One might be forgiven for taking the imposing gates of Belene prison for the doorway to heaven. They frame an enchanting panoramic view of one of the most beautiful nature reserves on the Danube. The park stretches along the Bulgarian side of the river and includes several islands, covering an area of 21,762 hectares. Listed as both a Natura 2000 and a Ramsar site, the place is recognized as a wetland of global importance.
Facing Romania and isolated from the Bulgarian mainland by a broad stretch of river, Belene island (named after the nearby town, and also known as Persina island) was chosen by the Bulgarian Communist Party as the site of a notorious labour camp.
To visit this unique place we needed to secure the prison’s laissez-passer for the island. Our tour is supervised by the Belene Island Foundation, founded in 2016. Vencislav, a guide in his thirties, presents our papers to the prison guards. Behind us, some families of inmates wait with shopping bags loaded with food.
The only way to reach the island is on foot via an ancient motorized floating bridge installed by the Bulgarian army in the 1950s. Our guides’ vehicle is parked on the other bank. The prison authorities have so far barred us from taking any photos.
From the bridge it’s a 30-minute drive on a narrow road to reach the ruins of the Belene camp.
A satellite view of the island of Belene/Persina. | GoogleMaps
“The first thing we asked the inmates to do was to build this road. At first, they had to get to the camp on foot, through the marshes”, explains Vencislav. Lining the road, at the corners of woods and fields, are modest buildings that belong either to the prison or to local farms. “Some prisoners are allowed to move freely around the island, in order to do specific jobs such as working on the farms.” He warns us not to interact with any prisoners we may bump into.
In the event, we reach the camp without passing anyone. At the entrance is a small house with a vegetable garden, and a large dog standing guard. Otherwise, all that remains of the site are a few dilapidated buildings. In front of them, the Belene Island Foundation has reconstructed the original gate. It reads, “Yes, you can be proud to be a man”, an apparent example of the former camp’s vocation to “re-educate” prisoners.
The building we visit is modelled on a school. In the entrance hall and the classroom-like cells, prisoners’ belongings and explanatory panels in Bulgarian and English tell the story of the site. | Photo: ©Francesca Barca
The educational tour was designed by the Sofia Platform, an NGO created to commemorate the communist era and the period that followed it, known as the “transition”.
In the final room, visitors can dialogue virtually with camp survivors using an incongruously high-tech setup. The interviewees have been filmed beforehand, and we can ask them questions and receive their AI-selected answers, creating the illusion of a face-to-face exchange.
In one room, an massive mound of earth represents the quantity that detainees needed to move daily to obtain a ration of food. | Photo: ©Francesca Barca
A chef by trade, Vencislav tried his luck abroad and in Varna, a town on the Black Sea, before returning to his hometown of Belene. He became involved in the local association “to help his friends who started it”, and because he has “always loved history”. It is a small-scale operation. “We learn from each other, from the books we find. We conduct the visits ourselves, and maintain the roads and buildings. We also try to gather local testimonies, but that’s not easy. The generations who knew the first camp are disappearing, and the subject remains sensitive.” The association relies on modest subsidies. Its funding is barely enough to rent a small office, repair the vehicle and maintain a website.
Despite the volunteers’ best efforts, the site is in a pitiful state. The main building has broken windows, meaning that winter visits are out of the question. A second, identical building has partially collapsed and is off-limits to visitors.
Created in 1949, the Belene camp housed the first victims of communist repression. Among them were farmers, anarchists, monarchists, goryanis (anti-communist resistance fighters), as well as a dozen evangelist pastors. The camp was spread over two sites, known as the main site and Site 2. It quickly became one of the mainstays of Bulgaria’s own gulag archipelago, which counted up to a hundred camps.
In 1952, Belene housed 2,323 inmates, including 75 women. An all-female camp was even opened on a small island nearby, but witness accounts and documents are scarce. Over the entire period, more than 15,000 people were interned here.
Inside the main builing | Photo: ©Francesca Barca
Officially closed in 1953 after Stalin’s death, Belene was transformed into a regular prison. It reopened after the 1956 Budapest uprising, with the notable addition of a section for minors, which caused a scandal in the West. Under international pressure and following a hunger strike, the Bulgarian authorities closed the prison again in 1959. Site 2 was burned down and the land flooded to erase all traces of it. However, the main part of the camp was soon given over to the new permanent buildings, including the one we visited.
Prisoners regularly died, mostly of exhaustion or ill-treatment, but also by summary execution. Many were quickly buried on the outskirts of the camp. No graves were marked. It is known that bodies from the Lovech camp, also in the north of Bulgaria, were transferred to Belene from 1961 onwards. They were surreptitiously buried on the beaches of a small nearby island, where the loose earth was easier to work with.
