CET ON-LINE* 27- May -96
Monday, May 27, 1996 Volume 1, Issue 355
Ecstatic royalists mobbed Bulgaria's King Simeon II as he toured Sofia's lavish
Orthodox churches on Sunday, the second day of his triumphant return from 50
years of exile. Up to half a million people turned out on Saturday with flags,
banners and flowers to welcome Simeon, a Madrid business consultant, and his
Spanish aristocrat wife Margarita. Local journalists said the hordes dwarfed
even the pro-democracy demonstrations that overthrew the communist dictator
Todor Zhivkov in 1989. Sunday's newspapers were emblazoned with
photographs of Simeon weeping with joy and Bulgarians climbing atop buses
and trams to catch a glimpsem of the lean, balding monarch, who fled
Bulgaria as a child in 1946 after the Soviet Red Army installed a puppet
communist regime.
