Healing waters: infrastructure and capitalist fantasies in the socialist ruins of rural Bulgaria

ABSTRACT

This article explores the aspirations of a small community in rural Bulgaria, devastated by postsocialist economic decline. The community’s economic and moral aspirations are linked to the ruins of a thermal bath and the existence of a “miraculous spring”– formerly the source of local prosperity and pride. In the context of a vanishing agro-industrial sector, deindustrialisation and a mass exodus of the local population, the bath is the locus of capitalist fantasies for the villagers, who believe foreign investments will revive the entire community.

RÉSUMÉ

Cet article explore les aspirations d'une petite communauté rurale bulgare dévastée par le déclin économique post-socialiste. Les aspirations économiques et morales de la communauté sont liées aux vestiges d’un bain thermal et à l’existence d’une « source miraculeuse » - autrefois source de prospérité et de fierté locale. Dans le contexte d’un secteur agro-industriel en voie de disparition, de la désindustrialisation et de l’exode massif de la population locale, le bain est le lieu des fantasmes capitalistes pour les villageois, qui croient que les investissements étrangers raviveront toute la communauté.

KEYWORDS:

• Infrastructure
• aspirations
• rural development
• postsocialism
• Bulgaria

Acknowledgements

Alexandra Ion and Agota Abran read the paper and made useful comments and critiques. Thank you! We also thank Gheorghi Iosifov, Stephan Emilov Petrov and Venelin Leofitov Pavlov, three local enthusiasts, who assisted us in our fieldwork and the personnel of the State Archive of Vidin for their courtesy and assistance. All errors are our own.

Notes on contributors

Stefan Dorondel is a Senior Researcher at the Francisc I. Rainer Institute of Anthropology Bucharest interested in environmental changes in postsocialist countries. He is the author of Disrupted Landscapes: State, Peasants and the Politics of Land in Post-Socialist Romania (Berghahn, 2016) and the co-author (with Thomas Sikor, Johannes Stahl and Phuc Xuan To) of When Things Become Property: Land Reform, Authority and Value in Postsocialist Europe and Asia (Berghahn, 2017).

Stelu Şerban is a sociologist at the Institute for Southeast European Studies, Bucharest, interested in postsocialist transformations in Southeast Europe, everyday life in rural societies, ethnicity and political ecology. He is the author of Elites, Parties and Political Spectrum in the Interwar Romania ([in Romanian], Bucharest, 2006), and co-editor (with Stefan Dorondel) of the edited volume At the Margins of History. Agrarian Question in Southeast Europe (Bucharest, 2014).

ORCID

Stefan Dorondel http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8722-6242

Notes

1 We carried out intermittent fieldwork in the village between 2013 and 2017.

2 See http://www.slovo.bg/showwork.php3?AuID=283&WorkID=12946&Level=2. We thank Ivelina Eftimova for the suggestion and for the link.

3 For a typology of ruins, see DeSilvey and Edensor (2012).

4 As Zeller (2017, 215) shows, infrastructure has different meanings for different scholars. He defines it as “large, state-sponsored, transformative projects, which mobilise environmental and technological resources for the attainment of specific goals”.

5 State Archive of Vidin, Fund 918, File 31.

6 See “Mineralen izvor do s slanotrn” [Mineral Spring to the Village of Slanotran] http://www.vidin-online.com/resursi-vv-vidinsko/mineralen-izvor-do-s-slanotrn. Accessed February 7, 2018.

7 State Archive of Vidin, Fund 489, Files 121 and 707.

8 State Archive of Vidin, Fund 489, File 709. To understand the magnitude of this investment, consider that the average salary of a blue-collar worker in the early 1980s was 250–300 leva/month (Creed 1998, 153).

9 Documents found in the private archive of Stephan Emilov Petrov. We thank him for allowing us to copy them.

10 Documents of the mayor’s office. The local data concur with a new UN demographic survey recently released which puts Bulgaria as the main country in Eastern Europe whose population dramatically decreased. The demographic projections for the future look also quite pessimistic (United Nations 2017, 13).

11 https://doi.org/10.1080/02255189.2019.1632176.

12 Plan for Using the Mineral Waters from the Danubian Area of Vidin Municipality for Balneal and Recreation found in the archive of the Slanotran mayor’s office. The project was conceived by a team of experts, including a university professor, an architect and an engineer.

13 The underground waters were envisaged to last at least for the next 60 years.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from Romania’s Ministry of National Education, CNCS – UEFISCDI [grant number PN II-ID-PCE-2012-4-0587] (2013–2016).