A supermarket in a small Bulgarian town: one week, one place

Published in

Stories while in the Balkans

3 min readApr 30, 2020

Blagoevgrad is a small Bulgarian town located 100km south of Sofia (the capital of the country). The town is famous for being the home of the American University in Bulgaria, which was established there on the 90s.

Right next to the campus of the university there is a big supermarket where most of the students from said university buy on a daily basis. Students try to do their shopping as fast as they can and try to get this day-to-day aspect of their lives out of the way, while ignoring that there is actually a lot going on there.

The supermarket is a place where different generations and types of people from the town come together, even if they don’t interact with each other. The kinds of people vary depending on the moment of the day, but it overall reflects what Bulgarian society has evolved onto: from old people who have never left the town to international students.

These are some pictures at different times of the day, during different days of the week, that show this phenomenon.