Emigration from Bulgaria. Please don’t (all) go

Date: 08/02/03

Too many of the brightest, youngest and best are leaving

MORE than a decade has passed since the peak of emigration from Bulgaria following communism's fall, but many of the country's most enterprising and best-educated young are still keen to seek a life abroad. Despite qualifying as economists, engineers or philologists, many of them end up - at least to start with - in menial jobs on farms or in hotels abroad. Yet the messages they send home are often surprisingly cheery, leaving their contemporaries who have stayed behind with a sense of missed opportunity and even abandonment.

Bulgaria's National Statistics Institute puts gross annual emigration since 1995 at an average of 50,000 - around 0.6% of the current population of 8m. Some 40,000 Bulgarians are estimated to be living in Britain alone; demand for visas is still growing. Many newspapers in Bulgaria advertise “guaranteed visa” services, often fraudulent, on which some applicants are prepared to spend up to six months' wages. A recent survey of students in Sofia, Bulgaria's capital, suggested that 15% of them planned to leave the country, but in smaller towns and in the countryside the figure is probably much higher.

Take Troyan, a town of 25,000 some 120km (75 miles) east of Sofia. Unusually, most of its factories have stayed open, though they run at a reduced capacity and take on very few new workers. For those lucky enough find a job, wages are low: a schoolteacher's starting salary is around €100 ($108) a month. The town's cinemas and nightclubs have all closed. Social life is virtually nil. Returning to Troyan after graduating, Miroslav and Miroslava Tsankova, an engineer and a language teacher, found a gloomy social void: all but a couple of their old circle of friends had gone abroad; not a single one of them was planning to come back.

Seemingly cut off from the bulk of Europe for much of the 1990s by the war in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria has missed the first wave of countries expected to join the European Union next year. The loss of qualified people may further reduce its chances of catching up.

• Primary Source