The Bell Story

New Culture foundation ran a contest for personal stories: A PERSONAL STORY WITH A BELL. Stolen bells are everyday reality in Bulgaria today. Very often, Romas are accused as the one behind those acts. Why? Is that true in the case of Bela Rechka’s bell? The project involved  neighboring Roma communities (in Dolna Bela Rechka and Varshetz) in the Open Laboratories to try to produce a new type of dialogue. The story competition was a way to involve schools and young people. The winning entry was produced by  by Tsvetelina Angelova, Ganka Peykovska, Marinela Dinkova and Lilia Anastasova – all of them 11th graders at the French Secondary School in a nearby town, Plovdiv.

They introduced their story as follows:
The story we are sending is a story of search. For traces and signs, for people and memories, for stories and versions. In the course of one month, we, a team of students from the French Language School Antoine de Saint Exupéry in Plovdiv, together with our Bulgarian language teacher Tsvetelina Draganova, sought to see and hear the places and faces behind the statistical data provided by the District Police Directorate. According to these statistics, since 1989 there have been 7 registered cases of stolen church bells on the territory of the Directorate. To the case in the village of Gradina we were directed by the curators of the Historical Museum in Plovdiv. It was also from them that we heard, for the first time, about the family of the hereditary bell-casters Veleganovs. In the meantime, Plovdiv Bishopric gave an official answer to our inquiry to the effect that there was no information about bells being stolen but it ‘calls down God’s blessing on us’ and ‘remains’ our ‘supplicant’…

To read the full story of their investigations, download the file plovdiv1prize (15pp, 9000 words).