
Exactly five years ago, freelance documentary photographer Mihaela Aroyo found herself in the heart of the community of the so-called Bessarabian Bulgarians, inhabiting Southern Moldova and the Odessa region of Ukraine. Without a major plan, on a hot July day, she visited an annual community festival in the village of Stoyanovka and on her way, through the dusty unkempt road, she asked, in broken Russian, a woman for directions. “But why don’t you just speak in Bulgarian?”, the woman answered.
The lucky encounter has turned into a long-term project, now showing as an exhibition at Sofia’s Gallery Synthesis under the title “Dreaming in Bulgarian”, signifying the different ways by which the people preserved their identity. Some have settled more than 200 years ago, fleeing repressions from the Ottoman empire. Stability has never informed their lives: every few decades, the community finds their villages and towns on different maps, in the context of the fall of the Ottoman empire, and then the creation and the dissolution of the USSR.
“People in Bessarabia seem to have rationalised the sense of threat and power changes: for the last two centuries, some families have lived in eight different states”, the Varna-based photographer told Veridica. “Maybe this is why they’ve sustained their identity, as this one factor that doesn’t change. The feeling of belonging to a certain origin, family, home, works as a shelter in times of stormy historical events”.
Between 2019-2024, Aroyo has made 14 trips, visited more than 60 villages and towns in Moldova and Ukraine, predominantly inhabited with ethnic Bulgarians, with families by now often mixed with other nationalities.
The ethnic community – numbering around 300,000 people in Moldova and Ukraine, and often speaking up to five languages but predominantly Russian-speaking as a second and sometimes first language– is also interesting to explore in terms of the vagueness of the local politics.
In conversations with Mihaela, some have expressed an open nostalgia to the USSR times and still view Moscow as a civilisational unifying centre; at the same time many support Ukraine’s fight or have switched opinions after feeling anxious from the start of the full-scale invasion; others live with the knowledge of the Soviet famine in the early 1930’s and hugely sceptical of USSR’s role in the history of the community.
“I won’t forget my very first trip to Ukraine after the beginning of the current war, in the summer of 2022. There were Ukrainian flags and symbols everywhere around the road and in the Babata village I went to a shop where there was even an ice-cream painted in blue and yellow. I told the woman at the counter that I chose “the patriotic one” and she said that “we didn’t know what patriotism meant until February 24.”
Locals are often keen on debating on what the USSR, Moldova or Ukraine did or did not give them in terms of security and opportunities. People told Aroyo varying stories on how they sustained or rediscovered their Bulgarian identity, sometimes seeing Russian (and in some stories, Ukrainian) influence and politics as a threat to their existence. There’s also the feeling that Mihaela Aroyo captures a world that is increasingly thinning: young people are eager to leave their hometowns, many have relatives in Bulgaria who have immigrated from Moldova and Ukraine to work or study, others have settled in the West for better career opportunities.
In his essay, accompanying the exhibition, journalist Dimiter Kenarov calls the region “the silent front”: “If you go there, you can hear the hidden rumblings which your ears could not otherwise detect.” Around of the beginning of the full-scale invasion in Ukraine in February 2022, focus on the Bulgarian diaspora in Moldova and Ukraine has increased: the community has proven to be vulnerable to pro-Russia disinformation both locally and in Bulgaria itself (disinformation about brutal repressions from the Ukrainian government have started as early as 2017 and has volumed-up since 2022 amid the war), while pro-Russia parties in Bulgaria, mainly far-right leader Revival, has tried to gain hold in Moldova and influence the Bulgarian community there.
“In addition to my shooting travels, I began to research the history of the different phrases of migrations in the region as a consequence of the Crimean War, World War I and World War II”, says Aroyo. “Bessarabia is like forever destined to be a border between empires and the major spheres of influence.”
More about Mihaela’s work at mihaelaaroyo.com and instagram.com/mearoyo.
“Dreaming in Bulgaria” is showing at Gallery Synthesis until September 24.