7 ms·

Altimir: Life in the depopulated Bulgarian countryside [video]

66 points by oska 8y ago

Jughashvili 8y ago
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.
- ido 8y ago
  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.
- peshooo 8y ago
  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.
patrickg_zill 8y ago
It's interesting, but I found myself wondering if you could find similar places in the USA these days, also ...
- itronitron 8y ago
  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.
- bitL 8y ago
  Appalachia...
- gabbygab 8y ago
  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.
- dkjshfajskdfa 8y ago
  There are lots of places like this in the rural south and midwest. Seen plenty first hand.
- thedailymail 8y ago
  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/ https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/
throwaway8342 8y ago
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.
- rienbdj 8y ago
  If communism hadn’t collapsed, would these places be better? It’s a fair question, since you cannot keep things in stasis.
- kgwgk 8y ago
  > the majority of people were content Definitely they couldn’t complain. (By the way, you meant “capital”, not “capitol”.)
- witty_user_name 8y ago
  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.
- jacobush 8y ago
chimen 8y ago
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-familie-din-constanta-hotii-din-bulgaria-i-au-lasat-fara-masina-video http://www.reporterntv.ro/stire/vacanta-de-cosmar-pentru-o-f... - https://www.romaniatv.net/romani-lasati-fara-masini-in-timp-ce-se-aflau-in-vacanta-in-bulgaria_341849.html https://www.romaniatv.net/romani-lasati-fara-masini-in-timp-... - https://www.promotor.ro/opinii/george-buhnici-despre-problema-cu-masini-furate-in-bulgaria-6113082 https://www.promotor.ro/opinii/george-buhnici-despre-problem... - https://www.digi24.ro/stiri/actualitate/social/romani-ramasi-fara-masina-in-bulgaria-le-a-fost-furata-din-parcarea-hotelului-787526 https://www.digi24.ro/stiri/actualitate/social/romani-ramasi... - https://movafaq.wordpress.com/2017/02/10/romanian-cars-bulgaria-ro/ https://movafaq.wordpress.com/2017/02/10/romanian-cars-bulga... - https://www.b1.ro/stiri/auto/varna-hoti-romani-furati-in-bulgaria-221797.html https://www.b1.ro/stiri/auto/varna-hoti-romani-furati-in-bul... - https://www.libertatea.ro/stiri/masini-furate-in-bulgaria-1751574 https://www.libertatea.ro/stiri/masini-furate-in-bulgaria-17... - https://stirileprotv.ro/stiri/actualitate/vacanta-in-bulgaria-s-a-transformat-intr-un-cosmar-pentru-o-familie-din-constanta-cum-au-ramas-fara-masina-in-bansko.html https://stirileprotv.ro/stiri/actualitate/vacanta-in-bulgari... - https://observator.tv/social/vacanta-la-schi-in-bulgaria-a-lasat-o-familie-din-constanta-fara-masina-de-30-de-mii-euro-200016.html https://observator.tv/social/vacanta-la-schi-in-bulgaria-a-l... - http://www.bmwclub.ro/forums/topic/171395-bmw-furat-in-bulgaria/ http://www.bmwclub.ro/forums/topic/171395-bmw-furat-in-bulga... I can go on but there's no point.
zokier 8y ago
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").
- emptyfile 8y ago
  It's really not especially weird. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ageing_of_Europe 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.
  - ataturk 8y ago
    The same thing is happening in the US. The big cities eat everything up, dominate politically, and basically don't care what happens to anyone else. We need county-based voting, not population based voting in order to turn this around.
growlist 8y ago
Perhaps it's actually better in environmental terms to concentrate development in fewer places?
Halluxfboy009 8y ago
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?
Chico11Kidlet 8y ago
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.
- chewyland 8y ago
  It actually is the world's fastest shrinking country due to facts that it is.
  - HNLurker2 8y ago
    https://www.populationpyramid.net/bulgaria/2029/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/bulgaria/2029/ Yes see context See Denmark for comparasion: https://www.populationpyramid.net/denmark/2029/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/denmark/2029/
npace12 8y ago
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.
- nikolay 8y ago
  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.
  - londons_explore 8y ago
    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.
    - nikolay 8y ago
      It makes sense.
wowxp 8y ago
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.

