I grew up in Sofia. I was the youngest member of a household which, at that time, consisted of my father, mother, older brother and maternal grandmother. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment: my brother and I slept in the bedroom, my parents on a sofa bed in the living room and my grandmother in the kitchen. My parents would leave for work and my brother for school early in the mornings. Very occasionally, I would go to kindergarten, but that was the exception. I knew that if I cried loudly enough once my father began getting me ready, at least one of our elderly neighbours would come rushing through the door and insist to look after me for the rest of the day. My playmates were kids my age who, like me, were looked after by their grandparents. Grandmothers were in charge of cooking lunches and dinners and chasing us with snacks in-between. Apartment doors were never locked and we could walk in and out of neighboursā homes as we pleased.
At the time, my grandmother was in her early 80s and quite sick. She had trouble walking, but she didnāt need to walk much because everything she may have needed was taken care of by my parents and neighbours. She would spend her days watching TV in the living room, sharing the news with neighbours on the bench outside our building or sitting in the kitchen chatting away with frequent visitors. She would get her pension delivered once a month, a welcome occasion for a cup of coffee with the officer delivering it; as was receiving a letter from the mail man or woman; the reading of the water or electricity meters; or the refuelling of petroleum stocks for the winter months. Naturally, all of my motherās four siblings would visit at least a couple of times a month, and so would their adult children. Our apartment was never quiet.
Neither was the building or surrounding areas. Bounded by tall birch trees, there was a huge playground on one side of it, and small green areas on the other with linden trees that seemed to be losing their pea-like fruit year-round. There was also a kind of parking lot covered by the slender branches of remarkably tall willow trees. Children and teenagers found miraculous ways of occupying all of these spaces during the day, likely under their grandparentsā unnoticed watchful gaze. At times, the entire population of all buildings in the street would congregate outside to roast peppers in view of canning for the winter months; to beat the rugs, a practice now forgotten; or to pass time when electricity was down again and there was nothing else to do but to āclickā roasted pumpkin or sunflower seeds and chat.
My paternal grandmother, an opera singer, divided her time between Sofia and the Village, officially a town but actually a village hidden away in the Bulgarian Balkans. She did her morning exercises upon waking up to keep in shape and had a strict beauty routine which included the application of face cream, mornings and evenings, on every single day. She insisted on dying her hair until (almost) the day she died. I spent my summers with her in the Village. She taught us grandchildren how to sit straight ālike a ladyā, how to make rice pudding and how to work the soil. Having lived through the war, she believed in the importance of knowing how to grow food and tirelessly maintained her fatherās house and the rather huge garden attached to it in the Village.
Together with my grand-aunt, she hosted all four grandchildren during the summer months (and, in the case of my pubescent brother, during his wildest teenage years). Of similar age, we were probably quite easy to look afterābread and butter in the mornings, a light lunch and cheese and olives in the evenings. In-between, we ran off to explore the forests, rummage through the cellar or attic of the old house, water the plants in the garden or feed the neighbourās pigs. In the cool evenings, we put on sweaters and followed my grandmother up the street and then the hundreds of steps to the monastery, stopping here and there to wait for others to join us or for my grandmother to exchange the latest gossip. Once at the top, at the foot of the glorious church, we would chase the ribbiting frogs or sit quietly and listen to the older peopleās conversations.
On especially hot days, my grandmother kept us indoors. Then, I lay on the divan in the kitchen (which, of course, also served as the bedroom for my grandmother or grand-aunt when their house was invaded by the younger generations), read one of the many books I had retrieved from the cellar or attic, and watched my grandmother rumble about, canning vegetables or making jam.
This book is about ageing in Bulgaria. Bulgariaās recent political and socioeconomic transitions have led citizens to reconsider fundamental questions, such as whether or not to have children or whether to stay in their home country at all. The processes of pervasive emigration and shrinking fertility rates have become entangled with the rapid ageing of the population. Nearly 20% of Bulgarians are now 65 years and over. The old-age dependency ratio (the ratio of those 65 years and older to the labour force, i.e., those 15 to 64) is estimated at 30.4 and the countryās median age is now 42.6 years (Central Intelligence Agency 2017). Bulgariaās transition to market economy has accommodated and encouraged changes in the role of older people in the family. The literature observes the fading of traditionally strong family ties in Balkan countries (considered closer to Asian, rather than Western, family types [Goody 1996]), dwindling intergenerational dialogue and increased focus on the individual (KulcsĆ”r and BrÄdÄÅ£an 2014). Today, older people are often associated with the communist past and rendered responsible for the difficulties of the present, suggesting a generational divide and a series of challenges to the provision of services for the elderly.
With this book I seek to draw attention to the rapid demographic, socioeconomic, cultural and ecological transitions taking place in a corner on the very periphery of Europe. We know a lot about the person-environment relationship in urban and rural environments, yet the literature focuses predominantly on the experiences of older people in the Global North (Smith et al. 2004; Scharf 2003; Scharf et al. 2005; Buffel et al. 2012, 2013). Work on ageing in the Global Eastācomprising those societies that are ātoo rich to be in the South, too poor to be in the Northā (MĆ¼ller 2020)āis only beginning to emerge.
Of course, the paragraphs at the start of this chapter are tinted with nostalgiaāthe feeling of having lost something valuable, āa positively toned evocation of a lived past in the context of some negative feeling toward present or impending circumstanceā (Davis 1979; see also Ghodsee 2004). Capitalism and globalisation have worked their parts to create expectations of and cookie-cut patterns for the lives we want to live today, regardless of where in th...