Twenty years ago, a book titled "Digital Nomad" was published and its writers Tsugio Makimoto and David Manners would later become prophets of an emerging phenomenon - more and more bright young people leaving corporate environment to live according to their own rules - in an idyllic world in which they breathe freely as views are beautiful, the air and the food are clean,  and your job is just a laptop distance away.

At the age of 26 Tsvetina Petkova gave up the career of a prosperous attorney in Sofia, just to test the other face of “modern slavery,” as she calls it, becoming a flight attendant in a major Dubai airline. Six years later the young woman started bringing together freelancing professionals - engineers, architects, social and media experts, who share plans to transform abandoned rural houses into workspaces for digital nomads from around the world.

Tsvetina turned the house of her grandparents near Botevgrad into her first "headquarters", where she has been working as a legal consultant and developing her project "Nomad Unity". Together with people who share her ideas, she first transformed the yard into a beautiful garden with herbs, flowers and vegetables, before changing the facade of the house and starting organizing her first events – yoga courses, language courses and seminars on the topic of healthy food.

“In the future, we would like to organize events on professional growth; to invite mentors and people with successful companies and businesses,” she tells us about her future plans. “The goal is for people to believe in themselves, to develop into independent professionals. When they are working here with us using their laptops, they not only have access to entrepreneurial events, but also have fun in the evening listening to live jazz music, drinking wine and enjoying life in general. They hike in the mountains, enjoy horse riding, etc.”

Currently, together with her team, Tsvetina is working on group funding campaigns and is looking forward to another major project.

“Our next step is creating a global village, developed by investors, companies or individuals," she says. “There they will be able to buy properties to use for a certain period of the year, and in the rest of the time we will manage the properties attracting people from all over the world. For our Global Village project we chose the village of Bozhenitsa - 15 km. from Zellin, as it has access to a highway, and is not far away from Sofia. I know people with amazing rural tourism projects, but they, unfortunately, focus on inaccessible places, where roads and schools are yet to be built. However, we would have hard times managing such a place, so we chose a location with more opportunities; where people can have access to active projects and ideas and participate in changing the environment.”

Local residents also have the opportunity to offer organic food, organized walks and hikes in the mountains and hand-crafted objects to the free-lance nomads. And all of them can be united by the most precious thing in this world - freedom.

“Freedom in fact means responsibility because you have to be able to organize your time, prioritize your tasks, learn constantly in order to generate money, but also to make full use of your free time," Tsvetina adds. “Digital nomads are people who crave freedom and take particular steps towards this lifestyle. In addition, they have good education and good professions. Most of them have studied and lived abroad, driven by the desire for growth and personal improvement. This allows them to make free choices.”

English: Alexander Markov