Spring has so far been cool this year which will push back rose picking – in the Valley or Roses around the towns of Kazanluk and Karlovo it only started a week ago. Usually, rose picking begins at the end of May, and its start is celebrated with exuberance in the Valley of Roses. The traditional massive street parades and parties dedicated to Damask roses go far back to the time when they were first brought to Bulgaria. In Kazanluk, in the heart of the Valley of Roses, the festival has a history spanning 120 years.

A rose festival was first held in Kazanluk in 1903, and it was all about charity and giving. It was a fund-raising event to help orphans, the socially disadvantaged and people with tuberculosis – a deadly disease at the time. Rose exhibitions were organized in Kazanluk, picture postcards from the Valley of Roses were made and sold at the festival.

Now that the pandemic years and the Covid-19 restrictions are behind us, Kazanluk is getting ready to welcome a record number of tourists for the jubilee edition of the Rose Festival. Some of them will travel thousands of kilometres to join the street procession on Saturday, 3 June, a hallmark for Kazanluk. 

The magical show "Rose princesses" at the Arsenal house of culture in Kazanluk

The festive programme begins on 2 June with concerts, recitals, exhibitions, and will go on until Sunday, 4 June. The festivities will reach their high point on Saturday when a carnival procession with thousands of guests from the country and abroad will pass through the town.

“Every year the number of tourists coming to the festival goes up, and before the pandemic had reached more than 100,000. This year we shall have more than 4,000 guests from different formations taking part in the parade and the carnival. There will be a new element in the procession with the costumes from all folklore regions from Kazanluk’s sister cities,” says Kazanluk mayor Galina Stoyanova:

“After 2020, when travel was restricted, this is actually the first year in which we have delegations coming from all twin towns, starting with Seoul in South Korea, China, Italy, France, North Macedonia, in Greece we have two twin cities. This year we shall add three more sister cities in Poland, Vietnam and Iran. Interest has always hinged on the production of and trade in rose oil, and there are festivals of roses and flowers in all of these towns. We are publishing an album “Old Kazanluk” this year, a compilation of photographs, selected out of the photographs given us by 276 locals who handed us more than 5,000 photos tracing the history of the town. The festival in Kazanluk also features performances by world famous musicians like Boney M. Xperience. 

The procession on Saturday will be joined by Pambos from Cyprus, famous in this country with his dance school; he was also on the jury of the Queen Rose contest which took place a week before the festival.”

Rose picking is an essential element of the celebrations in Kazanluk, with guests going to the rose plantations to pick the flower petals themselves.

“There are families who make a living out of roses. There are 5,500 hectares of rose plantations in the Valley of Roses; 70% of them are around the towns Kazanluk and Karlovo. There are close to 30 functioning distilleries on the territory of the entire region,” Galina Stoyanova says, and adds:

“In previous years, the pandemic caused some people to give up rose growing, some replaced roses with other essential oil crops. Now, we are seeing a revival of rose production. One of the difficulties in the campaign this year is finding seasonal workers, but for the time being, it seems everyone has been fending for themselves. The government should also be helping rose production because it is more than a tradition, it is one of few sectors developing entirely thanks to manual labour. Rose growers say that this year the yield is 4 tons per kilogram of rose extract, that is to say the campaign will once again be difficult. The price has soared to 8-9,000 euro per kilogram of essential rose oil, giving us the hope of seeing people going back to the kind of rose growing and rose oil production we used to have during the better years.”

Because it is celebrating the 120^th anniversary of its Rose Festival, Kazanluk was chosen as the venue for this year’s annual World Meeting of the Bulgarian Media, organized by ‎the Bulgarian news agency BTA since 2005.

• Bulgarian journalists from 33 countries discuss the topic "Media and ‎Freedom" in Kazanlak

Translated from the Bulgarian and posted by Milena Daynova

Photos: BTA, BGNES