BULGARIANS

Of the almost 8000 Bulgarians settled in Romania, around 6000 live in Banat. The most numerous are in Dudeștii Vechi, with almost 3000. Their ancestors crossed the Danube in 1688, starting from north-western Bulgaria after the anti-Ottoman uprising of Ciprovți. In 1738, some of them, Bulgarian Catholics, founded Old Beșenova (Stár Bišnov), which today is called Old Dudeștii.

Mr. Pavel Velciov, a native of Dudești, told us about their history and traditions. The Bulgarians of Dudești were skilled gardeners and farmers and worked their land with great zeal. When they arrived on the site where the village stands today, the then governor of the region gave them land and seeds. The Bulgars did well and prospered. By the interwar period, the village numbered almost 7000 inhabitants – they had nice houses, animals, and machinery.

The Bulgarians of Dudești are Catholics, and together with those of north-western Bulgaria, represent a unique community. They use the Latin alphabet and speak a vernacular language, with influences from German, Hungarian, Romanian, and Serbo-Croatian. South of the Danube, they are known as the Banatian Bulgarians. They have always emphasized education and spirituality.  The village church was built in 1804 in a neo-baroque style. Sundays were dedicated to God. There was no work, and customs were closely linked to the Catholic faith. At Christmas, children went out caroling and the choir performed a play whose characters were two angels (singing) and three shepherds (discussing the birth of the Saviour).

In Dudești, perhaps less known today, was born Carol Telbisz, mayor of Timișoara for almost three decades (1885-1914), who is today considered to be the main architect of the modernization of the city. Telbisz reorganized Timișoara according to the Viennese model, and transformed the city into one of the most developed in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the war, times changed. Communism overthrew the old social order. Wealthy citizens were labelled as paupers and dispossessed. Collectivization, which began in 1949, forced peasants all over Romania to give up their land and their wealth.

In the summer of 1951, the army arrived in Dudești and arrested more than 400 people, putting them on freight trains and sending them to the Bărăgan. They did well there too. They dug out the hovels, worked in the Collective. They didn’t starve to death. They stayed there until 1956, by which time the life and world they knew they had left behind, back home, was gone forever. The Communists had nationalized their land. Many of them left and returned to Bulgaria, more than two centuries after their great-grandparents arrived in Banat. Others stayed, and after 1989 they recovered their fortunes.

Today, the Bulgarian community in Dudești is particularly active. They even have a saying for it, which they live by: “If you lie down and sleep, you won’t have any memories”. Therefore, they strive to preserve their identity and close-knit community. Many young people have left for the West, and the elders no longer have anyone to teach their history and traditions to. The Bulgarian New Year’s song, which, like the Christmas carol, is part of the local tradition, is rarely sung anymore because few people know it. Another of Mr. Velciov’s worries is the folk costumes, the image of their identity, which no one can sew and make.

But they didn’t give up. They have set up ensembles to which they try to attract young people, organise music festivals, traditional recipe cooking competitions, and are very proud of their cultural heritage, which they have begun to pass on to the Romanians in the village.

And at the heart of all these efforts is music, which the Bulgarians love. Stefan Budur was born in Dudeștii Vechi. So were his parents, so were his grandparents. He is passionate about Bulgarian music, which he also plays on the harmonica. He also has a collection of instruments, which he proudly showed us and tells us that he started gathering them as a child when he started playing music.

Since then, he has taken part in numerous competitions and festivals, where he has won prizes for his interpretation of Bulgarian songs, which are different from Romanian ones, more cheerful, more playful, for drinking. Bulgarians know how to party and even hardship does not prevent them from dancing and playing, if they feel like it.

For him, music is therapy, he even calls it ‘melotherapy’, and he believes that it has saved him many times in his life, helped him to overcome his difficulties, sweetened his troubles. He knows all the songs by heart, learns them note by note and sings them over and over again. Some of them, the older ones, he also played in the army, and the time before his discharge went by more easily. He still knows them now, because, as he tells us with pride and joy, “music is never forgotten.”

The fate of the Bulgarians of Dudești is synonymous with the fate of Banat. It is a struggle with the storms that history has thrown in the way of the natural course of life. The people of Dudești, like the Slovaks, like the Hungarians, like the Serbs, have faced them, with the nostalgia of peaceful times that were once lost in decades gone by. That arrangement, to which they have contributed for centuries, is today leading them to preserve what they have inherited and to regain what they have lost – the uniqueness of their identity in the multi-ethnic whole of the region. And they do this with pride and patience, joyful and happy for their well-deserved place in the history and culture of Banat.