Valya Balkanska is a traditional Bulgarian music singer from the Rodophe mountains in Southern Bulgaria. Valya was born in 1942 in Arda, a very small village from Smolyan province in the Rodophe mountains and is well-known in Bulgaria and in Western countries.
Since her childhood, Balkanska has been singing and writing Bulgarian traditional folk music. This is one of the genre’s main exponents in the country and the Balkan Peninsula.
One curious fact about Vanya Balkanska is that she has one of her songs sent to outer space. In the decade of the 70s, NASA launched a program in which planet Earth would send a message to outer space. A selection of 90 minutes of music was made by Carl Sagan and Vanya Balkanska’s song “Izlel ye Delyo Haydutin” was selected as part of this 90-minute music selection.