Plovdiv canal in the country. In that period, Plovdiv became the birthplace of Bulgaria's movement for democratic reform, which by 1989 had garnered enough support to enter government. Plovdiv has hosted specialized exhibitions of the World's Fair in 1981, 1985, and 1991. The population by permanent address for the municipality of Plovdiv for 2007 is 380,682, which makes it the second in population in the nation. According to the data of the National Institute of Statistics (NSI), the people who actually live in Plovdiv are 346,790. According to the 2012 census, 339,077 live within the city limits and 403,153 in the
Plovdiv is the second or the third-largest cosmopolitan city inhabited by Bulgarians, after Sofia and possibly Varna. According to the 2001 census, out of a population of 338,224 inhabitants, the Bulgarians numbered 302,858 (90%). Stolipinovo in Plovdiv is the largest Roma neighbourhood in the Balkans, having a population of around 20,000 alone; further Roma ghettos are Hadji Hassan Mahala and Sheker Mahala. Therefore, the census number is a deflation of the number of Roma people, and they are most likely the second-largest group after the Bulgarians, most of all because the Muslim Roma in Plovdiv claim to be of Turkish ethnicity