Point 51 Magazine UK

Into the Valley of Roses How Bulgaria built a national symbol around the rose – and why it might lose it.

J O D I H I LT O N A N D M A R T I N D M I T R O V

HUDDLED BETWEEN THE SOARING Balkan Mountain massif and the lower, smoother curves of the Sredna Gora ridge, fields stretch out far into the distance. It is late May, rose harvest season in central Bulgaria. The previous afternoon, we – a Bulgarian journalist and an American photographer – drove east from the capital, Sofia, to observe the rose harvest and rose festival celebrations. As the dawn sky slowly turns from black to a deep dusty blue, sunlight peeks out from behind the mountains and the first light of the day reveals row upon row of rose bushes. Just visible through the mist, we can make out the shadows of workers, moving methodically as they grasp and pluck, grasp and pluck, filling their bags with handfuls of dew-covered flowers.

This harvest produces one of Bulgaria’s most precious commodities. The unique microclimate of this pristine valley provides ideal conditions for the Rosa Damascena – the “Rose of Damascus” – an ode to its probable origins. In the late spring, their petals produce one of the world’s most sought-after and expensive essential oils.

Many have tried to replicate these conditions elsewhere – from Romania to France to China – but none rival the Rose Valley. The genus requires conditions that are as fickle as they are precise. Only the combination of fertile soil watered by the spring that flows from the nearby mountain, and the specific levels of humidity and heat that exist here for a few short weeks in May and June, will satisfy it and produce such exquisite-smelling and productive yields.

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Often nicknamed ‘Bulgarian gold’, the market rate has at times reached €12,000 per kilo. suming to produce, but the potential profits can far outweigh the initial costs. In 2018, the global rose oil market was worth $278.7 million and was on track to expand, according to a market analysis report.

Often nicknamed “Bulgarian gold”, the market rate has at times reached €12,000 per kilo, and Bulgaria – a country of just seven million people – is the world’s most important producer.

Rose oil exports make up only a fraction of the country’s total essential oil production – Bulgaria recently overtook France as the top producer of lavender oil – but the symbolic importance of the Bulgarian rose industry has always meant at least as much to the country and its people as the economic benefits it brings.

As the sun rises, the dew that has gathered on the flowers begins to warm and a sweet fragrance wafts up through the air. “It’s roses, roses all the way,” the jubilant narrator from a British Pathé film exclaimed in a 1965 reel about Bulgaria. “The Valley of Roses: there is no other rosy valley like this in the whole wide world.”

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THE ROSE VALLEY stretches from the historic rebel town of Karlovo in the west, birthplace of Bulgarian revolutionary hero Vasil Levski who led the rebellion against Ottoman rule, to Kazanlak in the east, an industrial centre known for manufacturing Kalashnikov assault rifles. In a country that ranks among the poorest of the European Union’s member states, these two 36 . Point.51

In 1903 the city of Kazanlak organised its first Rose Festival, an annual event which grew to national significance when a railway line connected the city to the capital Sofia in the 1930s. The Rose of Damascus was made the national brand of the country under the Bulgarian Communist Party, and the Bulgarian rose industry continues to thrive today as both a prized export sent out to other countries and as a cultural attraction drawing in visitors.

The annual rose festival, which includes a “carnival” parade, exhibitions and performances, culminates with the procession and coronation of the Rose Queen and draws tourists from across Bulgaria and around the world. Local women, wearing colourful folk dresses, re-enact the traditional harvest: they pluck roses and fill their handwoven baskets, occasionally flinging petals in the air to the delight of photo-snapping spectators. Their pointed-toe pigskin shoes daintily brush against the soft earth as they perform a traditional horo dance against a backdrop of rose bushes. Sturdy-looking men wearing embroidered shirts and woolly hats called kalpak collect the women and their harvest in the back of a horse-drawn cart, and together they travel a short distance to an antique fire-powered distillery to demonstrate the distillation process.

long-standing exports – guns and roses – have made Bulgaria’s Rose Valley one of the country’s wealthiest regions.

Rose essential oil (known as otto or attar) is the distilled essence of rose petals and an essential ingredient in many of the world’s most exclusive perfumes and cosmetics, as well as spa treatments, pharmaceuticals, foods, and aromatherapies. It is expensive and time con-

Above: Young Bulgarians dressed in folk costumes celebrate the rose harvest as part of the “rose picking ritual”.

Right: The city of Kazanluk celebrates the rose harvest each spring with a series of events, including a parade and a rose product market.

