Числата - Bulgaria's public data in one place
Every time I needed a simple number about Bulgaria - the average wage in Варна, how many people live in some municipality, how a village voted in 1997 - I went through the same ritual: find the right page on the NSI site, download an Excel table (or worse, a PDF), figure out which of the forty sheets I need and copy the numbers out by hand. The data is public and it's actually good. The way it's served is not.
So I did what any reasonable person with a free weekend (and then quite a few more) would do and built a site around it.
chislata.com ("the numbers") gathers the public data of Bulgaria in one place: wages by region, economic activity and occupation (NSI, NOI), population and vital statistics by municipality, incomes and prices, every parliamentary and presidential election since 1991 down to the polling section (CIK), and a pile of Eurostat series so you can compare with the rest of the EU. Everything is mapped onto the same codes for regions, municipalities and activities, so you can finally put things next to each other.
A few things I'm pleased with:
- It's a static site. A handful of Python scripts fetch the sources every night, check them, build the HTML, SVG charts and CSV/JSON files, and publish only if the tests pass. If something upstream breaks, the site simply keeps yesterday's version. No JavaScript, except on the chart builder page, which you can skip entirely.
- Every number says where it came from and when it was fetched. The official source is linked on every page.
- Revisions are kept. When a number gets quietly corrected upstream, you can see what it used to be.
- There's an API (JSON or CSV, a free key gets you 100 requests a day) and an MCP server, so you can point Claude or whatever assistant you prefer at it and just ask, without copying anything.
It's in Bulgarian only, and that's on purpose - it's about Bulgaria, for people in Bulgaria. It is not affiliated with NSI, NOI, CIK or Eurostat and it is not an official source, hence the links.
If you find a wrong number, a dataset I've missed, or just want to tell me it's ugly, write to contact@chislata.com.
P.S. Yes, there's a paid tier for the API (5 € a month) for people who need more than 100 requests a day. The site itself is free and will stay free. Servers, sadly, are not.