Photographer Mihaela Aroyo: "'I Dream in Bulgarian Project' Came About Spontaneously During One of My Trips to Bessarabia"

Tatiana Marinova

Photographer Mihaela Aroyo at the exhibition (BTA Photo/Milena Stoykova)

Sofia,

30.07.2024 21:49

(BTA)

A Bulgarian photographer, Mihaela Aroyo, Tuesday presented an exhibition titled I Dream in Bulgarian at the Synthesis Gallery in Sofia. “The project was born spontaneously during one of my trips to Bessarabia,” Aroyo said. The exhibition unveils the identity of the Bulgarian diaspora in Bessarabia in present-day Moldova and part of Ukraine.

"I wish everyone to experience the emotion that I felt when I travelled to the Bessarabian lands, the emotion of crossing several state borders but finding yourself among your people," the photographer said. Aroyo has been exploring the history and culture of the region for five years.

The event was attended by Galin Georgiev, Rodolyubets [Patriot] Cultural Society Chair, and Mihail Stanchev, historian and diplomat.

"People in the Bessarabian lands are separated from us by distance and years, but they are becoming closer to us by migrating back to their ancestral home, Mother Bulgaria", Galin Georgiev said. He pointed out that Aroyo's exposition is something interesting and provocative because there, where a war is raging, people speak not only their native Bulgarian language, but also Ukrainian, Russian and Moldovan. In Moldova, people speak Bulgarian at home, but on the street and on official occasions, they speak Russian, Georgiev added.

Mihail Stanchev said that Bulgarian politicians think of the Bessarabian Bulgarians only before elections.

Tens of thousands of Bulgarians migrated from the Bulgarian lands to Bessarabia after the Russo-Turkish wars of 1806-1812 and 1828-1829 to avoid Ottoman rule, the organizers of the exhibition pointed out. The reasons for the exodus were also linked to the Russian Empire's policy of settling a population in Bessarabia to enrich the region on the Empire's border, they explained.

Mihaela Aroyo is a documentary photographer born in 1993 in the coastal Bulgarian city of Varna. She started her professional career in 2014 as an intern at Trud daily, and in the period of 2017 - 2018 she was a photographer at BulFoto agency. Since 2020 she has been working as a freelancer and researching topics such as cultural identity, history, folklore and environment. Aroyo holds a Bachelor's degree in photography from New Bulgarian University (NBU) in Sofia.

Her photographs have been published in publications such as The New Yorker, National Geographic and Die Zeit. In 2022, National Geographic Bulgaria published her photographs and an article about the Bessarabian Bulgarians. In 2023, the project I Dream in Bulgarian won recognition from the Magnum Foundation with second place at the Inge Morath Award, an award given to female photographers under the age of 30. In the same year, Aroyo won The Everyday Projects Award, a grant to support her work on the same project.

/MY/