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The prominence of the rose in Bulgaria reaches well beyond the rose valley itself. Most Bulgarian souvenir shops sell all manner of rose products: tiny wooden vials of rose oil, bottles of clear rose water, shockingly pink bars of rose petal soaps, rose-oil creams and rosewater lotion, and postcards showing fair-skinned, traditionally-dressed Bulgarian women posing in rose fields. Missing from the postcards are the agricultural workers who make all this possible.

There is a saying in Bulgaria: “Nyama roza bez bodli”. There’s no rose without thorns.

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EARLY ONE MORNING in May 2020, well before sunrise, we wait in the brightly lit forecourt of a gas station near the town of Pavel Banya in the Rose Valley. Behind us is the hulking Mount Botev, the highest peak of the Balkan Mountains.

At the appointed time, an enormous yellow truck rolls up, and Metody Stefanov, tall and burly, climbs down from the cab to greet us. Together with his brother Dimiter, Metody owns and runs Intermed, a company that claims to be the biggest producer of organic rose essential oil in Bulgaria. The Stefanov brothers have 400 hec-

Above: A team of workers arrives at dawn to pick roses for the Intermed Distillery near the village of Pavel Banya in the Valley of the Roses.

Overleaf: Folk dancers perform for tourists during one of several “rose picking rituals” performed in and around the city of Kazanluk as part of the annual Rose Festival.

tares of farmland on which they grow and distil fifteen different herbs and flowers including lavender, chamomile, melissa, and yarrow. But roses, which occupy about a third of their land, are their speciality.

We squeeze together into the truck’s cab.

Metody shoves the engine into gear and manoeuvrers the vehicle along a dark, lonely highway.

The sun is yet to rise when we turn off the main road through a gap in the shrubbery, and the truck’s monstrous tires bounce effortlessly along a bumpy dirt path until we come to a stop. As we climb down from the cab, the cool damp air hits us. Through the darkness, we can hear rustling sounds and hushed conversation. The pickers have already started the day’s harvest.

There is no mechanised way to harvest roses: every flower must be carefully picked by hand, and each day these workers take on a race against time, working to pluck roses while the petals are still coated with drops of dew, before the latespring sun dries out the fields for the day.

This group of pickers is from Sliven, a city 100 kilometres east of the Rose Valley. Among them is Penka Stefanova, her uncle Bozhidar Ahmedov, and cousin Nikola Kolev. They tell us they live in Nadezhda (which means “hope”), an impoverished ghetto where the majority of residents are ethnic Roma. Penka says she has to wake up at 3am in order to meet the van that transports the workers from Sliven to the rose fields. “Whoever could sleep in the van did it. But it’s hard with his driving,” she says, glaring at their driver.

Like Penka’s group, the majority of the seasonal workers now come from one of the country’s main minority groups: Bulgarian Turks and Roma, who collectively make up the Bulgarian underclass. Today, few Bulgarians are willing to do this tiring and poorly paid work. But it was not always this way. Bulgaria was under the control of the Bulgarian Communist Party for much of the twentieth century, and the efforts of the Communists to centralise the economy brought changes to the rose industry. Distilleries were nationalised and a state marketing enterprise for the rose industry was created: Bulgarska Roza, or Bulgarian Rose. “Socialism was pretty bad in many ways”, Marco Buzzetti, an Italian historian who settled in Bulgaria told us as he guided us through the Rose Museum in Kazanlak. “But it shaped the image of the rose as a national product.”

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The Bulgarian state established the rose as a national symbol in order to differentiate the country from other in the socialist world. “The rose was a powerful symbol and the rose industry was the major export industry that Bulgaria had at the time,” Nadia Kaneva, a professor at University of Denver who researches nation branding, explained over the phone. The other was arms manufacturing. “The difference was that the guns were only sold in the Soviet bloc, whereas the rose was sold in the West and was generating Western currency for the Bulgarian government.”

In the 1960s, an official holiday around the rose harvest was introduced, and the symbol of the rose drew tourists from both sides of the Iron Curtain. Agricultural work was glorified by the state, and those working in the fields – including pickers – were usually a representative mix of people from across Bulgarian society.

But when the communist era came to an end in 1989, things changed. Income disparity increased exponentially: as a share of total income across the country, the earnings of the bottom 42 . Point.51

half of Bulgarian workers fell from a peak of 32.5 per cent in 1987 to just 19.4 per cent in 1995.

