Varna Maritime University –  the Bulgarian Maritime University . Since its foundation in 1881, its main objective has been to develop highly qualified leaders for the Bulgarian Navy and the maritime industry, to prepare them for the challenges of the transforming Navy and the rapidly changing sector of the global maritime economy.In 1904, it was upgraded to a secondary technical school, training technical staff for the naval forces and civilian shipping, as well as for industry, railways, coal mines, power stations, etc. The first effort to train naval officers for naval forces and civilian shipping was in 1914, and in 1942 the school was re-profiled into Maritime Academy, training deck officers and electromechanics. In 1949 it was renamed “Nikola Vaptsarov Higher Maritime Academy” after the name of the famous Bulgarian poet and revolutionary, a graduate of the Higher Maritime Academy of Varna. In 1960, when Bulgaria became a member of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the Maritime Academy in Varna became a world-class higher education institution (HEI), and in 1953 it began to train foreign students, and by 1993 students from 12 different countries were trained for both Army and Merchant Marine. In 1974, the Academy has modernized its old equipment. In 1986 the Planetarium (the biggest one in the Balkans) was launched, training students to navigateby the stars.