This book is based on a collection of papers presented at a workshop entitled ‘The “Urban” and “Rural” in Present-Day Bulgaria’, which took place at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, on 29 and 30 May 2008. The aim of the workshop was to investigate urban-rural transformations in Bulgaria after the end of socialism. The workshop's key idea was to focus on how the urban and rural have been reconfigured, in socioeconomic as well as political, ideological and cultural terms. The participants were practically all anthropologists, except for one human geographer and one sociologist, and most attention was given to rural contexts. One overarching theme crystallized: that of globalization in the Bulgarian countryside. As all case studies presented at the workshop showed, it is no longer possible to speak of ‘traditional’ Bulgarian villages as they have transformed into ‘global villages’ — that is, they are directly affected by global forces and influences. Almost all the papers that were presented during the workshop have been included in the present volume, apart from two, which were published elsewhere or did not fit the overall concept of the volume. I would like to thank Dr Iliya Nedin, who co-organized the event and was involved at the early stages of editing this volume.