[IDEX 2025] New DC19 Pistol From Bulgaria

If you are a gun geek like me, the first thing you will see when you visit Bulgaria are Makarov pistols in the holsters of customs officials and border patrol officers. When I first crossed the Bulgarian border on my way from Istanbul, that really surprised me, even though it shouldn’t.

Bulgaria is a peaceful country, border police don’t get into gun fights every day, but I still was surprised Makarovs were not replaced by something else in all the years since the Berlin Wall fell.

Perhaps the same thought went through the mind of owners of DCI (Defense Capital Industry), the Bulgarian company that specializes in manufacturing machine guns and barrels. Last year they presented their new pistol called DC19 at the Bulgarian exhibition and now they brought it to the international expo for the first time.

DC19 was designed to become the new service handgun of the Bulgarian military and police and replace the Makarov. It is a striker-fired polymer frame pistol, with ambidextrous safety and slide release.

Designers clearly followed all the modern trends: there is a full size and a compact version, a variant with threaded barrel that has a red dot mounting interface. Every full size pistol comes with three magazines: two 18-round mags and one 19-round.

The version presented at IDEX 2025 has slide cuts, however, other DC19 pistols I’ve seen don’t have that questionable feature. Also, the version at IDEX did not have the most unusual feature DC19 has – horizontal chamber indicator on the left side of the slide.