There’s a spot on the map in Veliko Tarnovo Province, tucked into Strazhitsa municipality, that most people will never have heard of. It’s called Nikolaevo. Sixty-odd residents, a scattering of houses, farmland rolling out in every direction, and the kind of quiet that you only really notice once the van engine’s switched off and the birds take over.
I found it the way I find most places worth finding — slowly, on back roads, with no real plan except to keep heading somewhere that felt right. Strazhitsa town is five kilometres south if I need supplies. Veliko Tarnovo, with its fortress on the hill and its tangle of old streets, is about forty minutes away if I want a proper day out. But out here, in the village itself, it’s just stone walls, overgrown gardens waiting to be brought back to life, and neighbours who still do things the old way.
This is the plot I’ve been working towards — the place where GOASPIRIT61 stops being just a van and a camera and starts being a base too. Somewhere to come back to between trips. Somewhere the light hits different in the early morning, somewhere I can imagine setting up a proper little studio space one day, shooting portraits against crumbling render and faded blue shutters instead of studio backdrops.
There’s something honest about rural Bulgaria that I keep coming back to in my work anyway — the unpolished, the lived-in, the real. Nikolaevo has that in abundance. No pretence, no performance, just a village getting on with itself the way it has for generations.
It’s early days. There’s paperwork still moving, documents in transit, people helping from a distance while I’m not always there to do it myself. But every time I picture the finished thing — van parked up outside, kettle on, camera bag by the door — it feels like exactly where this journey was always heading.
More soon.
— Kirston
GOASPIRIT61 · Van Travelling Photographer
age 37.
Goaspirit61 Van Travels & Photography 