FORUM

According to a public opinion survey on www.opendata.bg conducted by the Open Society Institute-Sofia, in May 2012, more than half of the Bulgarians consider the present conditions in the country "unbearable." A mere six percent say they feel satisfied. The pessimists who think the situation has deteriorated make up 13 percent, a decrease of 2 percent compared to 2011. This, however, does spell more happiness, but can be explained with the fact that a higher 32 percent of those interviewed say that in 2012 things are as bad as they were the previous year.

Health and social issues, education and culture, integration of minorities, ecological and human rights problems: NGOs could bring a lot of positive change to crisis-struck and austerity-crippled Bulgaria, but they are failing to deliver. The NGO sector in Bulgaria is struggling to survive and is in a state of severe internal crisis, as shown by the annual report of the non-government sector of USAID, or the United States Agency for International Development.

Ever since Bulgaria gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1878 the relationship between the Christian majority and the sizeable Muslim minority (an estimated 1 million in 2012) has been, at best, controversial. Immediately after independence Bulgarian sentiments towards those Turks who had stayed behind in Bulgarian territory was mainly tolerant. However, various campaigns throughout the years leading to the Second World War were aimed at "Bulgarianising" the Bulgarian Muslims by name-changing, various religious repercussions and so on.

At first sight, this looks like an improbable chain of events that ended in tragedy, such as could happen anywhere in the world. However, the details expose what many Bulgarians would see as a typically Bulgarian mixture of stupidity, negligence, poverty and criminal indifference that has come to characterise life in the EU's newest member state over the past few years.

Britons buying in rural Bulgaria came here to acquire property and land at rock bottom prices. Considering the language and cultural differences, the time constraints and the plentiful enterprises established primarily to separate them from their money, the vast majority seem to have ended up with more or less exactly what they had hoped for. Whether they were aware of it at the time of purchase or not, they were also committing financially, emotionally and physically to their new, declining rural communities.

By the dawn of 2002 most Britons’ optimism for the New Millennium was already fading. We began to realise New Labour was just Old Tory with a more sophisticated PR machine. The current economic crisis was beginning to look inevitable and the cost of living was on the increase. As a nation, we hunkered down and turned to our favourite distraction for solace and escape – television.

Programmes like A Place in the Sun and No Going Home held the nation captivated.

Twenty-five years ago, when Communism was alive and kicking, foreigners on Bulgarian streets were a rarity and mostly restricted to the Black Sea resorts and some major tourist sights. Otherwise, most of the visible non-Bulgarian faces in the country were in the cities with major universities. There, young people from the Arab countries mingled with Vietnamese and South Africans, the result of Communist Bulgaria's propaganda of the Socialist lifestyle outside Europe.

The history of Bulgarian emigration is long and complicated. These descendants of Slavs and Proto-Bulgarians, who themselves arrived in the Balkans about 1,400 years ago, have rarely been afraid to set off in search of a better future elsewhere. At the beginning of the 19th Century whole villages moved to Russia after its unsuccessful wars with the Ottomans. When the Titanic sank in 1912, dozens of Bulgarians from poor mountain villages disappeared with her, indicative of the mass migration to the United States.

Instead of asking the uncomfortable questions, most of the media preferred to run after coverage hungry politicians. Even on the very day of the disaster, the reports from Biser were less about the victims and the destruction and more about Prime Minister Boyko Borisov.

Before 2012 the village of Biser was known only vaguely to Bulgarians as the setting for the romantic poem "The Spring of the White-Legged Girl" by the Revival Period poet Petko Slaveykov. But in February 2012 harrowing images of the bucolic community were not only reaching the rest of Bulgaria but also the wider world. In a brutal winter, that will be remembered across Europe for years to come, Biser for a short time seized and surpassed all other headlines.