Марина Петрова

Марина Петрова moved from Sofia to Косово in the spring of 2022 with her husband Атанас and their son Велко, then eight. They bought a small stone house on the upper square for €26,000, spent another €18,000 renovating it over the following year, and have been there ever since. We talked to her on a Saturday afternoon in March, sitting at the wooden table in her kitchen, with snow on the ground outside and a wood stove going.

“We thought we were leaving for the quiet,” she said. “We didn’t know we were arriving for the people.”

On the first winter

“Everyone warned us about the road. Nobody warned us about the silence. The road, when it closes, closes for a day, maybe two. You wait. You read. You drink tea. It’s fine. The silence was harder. There’s a particular thing that happens in February in a small village — the snow on the rooftops absorbs sound, the dogs stop barking because no one is passing, and you sit in the kitchen and you can hear your own breath. For the first three weeks I thought I was going mad.”

“Then in March a neighbour knocked on the door with a jar of pickled green tomatoes and asked if we wanted to come over for баница. We did. And after that the silence was different. The silence was always silence, but it stopped feeling like something I had to fight.”

On the neighbours

“In Sofia we lived in a building with thirty apartments and I knew two of my neighbours by name. Here, I know every one of the sixty-something people who live here year-round, and they know me. They know what time my son leaves for the bus stop in the morning. They know we have a guest staying because they saw a different car parked outside on Tuesday. They know my husband had a cold last week because the baker told the man at the kafana who told my mother-in-law on the phone.”

“At first this felt invasive. Now it feels like being held. There’s no abstract concept of ‘help’ here — there’s just Иво from two houses down who comes over with his chainsaw when a tree falls in our garden. There’s Елена who brings us bread when the bakery runs out before I get there. There’s the old man whose name I still don’t know who waves at my son every morning from the same spot on the same stone wall.”

On the hard things

“Velko’s school. The bus to Чепеларе takes thirty-five minutes each way. He doesn’t mind, but I worry. We hired a tutor from Smolyan to come up once a week to help with maths. That’s an expense we didn’t budget for.”

“My dentist is in Plovdiv. That’s the other thing — you don’t realise how dependent you’ve become on city infrastructure until you have to drive two hours for a routine cleaning. We’ve adapted. We batch appointments — when I go to Plovdiv I do everything: dentist, hairdresser, big grocery run. It takes a day.”

“If I could tell my Sofia self one thing, it would be: budget another €5,000 on top of whatever you think the renovation will cost. We did. We were still short.”

On whether they’d do it again

“Without hesitation. Velko is a different child here. Calmer, more confident, more curious. He knows the names of every plant on the path to school. He knows when it’s going to snow before the weather forecast does.”

“But I’d warn anyone considering it: this is not a holiday. It’s a different life. You stop having the option of being anonymous. You stop having the option of being in a hurry. Some people find both of those liberating. Some people find them suffocating. You have to be honest with yourself about which one you are.”

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Another long-form piece: “A weekend in Косово in February”