Sarah Craycraft’s The Village Project: Rural Revitalization in Contemporary Bulgaria is the result of long-term field research conducted from 2017 to 2024, with an intensive period between the summer of 2019 and the autumn of 2020. Craycraft carried out this research within the associative and civic environment in Bulgaria, focusing on rural revitalization during the post-socialist period, particularly following Bulgaria’s accession to the European Union in 2007.

Folklorist and lecturer at Harvard University, Craycraft arrived in Bulgaria in 2017 through NGOs involved in rural revitalization. One of these NGOs, Fabrika za Idei (Ideas Factory), provided her with essential support in approaching her research topic and engaging with everyday Bulgarian life. Founded in 2006 by a group of enthusiastic young people with left-wing political orientations seeking to promote political themes such as social justice, climate change, access to culture, and urban decentralization, Fabrika za Idei has partnered with a more recent organization, Rezidentsiya Baba (Granny Residence). Founded in 2015 by Yanina Taneva, co-founder and director of Fabrika, Rezidentsiya Baba channels its energy into promoting projects that revitalize the Bulgarian countryside. Unlike Fabrika za Idei, which primarily addresses the national public, Rezidentsiya Baba has developed rural revitalization projects in various regions of Bulgaria, including the northwest, one of the poorest and most depopulated parts of the country. Its activists, like those of Fabrika za Idei, are young people from the latest generation, enthusiastic about projects to revitalize the Bulgarian countryside. Thus, in addition to the anthropological research conducted within the organizational climate of the two NGOs, Craycraft also extended her investigation to localities, villages, and small towns in northwestern Bulgaria among the local populations involved in the projects of both NGOs.

Arriving with the romanticized vision of the North American, Craycraft confesses in the introduction to the volume the surprise and difficulty of adapting to what is considered a village in contemporary Bulgaria (p.14). However, after some time, life in the village became commonplace. Hosted by a young Bulgarian couple known in London, Craycraft is amazed by their versatility in navigating different cultural environments within a short time: London, where the two are students; Sofia, the capital, where they are active in civil society; and the native village of one of them, connected through networks of relatives and friends (p.16). Beyond these lively vignettes, the author also presents in the introduction the recent social and political context of Bulgaria, including the prolonged political crisis, which paradoxically did not interrupt the projects of the two NGOs. Craycraft also approaches and contextualizes concepts such as neoliberalism, folklore/folklife/cultural heritage, authenticity, revival, and revitalization. The author focuses on the latter concepts, which capture the novelty and research interest of the projects carried out by Fabrika za idei and Rezidentsiya Baba. While the concept of revival (vazrazhdane) is rooted in Bulgarian history and culture, being linked to the period of gaining independence from the Ottoman Empire, the 19th – 20th centuries, revitalization (sazhvyavane) represents a unique phenomenon of cultural reconstitution whose actors belong to the younger generation, representatives of civil society such as those from Fabrika za idei and Rezidentsiya Baba (pp. 29 – 30).

The constitution of this generation is presented in the next section, chapter 1 of the volume, “The Children of Postsocialism. A Generation Encounters the Village.” Although born after the fall of socialism, the young generation was strongly influenced by the processes of destructuring family relations in the years before 1990, notes Craycraft. The industrial mobilization of those years also meant diminishing the crucial role of parents in raising and educating children, projecting the persons of grandparents, especially grandmother (baba) in the foreground. Moreover, as most of them lived in villages that were then full of life, the rural space, particularly, the “old country house”/stara kashta, became a symbol of authenticity and at the same time a vital space. The post-1990 generation grew up with these existential landmarks that were forcefully impregnated, all the more so as Bulgarian villages massively depopulated, houses emptied and became ruins. The post-socialism world, the author notes, was built inside the ruins of the socialist era. Thus, following Anna Tsing’s idea, “ruins are our gardens” (p. 41), the revitalization of the rural world in Bulgaria becomes possible, and the young generation, combining nostalgia with play, “play among ruins,” is the actor of this revitalization.

