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Bulgaria was never a country I dreamed of visiting. In fact, I must admit that a year ago Bulgaria was little more than an abstraction. I knew it as one of many former Eastern Block countries: a nation with a struggling economy and a legacy of communism that manifested itself in myriad economic, political, and social interactions. Bulgaria: a medium-sized Balkan state, east of Italy, southwest of Russia, a place whose location and capital I had once memorized for a geography quiz, and then promptly forgotten.

A little more than two years ago Whitman alum Joey Bristol (’01) went to Bulgaria to begin his two-year tenure as an Environmental Management Peace Corps Volunteer. Shortly after his arrival he contacted Whitman Environmental Studies Professor Bob Carson and proposed an educational trip for Environmental Studies students, an opportunity to explore environmental issues overseas. The trip took a year and a half to plan, but this last May I joined nine other Whitman students in Bulgaria’s capital city of Sofia to begin a ten-day journey through a redeveloping nation. We were accompanied on our travels by Joey Bristol, Bob Carson, Whitman Director of Academic Resources Clare Carson, and Plamen Penev, our Bulgarian translator and fast friend.

Our small tour bus took me from the airport through the crowded city to Hostel Mostel. Thirty-year-old Soviet model cars maneuvered around us, and sped through traffic with the alacrity of bumper cars. Vehicles that were off the road were usually parked on the sidewalk itself above pale, crumbled, and cracked pavement. Though the sun was very bright, Sofia is an unavoidably dark city; the buildings are tall and closely packed. The complex nature of Bulgaria’s political and religious history has resulted in a diversity of architectural styles which all convene within Sofia. There are mosques and churches and temples; there are a variety of government buildings, some Greek in style, others more reserved, square, and modern. The city’s more beautiful buildings are overshadowed by the crumbling remains of Communist-era constructions. These modern boxes are mostly apartment and office buildings, but they are everywhere, and they are unquestionably hideous. Every lamppost and shop window was covered in signs and advertisements. I was glad to see that most of them were in Cyrillic script, but many were in English.

We spent only one full day in Sofia, but we made our way through seven meetings. On this first day in Bulgaria, Joey made it clear that this trip was not about having a vacation. We were there to learn about Bulgaria, to learn about her environment and her people. To experience the landscape, not simply to look at it.

On the surface, Bulgaria appears to be like any Western European country. There are paved streets with hundreds of overanxious drivers; there is an international airport; there are Bennetton clothing stores and fancy restaurants. But in the bathrooms of many of those fancy restaurants are Turkish toilets where patrons must squat to relieve themselves. Even if there are Western-style toilets, small waste baskets beside the commode silently declare that you ought not flush your toilet paper. Very few Bulgarian municipalities have sewage treatment plants, and even fewer have sturdy plumbing. At the end of rusted pipes there is only a river. On the surface, Bulgaria is like any Western European country, but it is necessary to scratch the surface.

We met with the Country Director of the Peace Corps, Carl Hammerdorfer, on our day in Sofia. He told us that in Bulgaria there is much more than meets the eye; he declared Bulgaria to have “a high context society.” In contrast, he asserted that Americans live in a low context society: what we say is what we mean – or at least that is a comfortable assumption. Bulgarians, however, tend to imply much beyond their words, communicating more frequently through touch and movement than do Americans. He told us that the source of this complexity is in part Bulgarian culture, but that much of it is the legacy of 450 years of foreign rule.

Bulgaria was part of the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century. Shortly after freeing themselves from the Turks, the Bulgarians were taken under the hostile wing of Soviet Russia. Without political, economic, religious, or even social autonomy, candor is dangerous. “Give a Bulgarian a set of rules,” Plamen told us with a grin, “and he will find a way around them.” To maintain their Christian traditions under the Turkish Yoke, and to keep their culture under the Communists, Bulgarians learned to be subversive. They built their own security and forced opportunity out of a web of personal connections.

To this day the judicial branch of Bulgaria’s government is fraught with corruption as a result of the Communist mentality. Judges are bribed; rulings, silences, and business deals are all brought about through connections and clever, but illegal, maneuvers. The Bulgarians do not always perceive these actions as wrong, they are simply pragmatic. The system is not perfect, any Bulgarian will tell you, but it is intact. The country survived 450 years of hostile rule by engaging precisely this brand of pragmatism, and even now, with newly gained freedom, it is still difficult to step away from the desperate measures of desperate times.

