Did Baba Vanga predict the war between Israel and Iran, US intervention, missiles and the closure of airspace? Last week, similar headlines appeared on the Internet, and articles before that reflected on her "predictions for 2026", which included the start of World War III and humanity's first contact with aliens, writes "The Guardian".
Such claims are piqued the interest of Internet users, and on this occasion Bulgarians have warned that many of the prophecies attributed to Vanga were probably never uttered by her. Instead, she has become a powerful avatar used for everything from sensational clickbait to propagating pro-Russian narratives.
"This is absurd," said Ivan Dramov of the "Baba Vanga" Foundation, who also listed false claims - spread on TikTok, YouTube and in publications ranging from British tabloids to Albanian state media - about Vanga's visions of nuclear catastrophe or world wars.
"Absolute lies have been told about this holy woman," said Dramov, who added that Vanga was mainly concerned with people's health problems, not with impending cataclysms in the world.
Dramov recalled that Baba Vanga found herself in the spotlight during World War II, when people began visiting her to find out if their loved ones would return from front.
He pointed out that Vanga's statements are often narrowly focused on the lives of those who come to see her, as well as their relatives. "She tells people which doctor to go to, what actions to take, but nothing more", Ivan Dramov also emphasized.
In 2024, researchers from the University of Texas at Austin noted that Russians were among those who readily embraced Vanga, who had become "one of the most prominent media for "truth" in the Russian imagination of the 20th and 21st centuries".
Today, her name and her alleged prophecies are often mentioned in Russia, sometimes to support political narratives linked to the Kremlin.
The result is a combination with far-reaching impact: a 2024 report on disinformation by the media organization BIRN Albania, which examined 36 Albanian publications over the course of a year, found at least a dozen articles, most of which cited Russian media, in which Vanga's predictions are "often used by conspiratorial and disinformation media to reinforce certain narratives against NATO and the EU".
Viktoria Vitanova-Kerber, a doctoral student and research fellow at the Department of Global Christianity and Interreligious Theology at the University of Fribourg, said that "the eager embrace of Vanga by the Russians refutes the fact that it is unlikely that the Bulgarian woman said anything - at least not explicitly - about Russia".
Instead, many of the predictions attributed to Vanga - from the fall of the Soviet Union to visions of a glorious future for Russia - can be traced back to the Russian writer Valentin Sidorov, who claims to have met with Vanga in the 1970s.
"However, there are no records of these meetings, which would allow Sidorov to freely interpret or even interpret what Vanga said or did not say about Russia," explained Vitanova-Kerber.
She adds that "some of his writings from the early 1990s suggest that Vanga predicted the future supremacy of Russia over the United States - a narrative that is well accepted even today. Russia."
Sidorov's work has given rise to a new generation of prominent so-called Vanga experts in Russia, many of whom have gained prominence in the past 10 years, even as they have fabricated facts or distorted scarce historical resources to suit their own political views or interests, she said.
Victoria Vitanova-Kerber added that these experts "exaggerated, supplemented and rethought the information until it fit into the dominant narratives of today's Russian identity politics: national greatness, anti-Westernism and the preservation of the "traditional values" of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, in contrast to the "rotten" liberal values of the "West".
The result was a discourse about Vanga - among many circulating in Russia today - that stands out for its conspiratorial, anti-Western slant and seeks to justify events such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine. "This ambiguity of historical facts, combined with the spiritual authority that Vanga still has in Russia - and not only there - makes her a convenient tool of political propaganda," Vitanova-Kerber further explained.
The view was also shared by researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, who noted that Vanga's power and appeal were not limited to her role as a medium for the dead or her alleged ability to see the future. "Instead, it lies in the fact that she is a flexible medium whose name and voice can be used for different purposes," they said.
The seemingly endless stream of prophecies attributed to Vanga is surprising, considering that no one recorded Vanga while she was alive, and the mystic left no written records, said Zhenya Kostadinova, a Bulgarian author whose books about Vanga have been translated into several languages.
"Everyone puts words in her mouth that she never said," she stressed, adding that "since her authority as a prophetess is like that of Nostradamus, hundreds of people are tempted to speak on her behalf."
In one book, Kostadinova describes Vanga's prophecies as somewhere between "truth and myth," noting, that they have usually been retold and interpreted to some extent.
However, many seem to be inclined to spread false, sensational claims about what Vanga said during her lifetime, Kostadinova also pointed out.
"If you ask me, who hasn't taken advantage of Vanga's name for their own purposes? Every propaganda uses it to broadcast its own suggestions, those that please it, in order to reach the masses," the writer pointed out.
According to Ivan Dramov, in a sense this was a hint about the future that Vanga foresaw. In 1989, as the communist regime in Bulgaria collapsed, Vanga watched as her image and name began to be used to sell everything from clothes to handkerchiefs.
Although Vanga never mentioned the possibility of disinformation and propaganda being added to the list, "she generally stated that her name would be misused," he explained.