While browsing pro-Kremlin media, I come across reports about Ukrainian refugees who supposedly refuse to leave Bulgaria’s luxurious Black Sea resorts — and I discover that similar stories (about Ukrainian refugees in Baltic resorts) are also appearing in Poland, mainly on social media and in nationalist pamphlets. In Myśl Polska, for example, I find a reprint of a smear piece originally published by Russia’s REN TV.
Shortly afterward, new invitations and messages start pouring into my Messenger from the group “Ukrainians in Bulgaria.” I had last logged into it just before my trip to the Black Sea, when I was searching for Vissarion’s followers but mostly met people who had fled the war. Now I find that even before my journey, Ukrainian users had been urging me to go to the mountains instead — to the Rhodopes. “Only there will you understand that those stories about resorts are not just propaganda. Read about the protests in Plovdiv. Get in touch with Natalia Ellis.” “If you want to understand what’s really happening, go to Plovdiv, to Natalia.”
A moment later, Natalia Ellis herself writes to me in the group. She runs a refugee assistance center. Her tone is sharp, and she confirms: “It’s not just a Russian invention — there really were refugee protests in Plovdiv. The seals came out — what else can I call them? The seals wanted better conditions, they complained about the food, and they wouldn’t work. That’s how it was, I’m telling you. But most of them have already left. Because there were a million refugees in Bulgaria, but only about 45,000 are truly in need of help — those are the real refugees, not tourists. Come here, I’ll show you everything myself.”
I go straight to the station and buy a ticket for the morning train to Plovdiv. The tickets are so cheap that I decide to add two leva and take first class.
Bulgaria Up Close: Train Stations, Banitsa, and Traces of Russian Slogans in the Metro
A dirty-red sunrise lights up the Sofia World Trade Center sign on a glass block several stories high, right next to the Russian Embassy. The Bulgarian metro is smeared with tiny scrawls reading “Put Ukraine on trial.” Some of them have been painted over, others crossed out.
I reach the station and wander through its underground corridors, staining my thick jacket with cheese and grease from a rolled-up banitsa. I gaze at the endless passageways, courtyards, and 1990s-style arcades and patios planted with agave and clusters of low lanterns — shattered so beautifully that one feels tempted to break a few more, to crush them like snowberries.
I walk through tunnels lined with imitation brick, partitioned by empty glass kiosks — shops that never opened — with side passages leading to gaming salons that never seem to close. Then I finish my banitsa, smoke a sobranie, and reach platform twelve, where at the farthest end I spot my long-distance train — smeared with paint from the steps all the way up to the roof.
And then I start running — from the front to the end of the train, back to the front, to the end again, and once more to the front — searching for the first-class carriage. In the end, the conductor takes pity on me, smiles gently, and says: “No have first class. Sit where seat.”
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We’re rolling along at forty. Frost glints on the passing trolleys and scrubby meadows. All around — oak forests. We pass tiny villages drowned in soft smoke, and towns wrapped in the wool of sweet smog. The conductress smokes one cigarette after another at every station. In the carriage — quiet as poppyseed. Only the rhythmic clatter of the wheels can be heard.
We stop. Kostelec. Small houses painted green, red, and yellow. Through the empty station hall, I can see white mountains, melted into the milky exhaust from the heating plant. Then we move again, slowly, leaving behind a kiosk selling coffee and sandwiches, and graffiti that reads “Dildo 2020.” Once more comes the clatter — clear and soft — just like in a good old archival radio drama.
Clatter, silence, clatter, silence, clack-clack, silence thick as grain. My iPhone buzzes. A message from Natalia Ellis — she’ll be late. She’ll arrive only at 1:30; until then, the center’s administrator, Oleksandr, will show me around. So we’ll meet after all… There will have to be another conversation. Serious. Long. Probably very long. I had dreamed of keeping it within forty-five minutes. Shorter wouldn’t be proper, would seem indecent. But three quarters of an hour would do.
Then I could disappear again somewhere — find a bus, doze off, wake up, glance out the window, think how lovely it looks, the view, the hill, the stream, the sunlight on the snow. There would be the bus smell — faint diesel, soft old seats, a handful of passengers, just enough to record a few notes about them on the dictaphone. And then sleep again.