While we were in Bulgaria for a total of only ten days, we traveled to all but the northwestern and southeastern corners of the country. Bulgaria covers approximately 110,000 square kilometers; it is about the size of Pennsylvania. Bulgaria borders Yugoslavia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, the Black Sea to the east, the Danube and Romania to the north. The Balkan Mountains run east-west through the very center of the nation. Bulgaria is one of the most biologically diverse countries in Europe because of the different climatic regions and diverse topography that influence its ecology.

In our ten days in Bulgaria we learned that everything in Eastern Europe is about who you know, and Joey seemed to know everyone. We saw places and met with individuals we would never have had access to as mere tourists. We met with the public outreach official of the U.S. Embassy, the Minister of Agriculture and Forestry, the heads of several major NGOs, a prominent Bulgarian philanthropist, the mayor of Tryavna, and the head of the city of Ruse’s outpost for the Ministry of the Environment. We saw the inside of a deep coal mine, toured an environmental quality testing lab, and hiked in several nature parks.

Once I enrolled in Environmental Studies 260 Special Topics: Bulgaria I quickly discovered, as Joey Bristol had, that for an environmentalist there are few more fascinating case studies than present-day Bulgaria.

Bulgaria’s most significant environmental problems began during post World War II industrialization. Under Communist rule Eastern Europe’s industries grew rapidly in an attempt to match the technology and productivity of the West, but they expanded without consideration of their effects on the environment. Bulgaria’s government was not simply inattentive to environmental degradation; discussion of environmental concerns was seen as unpatriotic, a threat to the success of the Communist project, and was actively suppressed.

Prior to Communism, Bulgaria had been an agricultural country. In 1990, only months after the fall of the Soviet government, Bulgarian environmentalists, finally able to voice their concerns, estimated that 60% of the nation’s agricultural lands had been severely damaged by pesticides, fertilizers, and nuclear fallout. A year later they determined that two thirds of the country’s rivers were polluted, and two thirds of the original forests had been cut. Between 1991 and 2000 the new and still unstable Bulgarian government devoted its efforts to assessing the quality of Bulgaria’s environment then designing a plan for its monitoring and management. It was not until 2001 that the government published the National Strategy for the Environment and Action Plan 2000-2006. In the report, I read about the condition of the country’s water, air, land, forests, biodiversity, and waste management. The Strategy for the Environment recorded current and pending legislation and spoke of concerns in measured, if not critical, language. The diversity and magnitude of environmental problems faced by this small country was both fascinating and disheartening, but I was encouraged by the thoughtful strategies the Bulgarian government intended to pursue in the resolution of their difficulties.

The most significant factor currently affecting the state of the environment in Bulgaria is the nation’s pending accession to the European Union. Bulgarians are well aware that EU accession will boost their economy, but in order to join they must close a series of “chapters.” Before any nation is admitted to the EU it must prove that its membership will not discredit the Union; it must bring itself up to the standards of legislation and management that are currently operating in all of the EU countries. Bulgaria, with its struggling economy and corrupt government, cannot pass up the opportunity to join the Union. It has a significant incentive to clean up its act. Of particular interest to us were the government’s plans to improve the management of the environment, primarily through the introduction of necessary infrastructure and stricter enforcement.

Bulgaria is a fascinating place to study the development of environmental laws and practices because the nation did not begin to address environmental concerns until decades after other nations. By delaying action to solve problems of pollution, biodiversity, and energy, Bulgaria has taken advantage of the opportunity to consider the laws and approaches of other nations. For example, the Bulgarian government considered the United States’ own National Environmental Policy Act (1969), as well as the environmental policies of many European countries in designing their own Strategy for the Environment.

From that first day in Sofia I began to comprehend exactly how complex the cultural network of the country was, but I had been unimpressed by the city itself. Once we got outside of Sofia I was met with the complexity and unquestionable beauty of the Bulgarian countryside. We learned from the Minister of Forestry and Agriculture that the landscape changes every twenty kilometers, and that this quilted nation is all the more difficult to preserve and protect because national codes do not consider regional differences.

