A Leap to the Unknown: Burgas, Bulgaria

By the Black Sea coast, 383km away from Sofia, is Burgas. A city that I had the chance to know fairly well and in which I lived for around one month. I arrived in Hug Burgas hostel as a volunteer thanks to their ad in Workaway to contribute with my skills as a social and cultural anthropologist. This by helping them taking pictures, as well as organizing spaces and events for refugees from Ukraine.

Soon I realized that they needed more help in renovating and adapting their areas to host those refugees, mainly women with their kids. My skills weren’t really needed. However, I decided to stay and learn about the hostel/NGO and its aims. Meanwhile, I learned how to put tiles in bathrooms and kitchens -skill that I wanted to acquire when I was a child so I could help my grandfather with the renovations done by him at his home, I organized some stuff here and there, painted some walls, and created a podcast with the founder of the place. We recorded four episodes.

Hug Burgas is located in a former boy scout’s terrain, with some buildings for them to have summer camps. It was around early 2015 when Evgeny recovered the land which was by then abandoned and also was, prior being used by the boy scout’s community, a terrain from his family. He decided to give use to the old buildings to create a hostel and, eventually, thanks to the contributions and ideas of the volunteers and guests, became a social regeneration hub, based upon the initiative MARCO (Mobility and Responsible Consumption).

Its flag project is Hug Wood. This aims to give a new chance to old wood, by recovering it either from recycle bins or the forest, based upon the value that poses wood itself and the amount of labor that is needed to transform it.

Here, old doors are now used to build a ceiling for one of the kitchens in the hostel. In the last pic, me, putting some tiles.

Would you like to know more? Check their website. I also encourage you to visit them and give them a hand.