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https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/nov/28/great-abandonment-what-happens-natural-world-people-disappear-bulgaria>
"Abandonment, when it came, crept in from the outskirts. Homes at the edge of
town were first to go, then the peripheral grocery stores. It moved inward,
slow but inexorable. The petrol station closed, and creeper vines climbed the
pumps, amassing on the roof until it buckled under the strain. It swallowed the
outer bus shelters, the pharmacies, the cinema, the cafe. The school shut down.
Today, one of the last institutions sustaining human occupation in Tyurkmen, a
village in central Bulgaria, is the post office. Dimitrinka Dimcheva, a
56-year-old post officer, still keeps it open two days a week, bringing in
packages of goods that local shops no longer exist to sell. Once a thriving
town of more than 1,200, Tyurkmen is now home to fewer than 200 people.
On a warm spring afternoon, Dimcheva stood in the town square. “The weddings
took place here, all of the folk dances, the volleyball. There were lots of
young people. A pool,” she said. She gazed around, pointing to ruins or
now-empty spaces where buildings once stood, remembering. There, the building
that housed a small cinema. Behind it, the space for a school that burned down,
was rebuilt, then closed. “Life was bubbling.” Now, she said, “life in the
villages is dying”.
Thousands of similar villages are scattered across Bulgaria. After the fall of
communism, people flocked to the cities in search of work, and over the next 30
years many villages emptied to the point of obliteration. As of the 2021
census, almost 300 villages were completely abandoned, and more than 1,000 had
populations below 30 – most of them very elderly. With its low birthrates and
high rates of emigration, Bulgaria has been emptying out for decades. Its
population has dropped from close to 9 million in 1989, to fewer than 6.5
million – one of the worst peacetime population declines in modern history.
Bulgaria lies at the extreme end of this kind of demographic change, but the
forces reshaping it are acting everywhere. Over the past half century, the
global portion of people living in rural areas has decreased by almost a third.
Farming is becoming increasingly industrial and concentrated. More than half of
all people now live in and around cities, and that figure is expected to rise
to 70% by 2050. In many countries, birthrates are dropping steadily, and while
the global population is projected to keep growing until 2080, around half of
that growth is being driven by fewer than 10 countries."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