Meanwhile the income share for the top 10 per cent more than doubled over the same period, and the gap has widened further since. According to data from Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics office, in 2019 Bulgaria had the highest income inequality of any EU member state.

Before heading into the fields, pickers dress in layers that can be shed as the temperatures begin to rise. Young people favour well-worn tracksuits or sweatshirts while the older women tend to wear baggy Turkish-style shalwar pants.

Above: A horse-drawn cart waits to transport harvested roses to the weighing station. Very few producers still use horse carts; the majority collect bags of rose petals by lorry.

Opposite: Folk dancers wait out a downpour in a Kazanluk restaurant; Smaller producers sometimes use their own vehicles to transport bags of rose petals to the distillery, including this Russian-produced Lada.

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In place of the crowns of roses on view at the rose celebration in Kazanlak, they don baseball hats or tie their hair back with flowered scarfs.

Their fingers, pricked and crisscrossed with small cuts from the thorny bushes, peek through the holes in their worn gloves.

After each round of picking, one of the team members – usually the one best at arithmetic – records their haul. In this group that is Sabri, a young man in a black tracksuit. Next to the van, he weighs each bag on a set of portable scales and scribbles the precise weight of each bag of roses in a notebook beside the name of each picker – Bozhidar – 8 kg, 12 kg, 10.5 kg; Nadezhda – 9 kg, 9.7 kg. Then Metody, his boss and the company’s owner, tosses the heavy bags into the back of the truck.

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LIKE MANY BULGARIANS, most of Penka’s group worked abroad until the Covid-19 pandemic forced them to pack their bags and return home. Nikola was employed as a kitchen porter in a takeaway diner in Germany. Bozhidar worked as a welder on ski lifts in the Austrian Alps. During the winter, Penka stacked the shelves in a SPAR supermarket in southern Italy, and in the summer she harvested tomatoes. In Europe, “you know what you work for”, Penka tells us, adding that she sometimes made €40 a day in Italy.

But when Covid-19 struck Europe in March 2020, businesses were shuttered and many regions went into “lockdown”. Freedom of movement was limited and almost all commercial activities were suspended. “Many [of these workers] were not working with contracts,” Krasimir Kirilov, a Roma rights advocate and ethnic Roma from Sliven, explains. “If they didn’t have regular income and couldn’t apply for unemployment, they had to come back to Bulgaria.”

It is impossible to know the true number of people who have previously worked abroad, and have had to return to Bulgaria, Krasimir tells us. Some of those who came home have already returned to Western Europe; but still others have been forced to return to Bulgaria, if only temporarily, to find work.

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ing without the protections offered by formal employment, Krasimir explains. He believes this way of doing things benefits employers, but it is also bound up with the uncertainty of predicting how the season will go. Krasimir knows some of the rose pickers from Sliven, who he says are often-times experienced and skilled. But rose picking is now viewed by most people as among the least desirable jobs going in Bulgaria. With earnings so deeply dependent on the market, it offers little security in return for tough, strenuous work.

“In my opinion, there is definitely exploitation, but that is not the way that most of the Roma see it. For many of them, [daily] survival is important,” says Krasimir. He goes on to explain that for many workers, their focus is on the immediate future. If they work, they will have something to eat; and if they don’t, they will go hungry.

Workers who earned about €0.50 per kilo of harvested roses in 2018 were offered just €0.10 in 2020, as the market for rose oil went into steep decline. An experienced picker like Penka Stefanova usually earns up to €10 per day, bringing in bags totalling about 100 kilos. Even her uncle Bozhidar, who enjoys teasing and joking with the other pickers, admits: “It’s a tough, thankless job.”

Meanwhile, owners like Dimiter explain that it is now tough to find enough workers to bring in the rose harvest at all.

As dawn turns to day, the harsh sun dries the dew off the rose petals, reducing the amount of oil that can be extracted. Historically, the midday sun overhead signalled the end of the day’s picking. But nowadays, as owners rush to bring in the petal harvest with fewer workers, teams often continue working well into the afternoon.

When the market price for rose oil goes down, so does the amount owners can afford to pay the workers, says Dimiter. “This is a problem,” he explains. “Many don’t want to pick.”

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AT THE END OF A DUSTY ROAD in the nearby settlement of Manolovo is the Intermed distillery. Inside the gates, the cloying scent of roses lingers in the damp midday air. Here, bags of roses are unloaded from trucks – including those harvested by Penka’s group, as well as

others brought in from nearby fields – where they are weighed again and registered. The bags are then fed into the mouths of large, steaming copper stills, the oldest of which has been in operation for as long as the distillery itself, dating back to its founding a century ago. Others were installed in the 1960s, while the most recent were added by the Stefanovs who purchased and revived the distillery in 1997. The site had long been disused when they took it over. “It hadn’t been running for ten years. I had to restart everything,” Dimiter explains.

