Table Of ContentTranslocal Ageing in the
Global East
Bulgaria’s Abandoned
Elderly
Deljana Iossifova
Translocal Ageing in the Global East
Deljana Iossifova
Translocal Ageing
in the Global East
Bulgaria’s Abandoned Elderly
Deljana Iossifova
Urban Studies
University of Manchester
Manchester, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-60822-4 ISBN 978-3-030-60823-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60823-1
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A
cknowledgements
Many people have helped to develop this book over the past five or so
years. First and foremost, my thanks are due to the older people in Bulgaria
who agreed to share their time, life histories and everyday lives as partici-
pants in the research.
Many thanks to the University of Manchester for the small grant that
allowed me to do the project in the first place; the extraordinarily talented
Elena Balabanska, who worked with me in the field; Alan Lewis, who pro-
vided helpful insights at the start of the project; Evgeny Bely and the
devoted social workers who allowed me to be part of their communities
for a short while; and the generous Ginka Hadjieva, who introduced me
to many of the older people whose lives are the subject of this book.
Thanks to colleagues at the Antwerp Urban Studies Institute and Stijn
Oosterlynck, in particular, for stimulating conversations during the early
stages of research.
My special thanks are due to the inspirational Clara Greed, Anna
Plyushteva and Tim Schwanen who read the full manuscript and offered
very helpful critical feedback and advice. The exceptionally brilliant Qi Liu
and Yahya Gamal provided comments that helped me see the forest for the
trees. Thanks also to the remarkable Sarah Marie Hall, as well as Debapriya
Chakrabarti and Joe Shaw, who all commented on drafts of the chapters.
Thanks to Ali Browne—for being fabulous; introducing me, probably
unknowingly, to the most interesting of literatures; and, of course, for letting
us stay in her house during the pandemic so that we had room to breathe,
work and play.
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The book was commissioned by Palgrave’s Holly Tyler and seen
through to publication by Joshua Pitt—I am grateful to both for their
patience and unbroken support and understanding. Thanks also to Sophie
Li in Shanghai.
Thank you to my family. Thank you to Alma for keeping me company
throughout this journey, even before she was born; and to Amaya for smil-
ing and laughing, as she so often does, to brighten up dark Manchester days.
Most of all, thank you to my mother. Without her, this book would
have never materialised. She was part of the project in more ways than I
can list here, introducing me to friends and acquaintances during the ini-
tial stages of this research; offering insights into her life and experiences
under state socialism and after; and serving as a critical friend as I worked
through my interpretations of the material. So that I had space to think
and write, she helped looking after her granddaughters in the most fervent
and generous of ways, teaching them, in the process, how to be fierce and
fearless just like her. This book is for her.
c
ontents
1 I ntroduction: Ageing in Bulgaria 1
2 Lives in Broad Strokes: Navigating Transitions,
Disruptions and Uncertainty 35
3 Doing Everyday Life: Patterns, Resources and Adaptive
Mechanisms 63
4 Dislocating ‘Ageing in Place’: From Multi- local to
Transnational 99
5 Trajectories of Ageing: Learning (from) the Global East 129
Index 143
vii
l f
ist of igures
Fig. 1.1 The human ecosystem framework (based on Machlis et al. 1997) 14
Fig. 1.2 Population dynamics Sofia (Town) and the Village, 2002–2019.
