Those who are not aware of war and have never felt its terror, find it hard to picture its true dimensions. Seeing war at movies is one thing, but it’s quite another to smell it in the air. Nightmares in a night of unexpected silence and then the sudden awakening due to heavy artillery and shells whistling around… The battles get quiet across the day for a while, in order to continue at dusk. Snipers tend to test their weapons from time to time, aiming at random human targets, who dared to cross some front line. At first one hopes that someday this will all come to an end, but then the danger gets too close and people simply leave it all behind, heading to the unknown. That is the fate of the thousands of refugees from Syria who left their homes to get away from death. They sell whatever they can, in order to gather cash for the smugglers and then cover thousands of miles – some of them manage to reach the southern border of Bulgaria. Reber, a Syrian man of Kurdish origin arrived to Bulgaria in November 2014. The smugglers loaded him and his family on a wagon close to the border and 30 minutes later they were all nabbed at the borderline.

“Armed squads came to our village and started to shoot without warning. The situation worsened quickly and drastically. We fled from our homes in a hurry. Now it’s all fear there, it’s all the Islamic State. We were shot at from anywhere. One couldn’t guess the direction of the shells. We are calm now, here in Bulgaria.”

Nabbed as intruders at the borderline, the refugees are nobody here. They have no rights until they submit their asylum applications and while the procedure is ongoing these people are temporarily accommodated at camps with the State Agency for Refugees. The camps at the village of Pastrogor and the town of Harmanli are close to the border. There are two camps in Sofia as well, while there is a special place for children with no families or relatives at the village of Banya. The Harmanli camp is the biggest one:

“We have around 2,000 refugees here,” says Marko Petrov, a commandant of the camp. “Currently there are about 365 families with some 560 kids. The number of men is approximately 900 and of women – around 400. They come mostly from Syria and are of Kurdish origin (87 percent). We also have people from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Palestine… At first they used tents, then wagons. Repair works followed of the three housings and three halls, where tanks and other vehicles had been parked. Thus we provided accommodation to some 1,600 people. The capacity of the center is around 3,600 places. We have built a brand new laundry room. We have also built a very modern kitchen with a dining room, where we can cook for 4,000 in the course of two hours only. As of next week we begin to cook after Arab recipes. We have changed the entire electric grid as well. We have started to build up a central heating system which should provide warmth across all the buildings.”

In the words of Marko Petrov refugees tend to spend 4 – 10 months at the camp. Those, who manage to find a job in countries like Germany, Sweden and France leave as soon as they get their refugee status. Others wait for the invitation of their families. Barely 1 percent of refugees remain in Bulgaria.

English version: Zhivko Stanchev