66 points by oska 8y ago

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.

ido 8y ago
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.
peshooo 8y ago
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.

patrickg_zill 8y ago

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

itronitron 8y ago
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.
bitL 8y ago
Appalachia...
gabbygab 8y ago
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.
dkjshfajskdfa 8y ago
There are lots of places like this in the rural south and midwest. Seen plenty first hand.
thedailymail 8y ago
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/ https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/

throwaway8342 8y ago

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.

rienbdj 8y ago
If communism hadn’t collapsed, would these places be better? It’s a fair question, since you cannot keep things in stasis.
kgwgk 8y ago
> the majority of people were content Definitely they couldn’t complain. (By the way, you meant “capital”, not “capitol”.)
witty_user_name 8y ago
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.
jacobush 8y ago

chimen 8y ago

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-familie-din-constanta-hotii-din-bulgaria-i-au-lasat-fara-masina-video http://www.reporterntv.ro/stire/vacanta-de-cosmar-pentru-o-f... - https://www.romaniatv.net/romani-lasati-fara-masini-in-timp-ce-se-aflau-in-vacanta-in-bulgaria_341849.html https://www.romaniatv.net/romani-lasati-fara-masini-in-timp-... - https://www.promotor.ro/opinii/george-buhnici-despre-problema-cu-masini-furate-in-bulgaria-6113082 https://www.promotor.ro/opinii/george-buhnici-despre-problem... - https://www.digi24.ro/stiri/actualitate/social/romani-ramasi-fara-masina-in-bulgaria-le-a-fost-furata-din-parcarea-hotelului-787526 https://www.digi24.ro/stiri/actualitate/social/romani-ramasi... - https://movafaq.wordpress.com/2017/02/10/romanian-cars-bulgaria-ro/ https://movafaq.wordpress.com/2017/02/10/romanian-cars-bulga... - https://www.b1.ro/stiri/auto/varna-hoti-romani-furati-in-bulgaria-221797.html https://www.b1.ro/stiri/auto/varna-hoti-romani-furati-in-bul... - https://www.libertatea.ro/stiri/masini-furate-in-bulgaria-1751574 https://www.libertatea.ro/stiri/masini-furate-in-bulgaria-17... - https://stirileprotv.ro/stiri/actualitate/vacanta-in-bulgaria-s-a-transformat-intr-un-cosmar-pentru-o-familie-din-constanta-cum-au-ramas-fara-masina-in-bansko.html https://stirileprotv.ro/stiri/actualitate/vacanta-in-bulgari... - https://observator.tv/social/vacanta-la-schi-in-bulgaria-a-lasat-o-familie-din-constanta-fara-masina-de-30-de-mii-euro-200016.html https://observator.tv/social/vacanta-la-schi-in-bulgaria-a-l... - http://www.bmwclub.ro/forums/topic/171395-bmw-furat-in-bulgaria/ http://www.bmwclub.ro/forums/topic/171395-bmw-furat-in-bulga... I can go on but there's no point.

zokier 8y ago

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").

emptyfile 8y ago
It's really not especially weird. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ageing_of_Europe 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.
- ataturk 8y ago
  The same thing is happening in the US. The big cities eat everything up, dominate politically, and basically don't care what happens to anyone else. We need county-based voting, not population based voting in order to turn this around.

growlist 8y ago

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

Halluxfboy009 8y ago

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?

Chico11Kidlet 8y ago

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.

chewyland 8y ago
It actually is the world's fastest shrinking country due to facts that it is.
- HNLurker2 8y ago
  https://www.populationpyramid.net/bulgaria/2029/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/bulgaria/2029/ Yes see context See Denmark for comparasion: https://www.populationpyramid.net/denmark/2029/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/denmark/2029/

npace12 8y ago

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.

nikolay 8y ago
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.
- londons_explore 8y ago
  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.
  - nikolay 8y ago
    It makes sense.

wowxp 8y ago

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.