Altimir: Life in the depopulated Bulgarian countryside [video] | Hacker News Reader

Altimir: Life in the depopulated Bulgarian countryside [video]

youtube.com

66 pointsoska39 comments

Very bored with "documentaries" showing Bulgaria as under developed country with people living in villages, thinking it will be "original". 74% of the population is in urban areas, so showing this village with no roads is really trivial. If you wanted to look into the problem you should have filmed the young people who are living the country and why. Also why you present content which is a few years old without specifying that?

1. It's NOT the world's fastest shrinking country 2. Filming a god-forgotten village located in the poorest region of certain country does not depict anything. It's like saying that the ghetto part of Detroit depicts America.

It actually is the world's fastest shrinking country due to facts that it is.

https://www.populationpyramid.net/bulgaria/2029/ Yes see context

See Denmark for comparasion: https://www.populationpyramid.net/denmark/2029/

As bulgarin I don't see anything sad in this video. This happens everywhere in the world, everyone is going to big cities for better perspectives. In some countries the depopulation of rural areas is happening faster. It's how the world works nowadays.

I grew up in Bulgaria in the 90's and these villages were quite derelict back then as well. During summer break, a lot of parents used to send their kids to their grandparents for weeks/months. I wasn't one of them and I remember being very bored as all my friends would go to "selo" (village)

Now, as a parent living in the US, I can't imagine ever sending my kids to places like these but I wonder what they'd be missing out on development-wise. The villages were great, vast playgrounds.

I go back to Bulgaria every summer exactly because I want my kids to spend time in places like Altimir, not rot in toxic urban environments in the US. In fact, my kids spend their time in a much smaller village. They are around farm animals, they roam free all day long unsupervised and only come back when they are hungry, i.e. twice a day. My only worry is the ticks, but so far, we've been lucky, plus, I have Tetracycline always handy.

Where human populations are lower, there are fewer ticks that bite humans.

Bits of woodland near cities and also with wild animals are where you should be most worried.

It makes sense.

As much as the story pains me as Bulgarian, I'd like to provide some more facts rather than emotions.

Before the end of communist rule in Bulgaria everything was distributed rather evenly across the country and believe it or not the majority of people were content, there was work and some pay and most people got the same. The exceptions were not visible. After this the country "reset" and places with critical mass of well-educated people did well and the rest not. This is one of the latter ones. It had the bad luck to be close enough to the capitol (50-100km) which basically has zero unemployment rate and good salaries. It is nevertheless not so well connected so you can't easily commute there to work. The population is not enough to have critical mass to attract good investments. There are no universities in this part. Then Bulgaria joined EU and it became even easier to have better life quickly. It's one of the negative effects of globalization if you are not on the winning side.

In contrast, there are places in Bulgaria that are doing great. Plovdiv sports 150+ factories with Magna, Airbus, Liebherr and is currently the European Cultural Capitol. In Sofia you can find pretty much any IT company - HP, IBM, Paysafe, SAP, etc.

If communism hadn’t collapsed, would these places be better? It’s a fair question, since you cannot keep things in stasis.

> the majority of people were content

Definitely they couldn’t complain.

(By the way, you meant “capital”, not “capitol”.)

As a westerner living here the stand out issue was the utterly random placement of industry.

All of the factories were placed to provide employment. When capitalism took over the ridiculous placement of them (far from raw goods & far from distribution) meant they all failed and died.

Bulgaria could never be considered a true capitalist country anyway. There is still no rule of law and the mafia choke every last stotinki from the state and the EU.

Came to say basically what you said. The communist bloc/empire collapsed and was places like these were washed away in the tide of globalization. The same happened in the rest of Europe, but it was especially brutal in the Warsaw bloc. The more capitalist countries were better prepared to handle globalization.

Joining EU had this effect on my country as well (Romania). There are entire villages (I lived in one of them for 6 years and I can make a difference) where just old people can be found. The young left for other countries (mostly UK and Italy) and to the bigger cities but the latter did so because, for some reason, they couldn't find anything abroad.

What you're left with is nothing but old people who are easily manipulated into voting for whoever promises a bigger pension - sad but true, they dictate the future by majority. It's been years since we're fighting corruption at the highest level without success.

