Maritza 11 (1979)

Maritza 11
 
First Year of production:  1971 approx.
 
Company:  Typewriters Works, Plovdiv, Bulgaria
 
Maritza, the best known Bulgarian typewriter brand name, comes from the deep river which runs through Plovdiv, the second largest city in Bulgaria, where the typewriters were made.
 
What clouds Bulgarian typewriter history and manufacture is, of course, the Iron Curtain, behind which Bulgaria developed from a largely agricultural-based economy to one based on intense industry – all the while away from the prying eyes of the Western world. 
 
Bulgaria’s intensive industrial development picked up pace with major industrial construction from 1966 to 1975, during the Fifth and Sixth stages of a series of Five-Year Plans which started in 1949.
 
The Bulgarian Communist Government ploughed an enormous amount of money into building a typewriter factory in Plovdiv in 1971.
 
Later changes swept in by the fall of Communism led to a sharp drop in industrial and agricultural production, and ultimately an economic collapse in 1997. The Plovdiv Typewriters Works was among those businesses hit hard.
 
By that time the Typewriters Works in Plovdiv had produced a number of portable typewriters, starting with the Maritsa 11 and 21 (a Princess 300 clone, complete with ribbon colour selector and touch control switches) and going through to what appear to be more independent designs, for the Maritsa 12, 22, 30 and 300 (although the last two are believed to be originally a Japanese design, from Silver-Seiko) and the Hebros 1300F.