Watercolors
Lesezeit: ca. min.
Bulgaria is dotted with hundreds of thermal springs that have been used in various ways over several millennia, from Roman bathhouses to contemporary spas.
In February 2025, the scholar Slava Savova, a professional musician, trained architect, and visual artist, provided interesting insights into her research on this topic as a visiting fellow at the Regensburg Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies (GSOSESUR) which closely cooperates with the Leibniz ScienceCampus (LSC), a joint platform of the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) and the University of Regensburg (UR).
Lovers of Lost Places were in for a treat.
Environmental Humanities
Slava Savova focuses on water, resource extraction, and waste, with current projects exploring the interconnections between nature, politics, and health care. The scholar's passion is fieldwork, conducting interviews, taking photographs, and recording sounds at the sites she explores - a whole database now exists.
She documents Bulgaria's public bathhouses from Ottoman times to the health facilities that socialist workers enjoyed until the transition in the 1990s. Huge industrial sites were slowly abandoned, and the balneotherapeutic wellness temples associated with them began to fall into disrepair - many of them without any return.
Hot Springs
What survived were hot springs of thermal water. The ecological and social legacies surrounding them are among the interests of Slava, who is currently conducting her research within the ERC-funded LEVIATHAN project, which is investigating the legacy of post-war medicine. Professor Ulf Brunnbauer, speaker of the GSOSES UR and IOS Academic Director, is one of Slava's academic supervisors and invited her for a conversation with the Regensburg public.
Hundreds of hot springs play an important role for different parts of Bulgaria's rural areas and its society.
Slava Savova explores the different layers of the issue. She is engaged with Bulgaria’s recent political past. She finds it "deeply rewarding to work with communities outside the capital.” Much of her work comprises of going to places and talking to people, "you have to be self-reflective, develop strategies for connecting with every individual community”.
She has a strong feeling that voices outside the capital are not heard in her country, in terms of environmental, but also social history, or any other project that needs to come to the surface.
Thermal Water
Slava's research is conditioned by a natural gift. When it comes to her research, she has always been inspired by the feeling of being deeply connected to nature from a very young age, says the scholar.
To this day, she likes to hike as often as she can, noticing the changing nature, feeling the urge to explore processes and make certain places, including Bulgaria's public baths and spas, aware. She combines anthropological and historical methods in her research design.
Crossroads
What surprised her during her research? “The predisposition towards the socialist period, how people locate their sense of identity against the backdrop of tumultuous events”. But she discovered much more in her interviews. “People miss the sense of security. When you leave the capital and go to smaller towns and villages, people still live with the fallout from the 1989 rupture, although they recognize that another major break occurred after 1944.”
In the 1980s, rural areas throughout Southeastern Europe were at a crossroads. They had to reinvent themselves, a process that continues to this day. In rural Bulgaria, a significant number of settlements and towns were connected to health care facilities and developed around natural (mineral) water springs. However, none of them made it into UNESCO's “Great Spa Towns of Europe”.
"The ecological and social dimensions of transformation, the uncertainty of the transition period have produced new socio-historical terrains around water. Our new relations within the market economy have ultimately reinvented or decimated the physical infrastructures that once mediated thermal water."
Slava Savova
“Nothing is left.” “Everything is in decay”. “They took the water.”
While exploring various hydrothermal landscapes, Slava heard many of these remarks from the local population. Among the sites she discovered was Starozagorski Mineralni Bani in central Bulgaria. It perfectly illustrates the use of the site as a bathing place dating back to the 2nd century A.D.
New bathhouses were built there in the 18th and 19th centuries, and modern ones in the 20th century. In the process salvaging building material from Roman times was common. "Adapting existing infrastructure and at the same time destroying the historical layers was common, as previously built structures provided valuable building material that could be salvaged", the scholar points out.
About 40 km southwest of Stara Zagora, the spa traveler will find Kortenski Mineralni Bani, perhaps by chance, as Slava.
Not many people in the region today know about this "extraordinary place," says Slava, enthusiastically talking about its interesting atmosphere, amazing light, its location near a river, and "the rich stories of the locals, how people and place have changed over time.”
The Feral Body of Water
Dilapidated buildings, formerly public bathhouses. An old pipe protrudes from a make-shift structure; it is impossible to tell where it comes from. The continuously flowing water fills a basin made of old car tires.
In October 2024, Ravno Pole felt like time travel, making its coexistence with a spa hotel and golf course seem almost surreal, Slava says. The small settlement of 1,600 people has never been a popular tourist destination, despite the abundant hydrothermal resource. Its thermal springs provide more than 40 liters of water per second at temperatures of up to 62 degrees Celsius.