After boiling water is poured over the roses, workers close the heavy metal doors with a loud thud and the distillation process begins. The heated combination of water and petals creates a vapour which includes the flower’s essential oil.

That vapor then moves through a series of tubes which make up the condenser, turning the vapor into liquid. As the ingredients slowly cool, they

Above: Metody Stefanov, centre, co-owner of Intermed Distillery, uses string to tie up the bags of roses brought in by teams of pickers.

finally enter a clear glass tank. The precious oil – lighter than water – floats to the surface where it can be skimmed off.

It takes four tons of rose petals to produce one kilo of precious organic rose oil, explains Georgi Anastasov, the distillery’s long-time technologist.

Dressed in clean overalls and a lab coat, Georgi and Metody lead us down a set of stairs. We reach a locked door with a sign on it that reads: “NO ENTRY EXCEPT THE TECHNOLOGIST.” Inside is a highly sanitized room full of modern laboratory equipment. Every day, under Metody’s watchful eye, Georgi carefully pours and evaluates the previous day’s production of precious oil into a glass bottle before tying it carefully closed with a string. During the rose-production season the company produces roughly 400 kilos of rose oil, one third of which is certified as organic.

The bottle and its contents, sealed with a hot wax stamp and accompanied by a signed certificate of quality, will be stored in a locked deposit box until it is ready to be transported to the buyer. “With roses, every detail matters, from the growing and picking to the end of the production. All of this is important for yield and quality,” Dimiter explains.

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Enio Bonchev Distillery in Tarnicheni, a village in the Valley of the Roses.

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WHILE WORKERS OFTEN COMPLAIN about the low wages they receive for a day’s labour, the owners of the fields and distilleries have troubles of their own. “This is a bad year for rose oil production,” Metody tells us, when we meet in the spring of 2020, as both the weather and the Covid-19 pandemic created serious problems for the industry. “It was too cold too late into the spring which makes for a bad harvest,” he explains. “Demand from the perfume industry has plummeted after the airports were closed,” Metody says, and the decline in perfume and cosmetics sales has been felt down the supply chain. The price of rose oil took a nosedive: from an all-time high of €12,000 per litre just a few years before, the price dropped to below €5000 in 2020.

The impact of the pandemic has exposed more long-standing problems in the sector too.

The Bulgarian government has been criticised by more established producers for not acting as a gatekeeper for prospective rose growers, and regulating more tightly the quality of the produce. Metody told us that the rising value of rose oil in the years before the pandemic led many newcomers to enter the industry in the hope of making a quick profit. “All of a sudden we had everybody turning their plot into a rose garden,” Metody says. This influx of new production resulted in lower quality rose oil flooding the market, Metody says, and has put the reputation of Bulgarian rose oil at risk.

Since then, things have gone from bad to worse.

BGNES, a Bulgarian news agency, reported that growers have destroyed more than 100 hectares of rose fields due to the dramatic drop in prices.

Existing stocks of oil (estimated at 5 to 6 tonnes) produced as far back as 2019 have remained unsold and are spoiling, rose grower Slavi Staykov told Agroclub.bg., adding that subpar oil from roses other than Rose of Damascus have diluted the quality and reputation of Bulgarian exports.

Venelin Velikov, another grower, speculated that the whole Bulgarian essential oil production sector may be headed towards bankruptcy. “We are at the bottom,” Dimiter tells us. “When everything starts back up again, the market should go up again.”

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MORE THAN THREE DECADES since the end of communism in Bulgaria, and even longer since the symbol of the rose was made to define Bulgaria and Bulgarian-ness, one anthem endures. “Edna Balgarska Roza” (“One Bulgarian Rose”) was singer Pasha Hristova’s big hit in 1970 and was recently voted “song of the last century” in a poll by Bulgarian National Television.

Good evening, my young friend, Good evening, comrade Welcome to our town, Welcome to Bulgaria On this beautiful day, Take one Bulgarian rose from me It will tell you with a fragrant voice About the Balkan and the Seaside, and about all of us All of us…

Above: Bozhidar Ahmedov picks roses for Intermed, under the supervision of co-owner Metody Stefanov.

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