When the Fields Spoke Bulgarian
Olivera Lazarević
Year after year, every spring, an expected transformation would take place in Trnavci, my village in central Serbia. With the change of the season, the first buds of new life would emerge from the soil, and alongside them arrived the Bulgarian seasonal workers who nurtured the land and harvested the crops. In the autumn, they would leave, but only to come back the next year. Then, one year, they simply didn’t come. And they never returned.
For the first nineteen years of my life, before I moved to Belgrade for my studies, I watched my parents work our family’s land. Their labor was not merely a means of income but an obligation. My father, a geography teacher, and my mother, a retired teller, did not rely on agriculture to survive. They cultivated the land out of duty. Selling it would be a sign of failure, renting it out would be an act of laziness, neglecting it a betrayal.
My father inherited around three hectares of land, and my mother additional four. In our region, farming wasn’t focused on a single crop but rather on a little bit of everything. Like many others, my parents grew blackberries, strawberries, cherries, plums, grapes, corn, wheat, and clover. They almost always relied on seasonal workers to harvest the crops—the people from our own village, the unemployed or landless. As the village population steadily declined for the last thirty-five years, the number of people willing to work in the fields has shrunk too.
Through conversations with my family and neighbors, I learned that the first group of Bulgarian workers came to Trnavci in 2001. They were divided into at least two groups with around a dozen workers each, both men and women between the ages of 25 and 55. They would arrive in the spring and leave when the last corn has been harvested in late autumn. Their work ranged from hoeing corn to picking fruits. They provided much-needed assistance with physically demanding agricultural tasks, filling in where local labor was scarce. Their services were in high demand, and anyone who wanted to hire them had to arrange it days in advance. This never required a formal contract, just a fee and a handshake.
Trnavci is neither rich nor poor. Most of the people are middle or lower class. There are families like mine that inherited more land than we could realistically cultivate ourselves. In that sense, the arrival of the Bulgarians was seen not only as a solution to the manpower shortage but also as a way to revive agriculture.
During the time they spent with us, the Bulgarians did not have it easy. Some of them lived in an abandoned veterinary center without electricity or running water. I saw them every day across the stream that separated their temporary home from my family’s yard. I was ashamed of taking my comforts for granted.
As the memories come flooding back, I remember a man called Meća, his gentle smile and kind nature. He must have been in his early thirties, but no one I spoke to remembers for sure. My mother recalls his readiness to help and share a joke during breaks on days of hard work in the fields. She told me about a day they spent hoeing corn during the summer after her father passed away. My grandma had not only lost a husband but found herself alone, picking meaningless arguments with family members. My mother was caught in the middle of all of this and cried as she worked in the field. Then, Meća came over to her, consoling her while also taking over hoeing her row of corn. She is forever grateful for his kind words when she most needed them.
Meća’s wife was quiet and shy. I can’t even recall her name. I remember her colorful clothing and dark hair, but her face eludes me. Even when they talked among themselves, she seemed to be in the shadow of either her husband or mother Stojanka, who I remember as a strong and no-nonsense woman. My grandfather would sometimes initiate a conversation with her, but it was never more than a small talk. The others remain vague figures to me.
Meća stands out because he became a family friend. He would bring us gifts as a token of gratitude for the little kindnesses my parents showed him and his family. My mother would cook them a hot meal after a day in the fields, he would borrow a phone to call his kids in Bulgaria, and my father would help with obtaining a residence permit at the local police station. When they decided not to come back to Serbia, he called my father to say goodbye.
When Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007, our paths went separate ways. It was not war that severed our ties, as had so often been the case in the Balkans. Rather, the separation was a result of new opportunities. My fellow villagers did not hold a grudge against the Bulgarians. Everyone I spoke to wished them well, glad that they could earn more and dream bigger.
Land cultivation demands commitment, strength, and resilience that few can sustain indefinitely. The earth gives back only as much as it is given. The absence of the Bulgarian workers only exacerbated a reality that had been creeping in for years. With fewer hands to tend the fields, mechanization surged forward, and where machines could not take over, the land simply lay fallow. My father once again turned to local seasonal workers who grew fewer with each passing year.
There is something essentially bittersweet about migration. I always saw it as a story of departures and arrivals, of new lives being built and old ones left behind. Talking with my family about this did not bring resentment but rather nostalgia for times when we were younger and more hopeful about the future.
Almost all of my ancestors were born and lived their lives within a radius of a hundred kilometers. The arrival of the Bulgarians during my childhood felt like a window into another world. I didn’t have many opportunities to learn about other cultures or nations aside from vacations and schoolbooks. Their presence opened a space for curiosity and connection to something bigger than what I had known, and when they left the window was shut. It wasn’t just about adding novelty to our community; it was the loss of a meaningful connection to a broader, richer world.
Now, nearly two decades later, the change is undeniable. The village is shrinking, its pulse weaker than ever before. The nature that we once tamed and bent to our will is reclaiming its space. Trees grow in places once unheard of, wild grasses swallow up abandoned fields, and lively chatter once carried across the meadows is now replaced by silence. I feel an overwhelming certainty that nothing as groundbreaking as the arrival of the Bulgarians will ever happen again. Those years now seem like a dream, a rare moment in time when the fertile lands of Serbia were a destination rather than a place to escape from.
This is not a story of tragic loss, but of inevitability. The world moves forward, and people move with it. Still, I can’t help but wonder what’s left in the wake of progress—in abandoned fields, in the spaces between people, in the moments that once were and will never be again. Villages and towns around the world are stages for similar stories, places where economic shifts redefine not only labor practices but the very fabric of life.
The Bulgarians may never return to Trnavci, and the village will continue its quiet retreat into history, shaped by forces far beyond its control. But in my memory, they remain part of its history—a presence as constant as the changing seasons. I think of them when the first days of spring arrive and when the smell of soil fills the air. I wonder where they’re spending their springs and summers now and what new life cycles they’ve become a part of.
For centuries, human movement followed the rhythms of nature. Now, those rhythms are shifting. Perhaps, one day, new hands will come to nurture the fields of Trnavci, bringing with them their own stories and their own smiles. Until then, the fields will continue to bloom in solitude, a quiet testament to the ties that once were, and to the seasons that continue, with or without us.
