Emil Tsenov - Roman Fictional Author

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.

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