The following chapters present the ways in which members of this generation carry out their projects. While Chapter 2 presents cases of “new villagers,” families and young couples who have decided to move from urban areas to abandoned villages, Chapters 3 – 6 describe and analyze the projects of the two NGOs mentioned above. Involved in these projects, the “new villagers” seek authentic ways of life by reconciling heritage, modernity, and rurality. In Chapter 2, the ethnographic details and quotes from interviews with fifteen “new villagers,” who moved after 2011 to rural areas (p. 60) allow the author to shed light on the process of adaptation and insertion of these newcomers in rural areas. Craycraft calls this process “sifting,” a slow and careful negotiation of values, ideas, and practices between newcomers and locals, following this process alongside three facets: refashioning the home and land, building new skills, and navigating social relations.

The next four chapters follow the common path of Fabrika za idei and Rezidentsiya baba, with a focus on the emergence, growth, and possible autonomy of the latter association. In Chapter 3, the author describes the simple but highly productive technique of project development, which consisted of selecting a number of volunteers willing to spend a certain period in selected villages to try to adapt and revitalize local traditions. Craycraft was also involved, but as a field researcher, she limited herself to observing everyday life and conducting interviews with civic activists, “newcomers,” and locals. After repeating these experiences over several years, including the pandemic year 2020, two communities of newcomers appeared in the villages of northwestern Bulgaria, metaphorically named by the project coordinators Selo Nazaem (Borrowed Village) and Priemi Me Na Selo (Accept Me in the Village). Projects of this kind are innovative and locally rooted, says Craycraft, placing them in contrast with the “neoliberal projectification” on which funding from international bodies, including the European Union, is based. In addition, ideas such as revival, cultural heritage, authenticity, and Bulgarianness are also examined from the perspective of these innovative projects.

The next two chapters are descriptive and aim to exemplify the concepts and interpretation noted above. Chapter 4 presents a project carried out with the participation of international artists in 2020 in Deleyna, a village of the Romanian-speaking population from northwestern Bulgaria, in which the ability of art tools to radically change village life was pursued. Next, chapter 5 tells about a project carried out since 2015, the year of the founding of Rezidentsiya Baba, which consisted of the production and sale of handmade socks by grannies, a traditional occupation in Bulgaria. Craycraft aims in the chapter to illustrate the idea spread in the academic literature that handmade artifacts inspire authenticity and vitality compared to industrial products (p. 164). From the very beginning, the aim of the project was to support social entrepreneurship in villages, in addition to handmade socks, other traditional objects such as clothes, carpets, and shoes were produced, but the aim was not to obtain a financial profit but to connect and involve the extensive networks of rurals, on the one hand, and young “new villagers,” on the other hand.

The last chapter of the volume takes up the idea announced in Chapter 3, namely that projects to revitalize Bulgarian rurality stand out through “tactics of self-organization, slow activism, and attunement to local affect” (p.185), social resources that are preserved even after the financing “on the project/po proekt” has ended. These are present, Craycraft observes, in times of social crisis, such as the pandemic period or natural disasters, floods, for example. As an illustration, a campaign carried out in 2020 by the grannies of Rezidentsiya Baba promoting the hryan/a horseradish varietal, as a traditional medicine to strengthen immunity, is approached and analyzed. Other examples are also presented under the label of rural revitalization projects, the continuation of the Selo Zanaem community at its own expense, or the alleviating the catastrophic floods of 2022 in the villages of the Karlovo area.

Civil society is usually associated in the academic literature with the urban environment and participatory political and civic cultures. However, Sara Craycraft’s volume shows that civic participation and the carrying out of social projects also take place in rural environments, either as such or attached to rural cultural models. This is the first merit of Craycraft’s book. A second merit is the consistent and long-lasting fieldwork in a culture radically different and separated at least spatially from North American culture, the author’s culture. Finally, Craycraft’s book could serve as a model of analysis for the folklorists of the Southeastern European space themselves, still confined to a nationalist, ethnocentric, and past-biased model.

Stelu Şerban, Institute for South East Europe Studies, Romanian Academy, Bucharest