The Smolyan village of Chamla, whose lands were bought by billionaire Vasil Bozhkov, has said goodbye to hopes of a new revival. To escape detention, the businessman, who fled to Dubai, bought 627 decares from the village abandoned by his residents through his real estate company “Property VB”. According to locals, the fat businessman would build a holiday village with hunting grounds for the rich, but there is no development. His agents promised to even open a road to the village. At the moment, however, no request has been made to do anything in the area.
“Bozhkov is now thinking about how to get rid of justice and save his profitable businesses, he can’t think of Chamla and his revival at all,” locals commented.
Chamla was the highest settlement in Bulgaria at 1600 meters. The village has been depopulated since the late 80s. The village has existed for 74 years. According to a plaque, 14 genera lived there. The last resident left in 1984. However, Chamla has not been deleted from the map, by the NSI and GRAO.
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“We don’t know that these lands belong to the billionaire Vasil Bozhkov, he must have been crazy to take this wasteland,” said Roma who settled in abandoned houses in the village of Chamla. They cut wood in the area and, instead of making nylon tents for shelter, spread to the dilapidated homes of the locals. One by one they tell of wild animals they saw around. “Yesterday I cut down spruce, today I found traces of a bear,” said Stoyan from Velingrad. A few years ago, a fellow logger from Rakitovo was thrown 8 meters by an angry bear in the area during an attack. Kezim Drikov, 28, lost his speech for a while, but escaped by climbing a tree.
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In addition to Roma, there are about 100 wild horses in the area. “They graze mainly on Bozhkov’s properties, but they make big whites on our farm,” they say in the neighboring village of Mugla. The horses were released from Devin villages on the other side of the mountain.
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The vast meadows and mountain slopes in the former village were investigated by the Smolyan prosecutor’s office. The reason for investigators to run to the almost inaccessible place is requested money from the EU for subsidies with false documents. The company “Property – UK” applied for subsidies for the absorption of funds under the scheme for a single area payment and payments for natural constraints to farmers in mountainous areas, financed by EU funds. According to the registers, the billionaire Vasil Bozhkov is 100% owner of “Property VB” at that time. The subject of the investigation was that the company indicated in the submitted general application for support areas in the land of the village of Chamla, which are not owned and used on a legal basis by the company. The reason is that not all areas had documents with which the company could certify that it had the right to use them.
The company under investigation bought the lands of the people from Chamla in 2006 and 2007. The average price was about BGN 1,000 per decare, which is a lot for land of 10 categories, brokers comment.
“My family has scattered a total of about 150 acres in the land of Chamla, now they are abandoned because access is very difficult. As heirs, we sold a small part of them to Vasil Bozhkov,” said the famous Smolyan artist Valeri Panicharov.
At the time of their sale, the status of these lands was temporarily municipal property, as their real rulers had abandoned them and had to reclaim and form them. According to the artist, there is hardly any intent to defraud when submitting the documents for EU subsidies by the owner. Either it was an inaccuracy in the survey of the land, or small overlaps with other owners. Panicharov’s grandfather was the first settler in 1910 in Chamla, because his house in the neighboring village of Mugla, where he lived, burned down and was followed by others, thus settling in a place over 1650 meters – the highest in all of Bulgaria. There was a school, electricity, electricity, a dirt road, even telephones. Now there is none of the mentioned benefits. Even mobile phones have no range.
Power cords and telephones have been stolen. Wooden poles cut. Almost all the houses are now without roofs, as the tiles have either been dismantled by the owners or have been stolen long ago. Only the cooperative building and the school partially survived. Access to Chamla is possible only by horse, mule or high jeep, which must have a 4 by 4 drive.
In 2002 the building of the former school was donated by the Municipality of Smolyan for 10 years for the purposes of the project “Kingdom of Chamla”, which is a long-term initiative of the Foundation “Destination Bulgaria”, in cooperation with the Soros Center for Arts – Sofia, Art and Culture “of the Open Society Institute – Budapest and the Youth Program of the European Commission. The idea is for Chamla to be an ecovillage whose residents have to take care of their own livelihood. They planned to watch cows, goats and chickens and ride horses and mules. The ecovillage was to be attended by young artists from different nationalities, whose preference is to create art in the wild – artists, photographers, artists, musicians.
Two foreigners – first the Frenchman Olivier Luic from Paris, and the following year the Spaniard Oscar Correa from Granada – spent a successful winter in the abandoned village to demonstrate psyche and stoicism in living without the benefits of civilization.
For several years now, neither Bulgarian artists nor foreign hermits have set foot in Chamla. The school where the Roma are now housed has broken windows, in some places all the windows are missing and the doors are broken.
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