When we left Sofia we traveled south to the secluded Rila Monastery in the snow-capped Rhodope Mountains, then to the prosperous town of Blogoevgrad, and finally to Melnik where the climate, critters, and culture are all influenced by the Mediterranean. We took a beautiful hike through the geologic oddity of Melnik’s Pyramids, enjoyed a delicious dinner at a traditional Bulgarian restaurant, and left early the next morning for the polished city of Plovdiv on the Maritsa River in south-central Bulgaria. In Plovdiv we met with the director and interns of Bulgaria’s largest and most influential non-governmental environmental organization, Green Balkans.

The next day we hiked into the Central Balkans National Park and spent the night in the Chalet Rai. The hike was pleasantly challenging and the mountains phenomenally beautiful. They were covered in rich deciduous forest with a dramatic topography of rock outcrops and waterfalls. On our way to the chalet a thunderstorm overtook us, sending down sheets of rain and a little hail, but I felt nothing but pleased with our hike. While much of the trek was done along switchbacks through the beech woods and over stony brooks that fell down the mountain, there were also sections of the trail on the flattened and well-grazed ridge tops where we met with small herds of sheep and goats, and shepherds who still carried staffs with bells.

The next day we crossed over the Balkans through Shipka Pass and found our way to Joey’s home base, the small and tidily maintained Tryavna. Here Joey had more connections than anywhere else. Our two days were packed with meetings, meals, and adventures. We spoke with countless locals, planted trees with school children at the local pool, spoke with the mayor in his office in city hall, and toured the inside of a deep coal mine. We also went to the local landfill and future wastewater treatment plant. As of now Tryavna’s sewage is sent directly to the local river. Left idle for years, the foundation of the treatment plant is grown over with weeds. Tryavna cannot yet afford to finish its construction.

Once we left Tryavna we traveled to the ancient capital of Bulgaria, Veliko-Turnovo. There we spoke with the Director of the Regional Inspectorate of Environment, a subdivision of the Ministry of Environment and Water. From Director Gregorova we received our most thorough explanation of the environmental conditions in Bulgaria. She walked us through the requirements of the European Union accession as well as the status of the environment in Bulgaria both physically, and in terms of legislation and monitoring. It was the eighth day of our trip, but it put a new and valuable perspective on all of the sites we had seen, and people we had met. From Veliko-Turnovo we traveled to Ruse, a lovely city on the banks of the Danube, we looked across the river to Romania, and traveled to the Roussenski Lom Nature Park. The park was a secluded spot outside of the city with a great diversity of plants and birds.

From Ruse we left for our final destination of Varna, a ritzy tourist town on the Black Sea Coast. There we met with the Black Sea NGO Network in their cramped headquarters where we were soaked in disappointing statistics about the condition of the Black Sea, which is heavily polluted, overfished, and depleted of wildlife. We listened attentively to all of these facts, but once out in the warm air of Varna environmental concerns were set aside. We strolled down to the sandy beaches and swam out into the temperate, poisoned waters of the Black Sea. Those of us who accidentally tasted a little of the water had no doubt about the level of pollution, but enjoyed the swimming. The next day we left our hotel at three o’clock in the morning and drove west to catch our afternoon flight out of Sofia.

Ultimately, through its accession to the European Union, Bulgaria is leapfrogging over the environmental standards of the US. As a nation we are falling behind Bulgaria because we have not been compelled, as Bulgarians have been, to see a relationship between the health of our economy and the health of our environment. The relationship Bulgaria now sees is direct, but imposed by the standards of the EU. Our own dependence upon the environment remains hidden and distanced by the vastness of our country. The damage perpetrated by our inattentive industries does not affect those who are most at fault. In Bulgaria they are beginning to close this significant gap. This small Eastern European nation’s problems are many, but they are acknowledged, and much of the landscape is still preserved. The people of Bulgaria are on their way to building a better, healthier nation, and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to see this country in the midst of its transformation.

I have tried to tell others about Bulgaria, but it has proved itself a nation impossible to summarize. I have considered listing our itinerary, condensing the almost fifty pages of notes I took in our ten days. But we didn’t always follow our itinerary, and I did not take my notebook with me everywhere. Sometimes, all I am confidant in saying is that Bulgaria is an amazing country and my time there an unforgettable experience. I learned over seventy Bulgarian words and phrases on our trip, and when I am asked about my travels in the country I think of my favorite expression: Blazée may – loosely translated: I am so lucky, I am jealous of myself. I cannot do justice to this place in the space of a few hundred words, but I assure you, Bulgaria is no longer an abstraction.


Rila Monastery	Melnik Pyramids


Rai Waterfall	beech woods