Every year, guests are enthralled at the Santa Lucia ceremony as the celebrants enter a darkened ballroom illuminated only by the candles that glow in honour of the Swedish tradition.

The same annual ceremony sees the awarding of Mini-Nobel Prizes to Bulgarian students whose academic records show their potential and who receive the boost of opportunities for further study.

This year, Sofia will again see the ceremonies enacted. Paul Beijer, Swedish ambassador to Bulgaria, who presided for the first time at the 2008 ceremony, speaks highly of it as an event that not only highlights Swedish traditions and cuisine, but also is "an opportunity to reward bright young Bulgarian students, and let me tell you, there are plenty of them about".

An ambition that he is nurturing for his term in Sofia is to promote an improved knowledge of Swedish classical music in Bulgaria. "I recently provided a lot of examples to a Bulgarian professor who wanted to do a lecture on Swedish classical music. Sweden has quite a big base of good composers through the centuries."

At the question-and-answer session after the presentation, Beijer says, the leading inquiry from an impressed audience was: "Why have not we heard this before?"

Sweden’s presidency of the EU will also see a cultural programme, according to an official Swedish website. The programme will "illustrate the relationship between the local and everyday and the broad and European".

Sami singer Sofia Jannok is just one of many artists taking part in the cultural programme during the Swedish Presidency.

"The Presidency provides a new and greater opportunity to showcase the cultural treasure that we have - in Sweden as well as in the rest of Europe. The cultural programme is therefore an integral part of the external activities taking place during the Presidency", says Sweden’s culture minister, Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth.

When Sweden takes over the Presidency on July 1, the occasion will be marked all over Europe.

There will be an opening ceremony in Stockholm, an outdoor concert in Brussels, the Benny Andersson Orchestra performing in London, Swedish film showings in Berlin and Paris and Swedish-Czech jazz in Prague, to name but a few examples. This continues with a great number of cultural events throughout the autumn.

Tomas Bokstad is project manager for the culture programme. He is proud to be able to present such a broad programme.

"We want to give the Swedish audience a picture of Europe and the European audience a picture of Sweden. But Sweden and the EU are also parts of a global context. This will be demonstrated by cultural exchange and cooperation with about 20 countries," Bokstad says.

The Swedish streetdance company Bounce tours the UK this autumn, Swedish literature will be promoted on a large scale in Edinburgh in August and in Nantes in November. The next generation of pop stars are being launched in Berlin and Paris and Swedish film will be shown in Belgrade in November. Artists such as Oumou Sangaré from Mali, the theatre guest performance ‘The Sound of Silence’ from Latvia, and the Turkish clarinettist Selim Sesler will all be coming to Sweden.

In December, the cultural programme will be concluded with two days of artistic performances, exhibitions and environment seminars in Malmo, in southern Sweden. This will form a natural transition to the UN climate negotiations on the other side of the strait, in Copenhagen, where the UN and the Swedish Presidency hope to successfully conclude an international climate agreement.