Without dreams, without words, without meetings, without searches, without the slimy Kremlin news briefs. To get rid of all these conversations, recordings, memories — to spit out what was, smear over the dramas and divisions, blur them, melt away, forget, not think, not write. To un-be.
Real Refugees — and Those Called “Seals”
“So, you’ve come after all… You know, Bulgaria used to be considered the sixteenth republic of the Soviet Union? Maybe that’s why the buildings look so Soviet — just look at them, total nightmares. But never mind, we can work with that too. If we managed to renovate this hospital, then anything’s possible. Come on, I’ll show you our Buffer Center — you’ll see everything before Natalia arrives. I live in this building myself — I mean, in the Center. You know they used to treat tuberculosis patients here? Later it was handed over to Natalia — for helping refugees, of course. So I moved in, started helping Natalia Ellis as an administrator, and, well, that’s how it’s been ever since.”
“I mean, we’d probably have gone back home by now, but we’ve got little kids, and there are rockets flying there, windows shattering — not the best conditions for growing up. I honestly don’t know how our children will process all this, what will become of them… Oh look, here’s the playroom — our daughters painted these pictures. UNICEF gave us some funding; soon we’ll be able to hire a teacher. And over there’s the gym. Further down — the photo studio, we’ve just repainted it… Oh, there’s Natalia, she’s arrived. I was just talking about the kids, showing the Center. Hello, Natalia Vladimirovna. Come on in, check everything, so people know you’re keeping an eye on things…”
“Oh, stop it, Oleksandr, that’s not what this is about…”
“Well, maybe not, but things still need to be checked. There’s no such person who shouldn’t be watched. Me, for example — I need to be watched.”
“Oh, you — definitely you need watching. All right, just kidding. Come on, let’s keep going — look, here’s the old hospital kitchen. Once we renovate it, I’m bringing in a Michelin chef. Seriously! We’ll do live cooking shows with our women involved — dumplings, chebureki, sauerkraut, pelmeni, belyashi — everything. Look at it — it’s a huge kitchen. Two skilled chefs and two assistants could easily work here. Plus, we’ll need an IT person to handle the lighting, photos, video, and online streaming. But that’ll all come after the renovation. For now, next week we’ll use it to host a New Year’s celebration.”
“Let’s go upstairs — we’ve got a terrace up there. Well, it will be a terrace once we open the exit and set up a little café garden. And speaking of gardens: I want to plant a million crocuses in the park in front of the Center. So far, we’ve managed ten thousand. But it’s a realistic plan — that park in front of the refugee center should become known all over Europe. Crocuses, tulips… Maybe if we plant everything, they won’t take the land from us, even though developers are already sharpening their teeth for it. The problem is, if they take over the park and start construction, it’ll be hell for the refugees. The children who fled the war react terribly to noise, banging, hammering. Just recently, when they went out to play and one of the local Bulgarian kids set off a firecracker, they all instantly flattened themselves on the asphalt.”
“It might not sound very refined, but our eight- and nine-year-olds wet themselves, they have to sleep in diapers. The psychologist can’t get them out of it. You see, they came here without parents, sleep only four or five hours a night, and when they’re awake, they keep reading the news and worrying about what’s happening to their mom and dad. And the adults here are wounded too — how could they not be? They came from Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv — with just one suitcase. Their past in shreds, their future molten and shapeless. For now, they have to focus on the present: eat something, try to sleep, warm up — only then look around, think about finding a job, maybe retraining, learning Bulgarian… The Center is meant to help with that — and it’s working: someone’s opened a small business, someone else a café, another a hair salon…”
The Black Sea and Filtration Camps — Getting Rid of Refugees
It’s different on the coast — I’ve already written about that. It’s not so rosy there. Have you been to the seaside? I don’t know who you ran into, but the coast is strange: a whole bunch of different people showed up — there are genuine refugees, but along with them came holidaymakers with families, including some who had already owned apartments in Bulgaria yet decided to live for free by the beach. Bulgarians, unfortunately, saw all those posts on FB and Telegram: free holidays in Varna, free food, you only pay for transport. They were posted by carriers/transport operators who made a fortune off the war, profiting at the expense of the Bulgarian budget.