Bulgaria is even scarier than that. We travel to or through Bulgaria almost each year (going to their beaches or to Turkey) and we happen to go through huge areas without seeing people at all. Often times, when stopping for gas (true story, happened to us last year), you encounter really shady people that simply look for trouble - especially with the ladies. In one occasion we stopped for more than 30 mins and the individuals started "gathering up" and doing whatever they can to spark a fight with us.

I have friends who traveled at night and swear to not do it again. They encountered the same type of individuals that were cutting trees onto the road to prevent you from going any further and try to rob people. We have a rule, never travel Bulgaria alone, even if you're alone at the border you need to find someone else going to the same direction and go in packs.

Sad to see a country go down like that. We have witnessed this country getting worse and worse each year. Also, they seem to be even more corrupt than us, we prepare batches of 10 euros for police because we know they will stop us, we just get the paper out of the windows, salute and go...that's all they want.

I'm curious if other Bulgarians are aware of the difficulties we have to deal with while traveling in their country.

Edit: I see some folks complain that I'm fabricating. I own a tourism small business and we always warn people of 2 things when doing Bulgaria:

1 - Never park your car where it's not being guarded, filmed, monitored (lots of cases with people left without their vehicle) 2 - Never stop at night on the road (if you can)

Romanian journalism (requires translation). The internet is filled:

- http://www.reporterntv.ro/stire/vacanta-de-cosmar-pentru-o-f...

- https://www.romaniatv.net/romani-lasati-fara-masini-in-timp-...

- https://www.promotor.ro/opinii/george-buhnici-despre-problem...

- https://www.digi24.ro/stiri/actualitate/social/romani-ramasi...

- https://movafaq.wordpress.com/2017/02/10/romanian-cars-bulga...

- https://www.b1.ro/stiri/auto/varna-hoti-romani-furati-in-bul...

- https://www.libertatea.ro/stiri/masini-furate-in-bulgaria-17...

- https://stirileprotv.ro/stiri/actualitate/vacanta-in-bulgari...

- https://observator.tv/social/vacanta-la-schi-in-bulgaria-a-l...

- http://www.bmwclub.ro/forums/topic/171395-bmw-furat-in-bulga...

I can go on but there's no point.

I have visited over 80 Bulgarian towns and villages in my campervan over the last 6 years and have never seen anything what you are describing.

Sure, lots of empty towns, plenty of poverty and old people but did ever feel fear or see any violence, not once.

BTW, I'm just a random friendly Canadian who talks with everyone.

I'm from Bulgaria. The stuff in OP's post definitely happens and there are more than enough areas like what he describes. Generally the area around Sofia/Plovdiv is civilized (South-West quadrant). But the South-East is depopulated and if he's going from Romania to Turkey, he'll be passing through the rougher parts of the countryside. I wonder if Google Maps or similar made him take a route off the highway as well. Don't do that. 100% on point about the road police.

I wouldn't blame the EU for these developments though, it's the natural consequence of how our country developed post-Soviet rule. I also can't blame the old people for voting how they do, for them it's life or death. At least the EU can keep some check on the corruption, without them we'd be a de-facto Russian vassal and there's no corruption like Russian oligarch corruption.

A few years ago I traveled solo through Bulgaria for a few days from Serbia to Greece on a 50cc Yamaha DT50R, avoiding major roads (due to small engine and it's just fun - spent a month going from Marseille to Istanbul - loved all the ex-yugoslav countries).

Never noticed anything dangerous while traveling in Bulgaria, although Sofia has that normal big city be-careful feel to it. No bribes required either.

Obviously only a few days and not a local and maybe I didn't see the rough areas...

Edit: obviously there is danger throughout many parts of Europe. I just wanted to say that travelling solo through mountainous roads on a 50cc motorbike and often staying in hick areas, I felt welcome. Then again: I wasn't in a campervan or riding a BMW; I am not from a usually hated country; YMMV.

Did you also travel through the night?

After dark - yes. Very late at night - no.

Ditto, I spent three weeks there last year travelling the hinterlands - everywhere from the Romanian border to the Turkish border, and from Sofia to the Black Sea - on back roads for the most part.

At no point did I feel unsafe - and I drove at night, walked through cities at night, parked my shiny hire car wherever.

We did see plenty of depopulated rural towns and villages, but there seems to be a substantial push into ecotourism, and we met several young couples who had returned to renovate homes in their home villages. Got chatting to plenty of older locals, too - they speak German, the young folks English. Very warm, and welcoming, everywhere we met people.

