in the centre of a reservoir, moved one step ahead. A call for investors to secure the 150 million euro needed to carry out the project went out. But given the hesitancy of investments at the moment, this plan might, too, become a part of history. At least for now.

Ladies and gentlemen, good night!