Nasko at NDK: a Bessarabian Bulgarian comes home

The story

Nasko, or Afanasiy, was born in Ukraine. He is a Bessarabian Bulgarian, part of a community of about 250,000 people who kept their language, songs and dances for 200 years far from Bulgaria. Nine years ago he decided to come back.

In front of NDK he teaches us words from his dialect: nobody there says "prozorets" for window, they say "pendzher" or "dzham". In Bulgaria he has never met any hostility. "The future is here, we build it with our actions," he says. We take the sides short, not down to zero. "I look like a young pioneer," Nasko laughs.