The history of the Faculty of Classical and Modern Philology is an integral part of the history of Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. The founding of the departments and degree programmes that make up the Faculty today dates back in the 1920s within the Faculty of History and Philology, the first Faculty of the University. In 1950 the Faculty of History and Philology split into the Faculty of Philosophy and History and the Faculty of Philology. The Faculty of Philology split in 1956 into two new faculties: the Faculty of Slavic Studies and the Faculty of Western Languages, which was renamed in 1979 to Faculty of Classical and Modern Philology.

Today, the Faculty with its 11 departments and 19 degree programmes, stands out as the largest faculty of Sofia University. In addition to the Departments of Classical Studies, Romance Studies, Germanic and Scandinavian Studies, British and American Studies, Spanish and Portuguese Studies, there are also the Departments of Methodology of Foreign Language Teaching and the Department of Modern Languages (for students with other majors), as well as the Departments of Arabic and Semitic Studies,Turkic and Altaic Studies, Studies of the Classical Еast, and the Department of East-Asian Studies. The Faculty offers language courses for the general public throughout the whole year.

The Faculty of Classical and Modern Philology is a unique centre for non-Slavic languages, literatures and cultures. The staff includes 216 full-time and 300 part-time lecturers. They cover a wide range of research and applied areas starting from fundamental research in the areas of the respective languages, literatures and cultures, through applied linguistics (dictionaries, textbooks, translations, etc.) to contrastive studies in the fields of language, literature and culture. Areas of research also include Bulgarian history, epigraphy and Thracian Studies. The research of staff members is inseparable from their teaching, which contributes to the high quality of the Faculty’s graduates and fully corresponds to the increasing requirements of both students and society at large.