The depopulation of Bulgaria in the mirror of closed and abandoned schools

An architectural project aims to collect a database of abandoned schools in interactive map

published on 10/10/23 10:21 AM

Photo: biennale2023.kab.bg/entries/proekt27

The depopulation of Bulgaria as evidenced in the buildings of closed and abandoned schools is the focus of the project "Education is a movement from darkness to light". This is the project with which Bulgaria is participating in the 18th Architecture Biennale in Venice after a 15-year absence.

Currently, the project database contains 1,100-1,200 school buildings in Bulgaria, architect Boris Tikvarski - author and head of the project - explained in an interview for BNR's Horizon channel. Member of the team is also the Belgian photographer Alexander Dumarey who was impressed by this very topic when he first came to Bulgaria.

"Our focus was on a not so colorful topic - the depopulation of Bulgaria. We thought that this topic was interesting because in the period in which Bulgaria did not appear at the Venice Architecture Biennale, there were two population censuses and the population decreased by about 10%, or about 800,000 people. We felt that the photographer's work best represented these statistics," commented architect Boris Tikvarski.

Bulgaria's population has declined by 11.5% in the past decade

The team decided to further develop the topic after the opening of the Bulgarian pavilion at the biennale at the end of May. It is very difficult to arrive at the exact number of abandoned schools, Boris Tikvarski pointed out.

"We're not exactly interested in the total number, so much as in supplementing the information beyond the number. We're trying to find clear dates - when the school opened, when it opened, where it is located, what population still lives in the respective village or town, what is the condition of the infrastructure that leads to this school, has its building been converted into something different."

The ambition is to prepare an interactive map on which this information is present, to make it clear which of the school buildings have the potential for a new life. According to arch. Literally, these public buildings are a valuable resource.
The project aims to show the scale of the problem, he specified.

"It would be interesting to transform this raw data into project assignments. It would be very useful for us to have the perspective of future architects and students."