All the information we gathered was enabled thanks to these devoted vendors. Their stories touched us so we thought of sharing them with you!
Ivaylo Dunev
Ivaylo has been in the food industry for 10 years along with his wife, and he is being doing this in Pazara for two years. They grow their own products in Kresna, where they have a few plantations.
Big sales for them reach in spring,when they sell flowers the most, and they start planting in summer because everything has to be ready in less than a year. The business runs in the family for years. “It’s getting really hard as the years come by because of the youth of Blagoevgrad leaving the city. I think the main reason for this decline is meanly because there is no factories in the region so people have no jobs.”
Atixhe
Atige has been working working in Blagoevgrad’s Pazara for seven years. “Every year we get less and less clients. People don’t have money and they are going abroad, far from the rural zones”. She complained about the big supermarkets that nowadays take the most part of her old clients.
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Atige is from Yakoruda, a small city in the south west of Bulgaria. Since 2012 she drives for two hours, along with her son, from Yakoruda to Blagoevgrad every Wednesday and Friday. She wakes up at 2:30am so she can be in Blagoevgrad at 5am to start preparing her stand. She talked about the necessity of punctuality in the Pazara, where nobody is going to guarantee you a table for the day. “Normally everyone respect the place of each other, that is why I have never seen a fight. Only the new ones get into trouble sometimes when they don’t know how this works.” Atige has to pay 4,2 leva per table and per day to the Town Hall of Blagoevgrad, and she gets three of them.
She owns a small farm where she grows different animals in order to get her products. She has chicken for the eggs (PHOTO OF THE EGGS NEST), sheep, goats and cows for the cheese… For the fruit and vegetables, she collects them from a forest that is three hours away from her house. She prepares more than ten types of jam from different fruits (PICTURE OF JAM JARS), even pinecone jam (PICTURE OF PINECONE JAM).
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When asked about the brotherhood of the Pazara, Atige said that her stand neighbors are kind but they don’t help each other. “Everyone does for himself”.
Biliana Milinkova
Biliana sells vegetables and nuts in her stand of the Pazara of Blagoevgrad. “I´ve been working in the Pazara for three years. As a local, I´ve never imagined I would end up having a stand in the market, but for me there is no other way for making money to live.”
Biliana stressed about the harmony between the workers of the Pazara: “People around help each other. If I don´t have enough strawberries for a client, I let them know where they can find more in the Pazara. But of course, there is competition, that is something inevitable.”
She takes care of her orchard in Polkovnik, where she grows lettuce, tomatoes or strawberries. It was his husband´s idea to start growing fruits and vegetables, and she ended up being the one who sells them in the Pazara.
Dimitar Dunov
Dimitar has been trading fruits for forty years. His son used to transport tobacco to Albania, where he would drive buses and trucks. One of the many times he drove to Albania, the car broke. It happened in a very dangerous road with a high percentage of fatal accidents. “I was very lucky for surviving. After the accident, I decided to stop this business.”
Now his whole family, including his three sons, work for the food industry. They transport their own products to Sofia and furthermore, and their farms are located in Pernik. Also, there is one product that they supply from Albania (cabbage). However, their business is so big that they have their own employers that work in their farms.
Right before the birth of his youngest son he was cut from a food labor market provided by the government. They shot down all the farms, so Dimitar had to become innovative and create his own business enterprise.
Elena
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Elena is from Blagoevgrad and she has been working in Pazara for five years. Her parents live in Gotse Délchev, a city in the south of Bulgaria. She gets all her products from the garden that her parents have in their country house, and they are also the ones who take care of it and prepare the homemade products.
In the garden they used to have peppers, tomatoes, corn, beans, cucumber and lots of spices. Now, due to the difficulty of maintaining the garden, they are growing apples, peaches and cherries trees. She also sells ecological honey from the Slovianka mountains, where they also get tea from.
The customers in the picture are AUBG students.
Jani Jashk
Jani Jashk has been working all over Balkans before he came to Blagoevgrad. He spent 3 years working in Albania, 15 others in Greece and the last 40 years in this Pazara. All the materials you see he supplies leather and different types of metal himself and then shapes them into authentic bells and belts. Check them out at the gallery.
Nadezhda Hristova
She has been in the selling flowers industry for twenty years. She sells in Pazara and in Borsa, Sofia. Her farm equates 7 acres where she grows all kind of flowers. She works all the year but in winter is hard due to the weather conditions, so she has to provide artificial heating. The other lady you see in the picture is her very good friend. So now they try to help each other all the time, as working in Pazara might become very competitive.
When we told her we are students at AUBG she told us she used to be a psychology teacher at South West university, but when she found out she had cancer she decided to quit teaching and dedicate her life to her passions.
Lubuj
This particular guy is the only one that doesn't grow the products. He has his own firm where he buys and sell nearly all types of products Pazara provides. His firm is located in Borsa near Sofia. His opening hours differ from the rest of the farmers as keeps his corner opened everyday and even during night until 8 pm. There is always music playing in his background that is how you know you are getting closer to his "office".