Eventually it all came out: the government ordered audits and it turned out that in Varna, for example, only 26 Ukrainian children attend kindergarten; hardly any were enrolled in school, they’re not learning the language, integration is nonexistent, 220 million leva from the emergency budget gone down the drain. On top of that, some refugees moved to Greece, some to Turkey; they lived there a while and then came back, shuttling between countries — and the transporters encourage these chaotic moves because they profit from them.
Now they’re tempting people with trips to Romania, because Romania hasn’t tightened its criteria yet. All of this ruins the idea of real aid for refugees, because whenever we try to do something officials throw those statistics in our faces and show screenshots. I still remember a post by one of the women who flew from Bulgaria to Dubai for a photoshoot: “a week of being a seals.” So from now on I call people like her seals — Bulgarian journalists already know this and quote me. Think about it: she lives as a refugee at Bulgaria’s expense, then she flies to the Emirates and gets a photoshoot, then asks for free bedding and complains that Bulgarian food disappoints her because the transporters had shown more gourmet dishes in the photos. And the transporters shrug, sympathize, and even encourage refugees to protest.
And indeed: there were protests on the coast and even here in Plovdiv. The idea is ostensibly right — the law is becoming cruel to people who fled — but that tightening comes partly from entitlement, because the seals keep saying that the money they receive was nobody’s to begin with, “it’s not Bulgarian, it’s EU money,” they say. And they finally understand that Bulgaria pays contributions to the EU.
In the end all this led to a disastrous situation: now all refugees are to be sent first to a screening camp in Elhovo, where conditions are horrific — unheated barracks, outdoor toilets, no transport, no medical care… On Fridays they deliver food and water. By Saturday the water is gone, by Sunday the food is gone, and after that you’re on your own. The young may cope for a while, but the weak and the sick will not. We tried to at least attach some kind of handrail in the toilet so that disabled people and the elderly wouldn’t have to crawl — I saw grandmothers literally crawling there, and the toilet is across the road… Elhovo is a death-house.
So that’s how it looks: on one side the seals, and on the other a new government that has decided to get rid of all refugees wholesale — to wear them down.
Well, there’s nothing else to do but keep going. I believe our Buffer Center is all the more important because it gives hope and helps people break out of stagnation, reconnect with the world. But for that to happen, the women who come to us have to understand that their old world is over. I write openly on Facebook that “the war will last for years.” And then everyone goes crazy — you have no idea the kind of abuse I get.
Still, I keep repeating: Russia has human reserves, doesn’t care about losses, is increasing its military budget, arming itself — this will go on for a long time. The Russian economy will only collapse in a decade. So what are the women who fled supposed to do for the next ten years? Sit on a beach in Varna? Crumble while letting their children witness the degradation of their mother? They still cannot accept the fact that their old lives are gone.
I also had to understand it: that life ended at six in the morning when my mother called and said, “Natasha, we have a war.” The thing is, I had been expecting this war for a while. I work with flowers, with gardening, and I realized that if Ukraine stops water supplies to Crimea, eventually they will come for that water. That’s why, eight years ago, we transported my plants from Odessa to Bulgaria — my largest succulent collection in the country, my 100,000 cacti — and my husband and I moved our IT business, started building volunteer structures… And whenever I returned to Ukraine, I kept telling everyone: prepare yourselves, there will be a war. No one believed me. The seals still don’t believe.
From the perspective of psychology and psychiatry, it’s obvious. They’ve cocooned themselves, infantilized — in fact, they never grew up. They are at the level of thirteen-year-olds; their children are more mature than they are. They begin to compete with their children for attention, and the children feel it and suffer even more. Later, these children will carry forward their mothers’ traumas, limitations, instability, and immaturity — into the fourth generation. The same thing happened to women during World War II. And now the war is back. It will stay with us for the rest of our lives. It’s terrifying, but we have to accept it.
Jędrzej Morawiecki — Polish reporter, writer, translator, and documentarian; habilitated doctor of social sciences; professor at the University of Wrocław. He specializes in post-Soviet issues, with a particular focus on Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Author of numerous reports and books, including Łuskanie światła, Inna Rosja, Krasnojarsk Zero, Człowiek w cieniu barw; co-author of the acclaimed volume Szuga. Kronika wypadków miłosnych w Rosji, as well as Szykuj sanie latem. He has served as a correspondent for Tygodnik Powszechny and the Polish Press Agency in Russia and is a co-founder of the portal PostPravda.Info.
