Roman
History Blog - Featured Author
Emil Tsenov - Roman Fictional Author
Tells the fictional story of the
real Roman empress Cornelia Super
I was born in 1968 in
Blagoevgrad,
Bulgaria. I currently live in Vienna, Austria, where I work and
teach in the
areas of Marketing and Strategy. I have an M.A. in English
Language and
Literature from Sofia University and an MBA from INSEAD, France.
My passion is
to observe the relationships between people and to analyze the
surrounding
world in order to understand it better.
Author Emil Tsenov
My long-standing
interest in Roman
history and numismatics is reflected in this novel, which is my
second book
after the short stories collection Gods of The City (2018,
published in
Bulgarian). I started
collecting Roman coins at the age of
10. The stories behind every coin – the lives of the emperors
and empresses in
whose name they were struck, the events and deities depicted
of the reverses – continue
to fascinate me. I am particularly interested in the story of
Roman provinces
on the Balkans, and “Cornelia” addresses the period of the 3rd
century CE in that region. The story in the book was inspired
by a true event.
In the 1980s a friend of mine, also a coin collector, was
offered an
antoninianus of the empress Cornelia Supera, the wife of the
emperor
Aemilianus, in an excellent condition. It turned out to be a
fake. I then
started thinking “What if someone found a real gold coin of
Cornelia Supera?
And what if she could tell us her own story? What kind of
woman was she?” This
is how the whole story unravelled and crystallized in the plot of “Cornelia”.
In 2012 treasure-hunters stumble upon an
exceptional find near the town
of Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria – the tomb of the Roman Empress
Cornelia Supera, who
remains hitherto almost unknown to history. What they find next
to her remains
will entangle in a complex knot the destinies of people from
different
countries and of different social status. Cornelia’s inheritance
is desired by
American millionaires, English lords and Bulgarian Mafia bosses.
At the center
of all events is Alex, a professor at a local university, whose
big passion are
ancient coins. While chasing the unique aureus struck in the
name of the
Empress, he will have to ask himself many difficult questions
and find the
answers.
After eighteen centuries of oblivion,
Cornelia finds a way to tell her
story and to reveal an extraordinary woman – intelligent and
with the ambition
to change history. Together with her husband, the Emperor
Aemilius Aemilianus,
she will go through all stages of ascent and fall to sink into
the mist of time
and to again appear triumphantly from it. Cornelia’s story will
shake our
understanding of the history of Rome and its Balkan provinces in
the 3rd
century CE.
You can buy it as an eBook (epub, mobi, pdf)
at www.tsenovbooks.com/en,
where you can
also learn more about the book and read the first chapters.
“Cornelia” is
also available as an eBook on Amazon.
Amazon.com (USD)
--> https://www.amazon.com/dp/
Amazon.de (EUR)
--> https://www.amazon.de/dp/
Amazon.co.uk (GBP) --> https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/
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History Website http://romanancienthistory.blogspot.com/
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© 2021 David Lee