Kaliakra Cape is a place where you can find dolphins and most important, a unique landscape that combines both land and sea. Even an old legend marks once more the picturesque of the region, by telling the story of 40 Bulgarian girls that tight their hares together and jumped into the Black Sea, because they did not want to be captured by the Otomans.
So, when you think of this place you can expect of anything, excepting a football team, especially when the nearest cities are the small Balcik and Kavarna. Despite all of those, Kaliakra is the name of the football team from Kavarna. And it isn’t a very new one, as the ‘blue-whites’ are founded in 1922. Their nickname is more famous than the team itself: ‘Cagliari’ and all the squad have only Bulgarian players. Kaliakra Kavarna is named like this since 1957, but until 1980, the club did not play professional football, as in that year they managed to promote in the second tier, for the first time.
But this break through did not helped them too much and after three seasons, Kavarna felt down in the third division, a place that became their ‘home’ for the next 22 years. Finally, in 2005 they obtained the second promotion in the second tier and things got better and better. In 2008, the team reached the Bulgarian Cups’ semi-finals, where Cherno More Varna put them out. The same performance was achieved two seasons later, but this time it was doubled by the first ever promotion in the first league of the country. Despite being a big surprise, Kavarna did not relegate after the first season and maintained the city that has only 11.000 inhabitants in the top flight of Bulgaria.
More shocking is that the squad has a quite old arena, the Kavarna Stadium, built in 1967 and that can host almost a half of the cities’ population. The record attendance was of only 4.540 spectators at the game against Cherno More Varna, from the semi-finals of the Cup, on 16th of April 2008, year in which the pitch was also brought to a suitable stand and equipped with floodlights.
In the past season, the team’s post was sealed by Yordan Gospodinov, a goalkeeper that will remain in the history of Romanian football by being starter in the match that Concordia Chiajna won 2-1on 23rd of Spetember 2011, in front of FC Brasov, which was the first ever success for the team from Ilfov in the top division.
Mircea Dominte 