Why we started writing about villages
A short note on what this site is — and what it deliberately isn't
Every property portal in Bulgaria treats moving to a village as a spreadsheet problem. Price per square metre. Number of rooms. Land area. Year built. The implicit assumption is that you are buying a thing — and that if you can just compare enough things, you’ll find the right one.
We don’t think that’s what people are doing.
The people who move to a Bulgarian village in 2026 — diaspora returning after twenty years in Frankfurt, retirees from Manchester who fell in love with the Rhodopes on a hiking holiday, urbanites from Sofia who decided that nothing in their working life would ever feel as real as the smell of their grandmother’s bread oven — they are not buying square metres. They are buying a way of living. A particular angle of light in October. The walk to the bakery before sunrise. The single café that stays open in February. The neighbour who notices if your chimney didn’t smoke yesterday.
None of that fits in a spreadsheet. So all of it is missing from imot.bg.
What we’re trying to do here
This site is an editorial counter-model. A curated guide to a small number of villages — fifteen, twenty, eventually maybe forty — written by hand, illustrated with whatever real photography we can find, grounded in practical detail that nobody else bothers to collect. Does the snow plow come? — yes, within six hours, run by the municipality. Is the kafana open in February? — yes, irregularly. What is hard about living here? — the Sunday bus doesn’t come and the cellular coverage on Yettel is patchy in the lower village.
We link to listings on imot.bg when we find houses worth a second look. We don’t broker, we don’t sell, we don’t have a commercial relationship with anyone. The writing is the product.
And what we aren’t
We aren’t a real-estate agency. We aren’t a property portal. We aren’t trying to scale to every Bulgarian village (there are five thousand, and most of them we will never write about). We aren’t telling you what to buy, and we definitely aren’t telling you whether this is the right decision for your life.
What we are is one person — and, if you write to us, two or three or more — paying attention to villages slowly, deeply, in the way that an editor pays attention to a magazine: one piece at a time, every couple of weeks, because the things worth saying don’t fit on a brochure.
If that sounds like something worth following, the newsletter goes out once a month. We’d love to have you.