Farewell X Challenge Park
In the summer of 2016, my girlfriend Mina took me to Tsarevo to show me the new skate pool in X Challenge Park. I didn't want to go, because I thought it was too far but we went for a weekend and I really liked skating it. We came back the next summer in 2017 with our camper van, stayed there for a couple of weeks and I met the man who created it Veselin Despotov.
In 2018 we stayed for a month and I organized a small blading event and thought to myself that I could organise a much bigger one the following summer. So in November, I sat down with Vesko in Sofia to talk about the upcoming summer. That conversation evolved and around March 2019 we became partners.
I vastly underestimated the time that I would have to put into it. The first people that helped were the locals. The twin sisters Zoya and Elena were always there for a calm conversation and some advice. We decided to start with fixing the food. To do that, I asked two friends to help me out. My childhood friend, Emanuel Peres, a well-known Israeli chef with Michelin-star experience came to Bulgaria and created our menu inspired by Bulgarian cuisine.
Lyubomir Gelkov, who was running an established restaurant in Sofia called Rakia Raketa Bar, gave us a crash course on managing a restaurant and put us in contact with quality providers. I don’t think we would have been able to make the food the way we did without them.
We were given access to a “municipality warehouse” which was basically a junkyard from where we picked old-school communist playground remains and under Vesko’s guidance converted them into furniture and skateable obstacles. Compared to Vesko I am pretty useless as a handyman. I really wanted to learn to be better with my hands and replace the keyboard with the Dewalt tools. I progressed since then but I still have a long way to go. The skillful guys who we worked with are Ivan Dermendjiev aka The Ninja, Lubomir Boyanov, Lyubomir Atanasov, Evgeny Penkov, and Todor Ivanov, who alongside Vesko helped us build most of the park.
The next thing on the list was to upgrade the camping area where we evened the ground and created an outdoor kitchen for the people staying there.
Then we wanted to add a mini ramp to the park and my friends from Vertigo, Velislava, and Emo were kind enough to pay for it.
We have a lot of Roma kids coming to play in the park and we give them skateboards and bikes in exchange for some help with the park. I wrote on Facebook in the Bulgarian rollerblading group to ask people if they would donate their skates so we could give them away and I was blown away by how many people helped.
We also had a few people who offered to help with particular skills, Teodor Dokov, Martin Simonski, Ivaylo Mladenov, Julian Vulchev, Dimo Kralev, Julian Minkov, and Phelia Barouh helped with photography, videography, video editing, and social media.
Desislava Stoyanova, Kristina Despotova, Elitsa Deneva, Ivana Kondova, and Sofia Koceva added that women's touch that the park needed.
That same year is when I met Tsacho Angelov and the whole BMX crew who I really love. They are so much fun! They had a BMX camp organised for teenagers.
We also organized the first (I think) scooter event ever to be held. We could not find any sponsors to support it so we financed it ourselves. The scooter community is so young that we barely managed to find who to judge the event. Overall we organized 14 events in my first summer.
In 2020 we decided to bring life back to the dirt track and Panagiotis Giotakis and Dobromir Dobrev from Bike Ventures came and helped us do that for a symbolic fee. This is also when Eva Stoyanova from Hartona started to work with me and subsequently with the park. Thanks to her we got NEXO and Samsung as clients and sponsors in 2022.
We expanded the camping area adding a second outdoor kitchen and places for caravans and campervans.
This was also the year when our kids' camps started to flourish and our food became famous. We were even asked to provide catering services for weddings in different places around the sea coast. Mina came up with a name for it SKATERING.
This was the year that we started a partnership with Redbull and No Blink who gave us exclusive rights to some of their movies which we showed in our outdoor cinema a few times a week.
With the help of Doichin Doichinov from TrueRiders and Bike Ventures we organised a mountain biking event as well.
My sister Phelia did a series of portraits of people in Tsarevo and created a digital exhibition. With it as a basis and with help from Fotofabrika, we built an outdoor exhibition area for hanging photos in the open air.
With the help of Dessy Andonova and the Vagabond, we tried having a concert in the pool for the first time as well and it turned out spectacular.
2021 is when we built the first half of our co-working space but I wrote a whole piece on it before. That year is also when Tsatcho Angelov and One Up BMX decided to help us and built a second skate park and a shop. We also built a bar from an old photo booth. That year we did our first and biggest team building to date with WPX.
2021 is also when the design work of the park got to another level thanks to Those Things Studio who inherited a certain look and feel we already had yet managed to work with those constraints and make us look even better and built our website.
2022 We doubled our co-working facilities with two old city buses and I wrote a peace about that too.
Here I would like to thank once again, Joana Tsoneva, Bistra Bozhkova, Eleonor Topalova, Tsatcho Angelov, Velislava Blagoeva, Emil Belev, Silviya Stoyanova, Tsvetelina Mitkova, Georgi Petrov, Radoslav Georgiev, and Veselin Zografov, for the trust.
Many of my friends and family helped along the way with moral support and muscle. Last summer we could not cope with the workload and nobody wanted to take our job adds so, in the end, my parents came to help paint the inside of the busses and my friends Lyubo, Petar, Kei, and Marco came for 3 days of hardcore physical labor.
I can not mention every single thing we did and every person or organization that I should thank. If forgot you for some reason I am sorry.
I write these words more than anything to say thank you. We could not have done all these things without the help of so many people.
I spent the last four years 5 months per year, in my camper van, in X Challenge Park. It was my home, my office, my playground, the place where my daughter learned the value of work and being on time. It was also the place where Mina and I got married surrounded by friends and family from all over the world.
I want to thank the X Challenge family. Those vibrant smiling people most of whom I can call friends now lived and looked after everyone who came to the park and always gave their best for the park to be what it is. I learned many things from all of them. The biggest of them all is Dessislava Stoyanova. Her dedication to the park is unmatchable and she will take my place in the park from now on.
Last but not least Vesko. Without his audacity, there wouldn’t be an X Challenge Park. I am grateful for the experience.
I decided that it is time to move on and with this post, I am saying thank you to everyone who believed in what we were doing and contributed to X Challenge Park to become an alternative oasis. I hope the park will continue to thrive in the years to come.
