site.btaRomania, Turkiye and Egypt Volunteers Help Turn Dilapidated Dolni Rakovets School in First Balkan Environmental Construction Institute Home

Romania, Turkiye and Egypt Volunteers Help Turn Dilapidated Dolni Rakovets School in First Balkan Environmental Construction Institute Home

Volunteers from Romania, Turkiye and Egypt are helping restore the school in Dolni Rakovets, BTA learned from organizer Dobromir Mashev on Saturday. About 40 people are clearing the building the building and the surrounding garden in the village near the western town of Radomir, with the intention of seeing it one day house the first Environmental Construction Institute in the Balkans, Mashev said. The three-day action began on Friday. 

The idea is to turn the abandoned Nikola Vaptsarov Junior High School into a training centre specialized in environmental construction and restoration with natural construction materials. The organisers plan for the site to have zero construction waste, with household rubbish being taken away and disposed of, while beams, timbers, tiles and other compromised building materials will be sorted and reused. The aim is to keep the school building as authentic as possible, but rebuild it with natural building materials such as clay, straw, hemp, wool and others.

The school was built in the 1920s and used to be attended by 120 students every year. Now the building is abandoned and a fire last year destroyed its roof. 

Mashev's family comes from Dolni Rakovets and his great-grandfather was among the organizers for the school's building, while his grandfather was its headmaster for years. Mashev himself is what he considers the first in Bulgaria specialist in building geobiology. He has studied in Germany and completed several projects for environmental construction institutes abroad. He admitted he has returned to Bulgaria for good and will dedicate himself to such initiatives in the future.