Introduction

Belarechka.online is a digital archive of ancestral and family portraits and stories from the village of Gorna Bela Rechka, Northwestern Bulgaria.

Gorna Bela Rechka is where my mother Verka came from – she was born there in 1931. Her mother Ivanka Goranova came from the Goranov family, and her father Dimcho Gospodinov – from the Denov family.

Our family history has always fascinated me, especially its visual traces. There are family photographs that still make me angry or joyful, or silence me. They’ve become a deep part of my own personal story. I think that it’s that resonance that I always find in family photographs – that never fails to tell me where stand emotionally – is what has pushed me to start and organize this archive.

It was my mother’s death in 1999 that brought me back to this beloved village of childhood summers. I began visiting and working in Gorna Bela Rechka on a regular basis in 2003. Private history – and how we can understand our collective history through it – has been the focus of my work all along.

The ancestral house of my mother Verka, grandmother Vanka and grandfather Dimcho of the Denov family is long gone. It’s the Goranovs’ house, which belonged to my grandmother’s brother Boris and his wife Maria, that has now become my Bela Rechka home. It is also the hospitable house of my childhood memories, our family summer vacations. This house is also now home to my sister Galina, who lives there.

Some of the photographs on belarechka.online are part of our own family archive. Others have been collected from the personal archives of people from Gorna Bela Rechka, Dolna Bela Rechka and Varshets since 2018. Most of them were made by relatives or family friends. There were also two photographers who captured life in Gorna Bela Rechka in the first and, respectively, second half of the 20th century: Ivan Angelov and Angel Ivanov. Their own archives have not been preserved.

The aim of belarechka.online is, on the one hand, to document and preserve the remaining visual traces of family life in the village and the stories that people tell about them today, and on the other, to inspire further research and conversations about our personal and collective history. I believe photographs give us an opportunity to connect with the full river of life from which we come – without fear, and without favouring or ignoring one emotion or another.

I am grateful to my sister Galina who supports me in our journey together and a shared understanding of who we are.

I am also grateful to the people who have opened up and shared their personal archives and stories with me, and continue to do so:

Tsvetana Bogdanova
Tinka Ivanova
Veneta Kostova
Neli Madjarova
Yordanka (Datsa) Tomova
Nadezhda (Deshka) Mihaylova

Dimitrina (Tanya) Mihaylova

Georgi Issaev

Katya Gyurova
Darinka Alexandrova
Dobrinka Georgieva
Tsvetelina Vaglyarska
Miloslav Slavov
Georgi Apostolov
Nikola Mikhailov
Siyka Petrova
Boris Velkov
Penka Alipieva
Penka Petrova

I am also grateful to the people who helped me for this website – especially Julian Möller for the vision and Boris Deliradev for the translation.

Belarechka.online is an open project. Everyone with a link to Gorna Bela Rechka can contribute their own photos and stories and help us develop it. The history of a village has as many authors as there are people living in it.