Unveiling the Past - Memories of a Dark Era

Today , I subjected my grandma to a thorough interrogation about the time when she was young. I asked her about a piece of paper I found in a cupboard that said "Korekom." When I asked her what "Korekom" was and she explained it to me, I couldn't hide my astonishment that it was a store in a country where you officially couldn't buy dollars, yet there were stores selling their goods only in that currency, and that was Korekom. And, in those Korekom stores, mainly high-ranking officials used to shop. They used to buy cassette players, chocolate eggs, whiskey, chocolate, televisions, all things that ordinary people couldn't afford at the time, and all with a currency they didn't have access to. Shortly before the Korekom stores closed down, people had access to the shops, but they obtained dollars on the black market.

From there, our conversation drifted into her memories. It struck me as very strange how all the hair salons, restaurants, and shops in a city were all state-owned, with no private initiative whatsoever. And she replied, "Well, that's just how it was!" When she explained to me that in those times, shop assistants were highly respected, I almost fell off my chair. They were constantly courted, no matter what they sold, because decent goods, however rare, were never displayed on the shelves; they were hidden behind for "their people," and it was actually very important to be "their person" then. The more assertive women were friends with at least a dozen shop assistants from stores selling different goods. That's how we seamlessly transitioned to the topic of relationships. She explained to me: "You enter a store and there's nothing in it. In the grocery store, for example, there might be only three types of canned goods, and you see that all the shelves in the store are filled with only those three types of cans, and that's it. You enter with your money and you actually have nothing to buy. These stores rarely had real milk chocolate, but were abundant with Kose Bose and Iskar marzipans, pale imitations of chocolate, not to mention real marzipan. In the pastry shops, there were only two types of cakes - chocolate with buttercream flowers on top - one pink and one white, with green leaves. In fact, it was essentially the same cake, but with two shapes - round and rectangular, with a little house and a bunny on top of the rectangular one. They were taken for birthdays."

my granny

I asked her about clothes. "Clothes were another big tragedy. The clothes sold in the stores were so ugly that it was important to know a fabric seller. My great-grandmother had a serious connection, with a neighbor who they were close to, who worked at the fabric stand in the Universal Store. When new fabrics arrived, she immediately informed my great-grandmother, who would then go to choose. After getting the fabrics, you had to know seamstresses to hire to sew them." I asked if jeans were sold. She answered, "No! Jeans were bought illegally from peddlers and people who had the right to work abroad, and the price was staggering."

As you can see, the clothes are the same!

Then the conversation smoothly moved on to coffee and olives, and then to appliances - TVs, stoves, refrigerators. You needed thick connections in Trade for everything. The furniture and sections were only 3-4 types, and they were relatively rarely brought to furniture stores. But thanks to this "diversity," almost all apartments were furnished almost the same.

Utensils for food, which almost every family had. Such a great "diversity."

I asked, didn't she have the opportunity to leave Bulgaria, considering that everything was so stripped and there was nothing, why didn't they go live in another country? She replied that they weren't allowed to travel to the West... Then you couldn't go to Germany, France, Italy, Spain, or Austria whenever you wanted. I asked, then was Bulgaria like a prison since they didn't allow you to leave? Well, more or less... The most difficult thing for her to explain to me was how, given that every city had several factories and everyone worked and produced, there were such shortages in the country and practically nothing in the stores, and yet the population lived quite modestly. After the arrival of the Red Army in Bulgaria, which had come to help the state, people lived in repression, following numerous robberies and rapes, murders... The intelligentsia was wiped out, and the communist party came to power, imposing a cruel regime following Russia's example. There was a murder in our family as well. Because when Georgi Dimitrov (Bulgarian and Soviet politician, leader of the Bulgarian Communist Party) died, my grandma's uncle was listening to music. Neighbors betrayed him. Then he was taken away and shot!!!

We haven't learned these things in school...! And what I want to conclude with is the following: Remember and take an interest in history! Our parents and relatives surely have stories to tell us. With the increasingly extreme beliefs of some politicians in Europe and beyond, things could reach the life that my grandma and partially my mother had before democracy came to our country!