(Source: NSI 2020) 20
Fig. 1.3 A typical house in the Village. (Photograph: Iossifova, 2016) 21
Fig. 1.4 Typical 1940s housing block in Zapaden Park, Sofia. (Photo:
Iossifova, January 2016) 23
Fig. 1.5 Aerial photograph of Sofia, showing the locations of the case
study areas: (a) Zapaden Park; (b) Vazrazhdane; and (c)
Lozenets. The concentric rings show the expansion of the city
before 1944 (darker) and during state socialism (lighter). Aerial
photograph derived from Google Maps in August 2020,
alteration by Iossifova. (Imagery ©2020 TerraMetrics, Map
data ©2020) 24
Fig. 3.1 A morning gathering of elderly men in the communal
park, part of their socialist-era housing complex. (Photograph:
Iossifova, March 2016) 70
Fig. 3.2 One of Sofia’s local pensioners’ clubs (right). The path to the
entrance is covered in snow. (Photograph: Iossifova,
January 2016) 71
Fig. 3.3 Lyubomir’s garden at the edge of the Village. (Photograph:
Iossifova, July 2016) 75
Fig. 3.4 Portraits—the television set in the homes of older people in
Bulgaria. (Photographs: Balabanska, 2016) 78
ix
x LIST OF FIGUrES
Fig. 3.5 Left: rositsa’s balance sheet, detailing her every expense in May
2016. For instance, 10.00 BGN milk; 12.20 BGN TV
subscription; 8.20 BGN groceries; 46.06 BGN medication;
41.95 BGN medication; 3.15 BGN filo pastry and bread; 27.70
BGN water; 20.36 BGN electricity. right: the menu of the
private food delivery service, offering four meal options for
every day of the week, with meals costing between 0.80 and
2.90 BGN. (Photographs: Iossifova, July 2016) 82
Fig. 3.6 Lyubomir (87) still goes hiking every weekend to collect herbs,
seen here drying on a newspaper in his home. (Photograph:
Iossifova, July 2016) 86
Fig. 3.7 Tsvetelina’s living/bedroom—the ‘through-room’ which her
adult live-in sons have to pass to get to their bedrooms.
(Photograph: Balabanska, July 2016) 87
Fig. 3.8 Panelki—Bulgaria’s interpretation of prefabricated housing.
(Photograph: Iossifova, March 2016) 90
Fig. 3.9 The room with the heat source is usually the only occupied
room in the house. Here, the wood-burning stove in
Tsvetanka’s kitchen/living room/bedroom. (Photograph:
Iossifova, July 2016) 93
Fig. 4.1 Stairs leading to/from a metro station in Sofia. Lifts have been
provided or are being retrofitted according to EU regulations,
but many are dysfunctional, leaving people with mobility issues
challenged. (Photograph: Iossifova, March 2016) 106
Fig. 4.2 ‘The square’ at the centre of the Village. ‘The bus’ is seen
waiting for passengers. (Photograph: Iossifova, July 2016) 108
Fig. 4.3 One of the entrances to an apartment building in Sofia; this
entrance is boarded up to block access to the building’s
stairwell. Many of the apartments in the building are no longer
occupied. (Photograph: Iossifova, March 2016) 111
Fig. 4.4 A table set for afternoon tea during summer in the Village. It
includes a choice of ‘banitsa’ (filo pastry) and cake and the
ubiquitous home-made jam. Milk and eggs are usually bought
from local farmers or even the product of own cows or hens.
During winter, the choice is often reduced to the bare
minimum. (Photograph: Iossifova, July 2016) 114
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Ageing in Bulgaria
Abstract In this chapter, Iossifova offers a brief introduction to Bulgaria’s
recent history and the political and socioeconomic transitions that have
led to the main challenges facing the country today: a rapidly shrinking
and ageing population due to the unprecedented outmigration of younger
generations in search of better livelihoods. Iossifova reviews the recent
literature on ageing in human geography and related disciplines, including
notions of ‘ageing in place’, age-relationality and the frameworks of inter-
sectionality, intergenerationality and the lifecourse. She introduces the
human ecosystem framework and discusses the grounded theory approach
taken, including interviews, observation and autoethnography. She then
moves on to present the case study areas in Sofia and the Village in the
Bulgarian Balkans. She closes in outlining the structure of the book.
Keywords Bulgaria • Ageing population • Human ecosystem
framework • ‘Ageing in place’ • Age-relationality • Global East •
Post-socialism
I grew up in Sofia. I was the youngest member of a household which, at
that time, consisted of my father, mother, older brother and maternal
grandmother. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment: my brother and I
slept in the bedroom, my parents on a sofa bed in the living room and my
grandmother in the kitchen. My parents would leave for work and my
© The Author(s) 2020 1
D. Iossifova, Translocal Ageing in the Global East,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60823-1_1