We did find that almost every museum and historic site had to be unlocked for us, as we were usually the only people at any of them - all the tourists were at Sveti Blas, lying on the beach.

I don’t know - maybe it’s just a relative scale thing - I would count walking through Sao Paolo at night as somewhat sketchy, but not the instant death sentence that people seem to think it is, for instance.

Just because it’s covered heavily in the media doesn’t mean it’s commonplace.

Avoiding the major roads/popular routes is an effective means of avoiding these types of problems. The criminals aren't interested in setting up an overnight road-block robbery/car-jacking where zero wealthy targets pass through.

I also think people in general tend to disproportionately exaggerate risks relative to the actual probabilities. Something exceptionally brazen and bad happens a few times making it into the news and now it's certain to happen to you should you go there.

Regardless though, if an alternative exists with 100% fewer reports of such problems, it's probably a safer choice relatively speaking.

But in my limited experience I have never found a "dangerous" place to be anywhere near as dangerous as its reputation described.

I've lived here for a couple of years and traveled most of the country. I've never seen anything like you describe.

There are enough challenges for this little country without the need to fabricate more of them.

Same happened to Croatia. From 2013. when we joined EU, Croatia lost at least 140000 people, which is about 3,3% of population, but unlike Bulgaria, I can say that Croatia is a really safe country.

Croatia is really a sight. Very nice place. On the expensive side though.

I visited (from Germany) last summer & it seemed very reasonably priced to me. Guess it depends on expectations & context!

By the way your article would suggest that car theft is a significantly larger problem in Romania than BG.

From https://movafaq.wordpress.com/2017/02/10/romanian-cars-bulga...

> In 2012 (the last year for which data are available) vehicle thefts in Bulgaria rose to 0.4 per 1,000 people in the population ... For Romania, the number is 1.6 per 1000 people

It's interesting, but I found myself wondering if you could find similar places in the USA these days, also ...

Absolutely... neighborhoods, towns, and roads surrounding former major industrial centers (or mining towns), and occasionally the city itself. By land area, a lot of the US is like this, you just have to do a lot of driving if you are on the coasts, or fly to a small airport and drive to a different small airport.

Appalachia...

We've had ghost villages since colonial days ( where native americans chased out of their villages or wiped out ) before being repopulated with european settlers, ghost towns from countless boom and bust cycles ( fur, timber, oil, gold, etc and of course the great depression ) and most recently the rust belt which is still ongoing problem.

There are lots of places like this in the rural south and midwest. Seen plenty first hand.

Not the US, but much of the countryside in Japan is undergoing similar demographic and economic collapse. Most visitors stick to areas accessible from airports, trunk roads and shinkansen lines, so it hasn't gotten so much international attention. But if you rent a car and drive into the mountainous interior, or outlying regions like Shikoku, you'll find plenty of emptying, aging villages, adbandoned stores and factories and return-to-the-state-of-nature decay. Richard Hendy's blog, Spike Japan, had many well-researched and beautifully written posts on this phenomenon, unfortunately he stopped updating a few years ago. https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/

I was reading on the history of Bulgaria from wikipedia, and came across this curious snippet:

> Facing declining birth rates among the ethnic Bulgarian majority, in 1984 Zhivkov's government forced the minority ethnic Turks to adopt Slavic names in an attempt to erase their identity and assimilate them

So the population decline is not just some recent post-communist depression, but something more deeply ingrained in the society. This is especially weird as it seems the nation was doing relatively well for an underdeveloped communist country in the 80s ("per capita GDP quadrupled by the 1980s").

It's really not especially weird.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ageing_of_Europe

Bulgaria and Romania experienced extreme level of emigration but almost every country in Europe is dying out. The countryside in these countries is depopulated and dead, in a country like the UK or France it is merely grim and miserable.

Perhaps it's actually better in environmental terms to concentrate development in fewer places?

That's a good example of the results of the healing powers of capitalism, that the western propaganda talked so much about, when they were collapsing the Soviet Union.

You think the Soviet Union needed help collapsing? It was mostly doing that on their own, Reagan et al just sped up the process a bit.

And yours is a good example of a troll comment. Living in Bulgaria now is a lot better in almost every way compared to the communist times.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com