BELA RECHKA PROJECT

Do you know what is a Weird Sister?
What is a obrok?
What is God?
What is evil?
Do you know the smell of goat's milk curds?
Or the taste of green walnuts freshly knocked off the tree?
How many days does the soul need to pass to the other world?

These are just some of the long lost sensations and answers that the BELA RECHKA Project has set out to find, show and make available to more people, both in Bulgaria and around the world, with the help of the Internet and new media technologies.

The project, co-organized by the Dutch foundation MEETING CULTURES and the Czech multimedia company TRIMEDIA, brought together 11 people from six countries (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland) employed in three different professional fields, who spent ten days in September 2003 in the village of Gorna Bela Rechka, near Vratsa in the Northwestern Balkan Range.

Why?

The Bela Rechka Project believes that only if we become more sensitive to each other, if we feel the differences through personal experience, if we focus on forgotten personal stories that are waiting to be retold, could we lay the beginning of a new understanding and new interaction. The project also believes that everyone has a right to their own culture and a right to express it in their own way. And that being Bulgarian today is just as interesting as being Czech, Italian or Albanian.

That is why Bela Rechka is above all a project about the senses: to recall the taste of autumn plums, to take a walk in the village cemetery and to hear the songs of the women in headscarves, to pluck a violet cluster from the trellis vine in front of the house, to awake at cockcrow to the sounds of silence… And to share all this with someone who has never had exactly the same personal experience but who has the same questions: What is God? What is evil? And then - to post this on the Web for all other people, wherever they might be, who are looking for their own answers to the same questions.

The village

The great advantage of a village like Gorna Bela Rechka today is that time has preserved many things in their authentic form. The village lies at an altitude of 500 m in the northwestern part of the Balkan Range, about 100 km from Sofia. Little has changed here in the past century or two - the locals keep sheep and goats, and produce goat's milk, cheese and curds, eggs, and seasonal vegetables. When the Czech historian Konstantin Jirecek travelled across these lands in the late 19th century, shortly after Bulgaria became independent, he described the region as very poor and the people as very simple. According to a surviving document from the Ottoman Empire, in the early 19th century Bela Rechka was one of the poorest villages in the area - with an average of 32 goats per household. In those days a household that owned up to 50 goats was considered poor, one that owned up to 200 was middle-class, households with 200 to 500 goats were wealthy, and those with more than 500 goats belonged to the rural bourgeoisie. Today in the village of Gorna Bela Rechka there are five cows, two village oxen and 120 goats. The village population has declined to 92 people aged 70 to 75.
Despite the sad statistics, Bela Rechka has something that made the whole team feel happy in a special way: This is a place that follows the ancient biblical rules that life is about giving, a place where not everyone locks their doors, where the dead are laid to rest in a way bequeathed by the ancestors and where, when a child is born, anyone can tell you the story of the three Weird Sisters. This is a place where several real histories of Bulgaria intertwine - pagan, Christian, socialist, contemporary.

LESSONS

In the village of Gorna Bela Rechka you can learn, for example, the following (as told by Granny Todorka and Granny Sofikya):

How to pray and for what: You pray every night before the icon lamp. I cross myself and say, my Lord God, help me, Holy Mother of God, help me, the family, everyone and their children, to make all their wishes come true.
The Weird Sisters are three sisters who appear at childbirth and do the following: The first one said, let's take the child. The second one said, let's not take the child but let him grow up, let's take his mother instead. And the third one said, we won't take the child or his mother right now, let him grow up in his mother's care and let him marry, and when they go to church for the wedding then we'll take the bride so that two mothers will grieve, two houses will mourn in black. That's an old tale, that's why 40 days after childbirth the mother must stay indoors because there are witches abroad and her milk will dry up, and why the baby should not leave the house after sunset.
The soul after death: We don't turn off the lights for 40 days because the soul stays at home for 40 days and only then goes to the grave. Back in the past we used to light oil lamps and keep them burning, we mustn't put them out because the soul will lose its way in the dark.
Evil: You can't avoid evil, if it's written you can't avoid it, you simply can't, dear, whatever you do if it's written you can't avoid evil.

BELA RECHKA PROJECT TEAM:

Massimo Catalfo from Italy, Patrick McEntaggart from Ireland (graphic and software designers)
Diana Ivanova, Detelin Vulkov, Mariana Asenova (journalists), Milena Yankova (sociology graduate student) from Bulgaria
Agnieszka Cwielag, Marzena Ryba, Ireneusz Trypkevic from Poland (social psychologists)
Stanislav Miler from the Czech Republic (producer)
Paul van Zoggel from the Netherlands (web designer)

BELA RECHKA THROUGH THE EYES OF THE PROJECT TEAM

What impressed me most was that the people were very open and friendly. They did not know who I was at first but they were extremely welcoming, and in every house we visited they gave us something, they shared their food and drinks with us. Everyone I met had this huge smile. I remember the eyes of those people because they tell you everything about them. You can see that they are truly very honest and open people - this is a small village, you see that life is very ordinary and that not much happens here, but I can see even without talking to those people that they are living according to their values, and that's very very important.

I think so, yes. There is such an enormous gap between life in the big cities and in this village. I remember the trip in the mountain with Old Mitko, the way he looked at the mountain, at every tree, at every small bush - I could see that he is simply at one with nature, that he is part of nature. You could see that even in the way he gathered walnuts.

What is interesting to me is the dreams of people, what they tell. Because life is so ordinary, but when you hear their stories they are truly exciting and very impressive… I was truly amazed. They really have lots of interesting things and stories to share with other people, but the problem is that so far no one has thought of asking them about that. So we must do that because those people are elderly and their stories will be lost with them. But it is important that other people learn these things, they are important - the legends, the way you believe. Everything is important, everything is connected with Nature - the votive offering, the prayers for rain, everything. It would be nice if we could show all this to more people. I think that culture is very important - mores, customs, everything.

People look so happy, at least everyone smiled like children, with those good and merry wrinkles around the eyes, like little suns. I was very impressed by that, it was so uplifting - not some depressed small village somewhere in the mountain, but people who are really happy.
I didn't expect this to such an extent, I really didn't. What I see in the pictures we took is pure joy.

It seems to me that they look so happy because they don't have so many problems. Their biggest problem is stocking up food for the winter. There isn't so much information coming from the rest of the world. So for these people who live here Bela Rechka is something like a small paradise.

The message is in the smiling faces. If we can show this - these laughing and smiling faces - that will be the big message.

To be in a village for ten days with no connection to a mailbox overflowing with e-mails returns you to the basic values in life - you see only people who are interested in the basic questions in life and that makes you think. I am now going back to the big city Prague, where everything is fast and you must hurry to make money and pay your rent, for example. This is an interesting experience for anyone. And the most interesting part of such projects for me is that the people who communicate and send messages to the world can see and feel the world in a different way, and this can make them tell the stories in a different way, make a different type of reports and, as a result, people will ultimately see the world in a different and new way.
I was very impressed by Georgi, our neighbour in the village - this was the most smiling man in the village, with bright eyes. Yesterday we went to his house for a drink. He has been collecting food for half a year now and he showed us the big jars, the space under his bed was filled with fruit jars, herbs and rakiya [brandy], walnuts… I felt happy, I thought that I would be happy if I could live like that at 85, I would be happy if something like that happened to me...