Ravno Pole is a place where "the [simultaneous] absence and presence of thermal water appeared as a cross section through the long transitional period," says Slava. The first sight she saw when she arrived at the site was a man sitting on a small wooden chair watching two metal buckets with half a dozen slaughtered chickens soaking in them under an improvised hot water fountain. Five black cats were waiting for their turn. When it became clear that the investigation was not by the municipality and that no fines would be issued, he directed the visitors to other places where thermal water was present and accessible.
The sites were largely anonymous on Google Maps. At the second stop the researcher noticed the crude concrete basins where two men were washing personal items and a woman washing blankets and towels.
Two of them were lumberjacks working across Bulgaria, then sending the money home where their parents took care of their young children. It became clear, that the spring was an important extension of their domestic realm.
“Ravno Pole highlights how a single thermal water source could be used to produce a multiplicity of waters. Different infrastructures produce different possibilities, which flow into different local economies, social arrangements, and cultural practices.”
Slava Savova
During the socialist period, Slava explains, Ravno Pole was part of a national strategy that outlined a long-term vision for the use of Bulgaria's thermal springs.
It was included in the "Atlas of Resort Planning" - a book that defined a new geography of healing. According to the researcher, the document classified Bulgaria’s thermal springs into categories that defined the paths for their possible exploitation according to the chemical composition of the water, its temperature and the surrounding climate, the presence or absence of resort infrastructure, and the potential value of the place for tourism, including international tourism.
In the “Atlas”, the water in Ravno Pole was compared to similar springs in Central Asia where important national resorts were developed. However, the perceived importance of Ravno Pole was reflected in its mapping. As soon as the scale of the maps became smaller it disappeared from the strategy of planning hydrothermal resorts, says the researcher.
The place is mentioned only as a balneo-industrial site, used for water bottling. The mineral water at the public thermal baths and the fountain in front of it was permanently turned off, but Slava found the water flowing freely behind the building.
At a distance of about 2 km, a hydrothermal lake was accidentally created during excavation works, which is now filled with car tires and empty bottles lying and floating everywhere. The lake covers an area of 36,000 square meters and is fed by a constant flow of thermal water, "which puts into question the local conspiracies of the stolen resource," says the scholar.
"During the socialist period, the public commons were very often used only for private purposes, which actually degraded the public nature of the commons: You can in a way challenge or at least nuance these dominant stories of privatization, everything is stolen and so on, because even in socialism there were some things that pointed to this development. And sometimes you could make a good economic argument that it might actually be bad for the resource if it is privately managed and then publicly overused.”
Ulf Brunnbauer
The Finiteness of Water
Slava takes her audience on a second virtual walk, this time to Velingrad in southern Bulgaria, a place full of history. Its more than 60 public thermal wells are surrounded by controversy: what kind of socio-ecological connections have been fostered by these water sources? What are the local mythologies that have developed around them, and how do these processes unfold on the terrain of the long transition period?
In the interviews and participant observation that Slava conducted, common concerns were shared by the locals - the disappearance of the water and its decreasing temperature in recent years and the increasing number of spa hotels and vacation homes, blaming the "water business" for the drying up of the springs.
Tourism, however, is an important source of income for the town.
As of August 2024, 46 of the 60 water fountains were still functioning. Historically, thermal water in Velingrad was essential for women's health and childcare. In addition, it is still used to prepare winter preserves or to cook eggs and vegetables, as the water sometimes reaches more than 90 degrees Celsius.
In recent decades, the excessive demands of new spas have become an issue: Each construction site is seen by the locals as a sign that the resource will disappear forever, says Slava.
“A process of defunding and abandonment or musefication have left the traditional infrastructures that once mediated the connection between the human body and the natural resource almost inaccessible.” Slava Savova
But the reasons for the water's disappearance are more complex: new water meter requirements, gray water infiltration, restricted access that hinders pipe repair work, to name a few. There is also dissatisfaction with the use of water for washing cars, which pollutes the environment.
The inhabitants of Velingrad often experience interruptions in the drinking water supply, sometimes every other day. Therefore, thermal springs become an important, constant source of water that could be brought home to be used for daily hygiene and cooking.
In Burgaski Mineralni Bani, a balneoresort 14 km northeast of Burgas, an Ottoman-era public bath provided access to the hydrothermal resource for the people from the region until recently. However, it was closed and transformed into a tourist attraction, with blue lights projected into its empty pool and basins.
While the museum staff told Slava that visitors are few and far between, the queues at the thermal spring testify to the importance of preserving access to the public good. Meanwhile, a controversial replica of a Roman bath has been built nearby and operates as a spa.
Its tourism-oriented branding, however, means that the communities most dependent on the thermal water for therapy and hygiene - the elderly and Roma - are now priced out of access.
© University of Regensburg |Text: twa.
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