Inside the builing | Photo: ©Francesca Barca
The hastiness of the burials and the methods employed caused a diplomatic upset, says our guide: “Body parts were regularly washed down the river into neighbouring Romania. The Romanian authorities voiced their displeasure, since terrified local people were convinced that it was the Securitate [Romanian secret police] who were behind the atrocities.”
In the 1980s, Belene mainly housed members of the Turkish minority opposed to the forced assimilation policy of the regime of Todor Zhivkov, leader of the Bulgarian Communist Party for 33 years. The camp did not close for good until 1987, two years before the collapse of the Eastern bloc. The ordinary prison, however, is still in operation, with a capacity of 395 places and a dormitory for prisoners on day release. It is still the main employer in the town.
The Belene memorial, outside the camp. | Photo: ©Francesca Barca
Despite the periodic declarations of closures, it seems that the site was used throughout the communist period. According to our guide, “it is probable that prisoner movements were orchestrated between the ordinary prison and the labour camp, in order to cover tracks, at a time when the status of political prisoner did not exist”.
On the main site, only a ruined watchtower offers a glimpse of the camp’s brutal reality. Unfortunately the tower is not safe for visitors. Its access path is overgrown, and our guide asks us to keep our distance. The place is reminiscent of “The Zone” in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker: an unsettling landscape that combines ominous industrial ruins and pristine natural spaces. In that film, the protagonists’ quest leads to a room that fulfills their most secret desires. But what are visitors looking for in the ruins of the Belene labour camp?
Vencislav is pensive: “We have all kinds of visitors, but most are Bulgarians. For me, it’s a duty to come here and understand what this camp was like and the reality of our history. Unfortunately, some people think that the problem was not the camp, but the type of prisoners. Yet very different regimes have used camps: Nazis, Communists, but also democracies like the United States with Japanese Americans during the Second World War. In fact, it is this model of repression of political opponents that needs to be done away with.”
One of the camp’s watchtowers. | Photo: ©Francesca Barca
To this day, no dignitary of Bulgaria’s communist regime has been prosecuted for crimes committed in the country’s camp system, not even General Secretary Zhivkov. In the 1990s, the former communists, rebranded “socialists”, tried to minimize the scale of Bulgaria’s gulag archipelago, not least by themselves leading a commission of inquiry into the subject. The history of the Belene camp is shaped by the determination of successive governments to conceal its existence. The effect has been to erase both the memory of the victims and the identity of the perpetrators.
Without proper excavations, it will be hard to fully reveal the workings of Bulgaria’s repressive communist machine, or simply the camp’s historical memory. Given the Belene’s complex status as a place of remembrance, a prison and a nature reserve, such a dig looks unlikely.
A past that won’t go away
In a 1992 report for the radio station France Culture, historian Sonia Combe noted that the first testimonies of victims appeared as early as the fall of the regime in 1989. “Everyone was surprised by the violence and scale of the repression we were gradually discovering. [It] seemed to have reached a level unequalled in the other [Soviet] satellite states. It was aimed not only at opponents, but at anyone who showed the slightest sign of independence of spirit.”
The first commemoration took place on 7 June 1990, organised by the victims of communist repression. That event turned into a demonstration attended by several thousand people from all over Bulgaria, including former prisoners and representatives of the political opposition. Over the years, Belene has become an annual gathering place for commemorations.
In the 2000s, former members of the Bulgarian National Agrarian Union began construction of a memorial, which remains unfinished. In 2005, a local branch of the same party installed a commemorative plaque on one of the buildings. In 2011, the Bulgarian government officially adopted February 1st as a day of tribute to the victims of the communist regime. And in April 2014, the local Catholic priest Paolo Cortese set up a committee to build a proper memorial to the camp’s victims.
The historian Daniela Koleva recalls an initial phase of commemoration when the survivors were still young and had enough energy to organise events and build a memorial. But as time passed and the survivors disappeared, the energy faded, says Louisa Slavkova, founder and director of Sofia Platform. “Then the priest Paolo Cortese arrived in Belene. By spotlighting the existence of local victims – such as one of the mayors at the time – he enabled the town’s inhabitants to free themselves from their guilt and become part of the victims’ story.”
Since 2018, Sofia Platform has campaigned for the camp to be listed as part of Bulgaria’s intangible cultural heritage. This is a complex process involving several ministries (justice, environment, agriculture, culture) and government agencies with diverging interests. Louisa Slavkova explains: “The justice ministry was the owner of the old buildings, and some of them are still in use, notably for housing prisoners. […] The challenge for the environment ministry is to find a way of protecting the various wetlands, because if the Belene site is classified, this means that archaeological excavations are authorized.”
‘We learn from each other, from the books we find. We conduct the visits ourselves, and maintain the roads and buildings. We also try to gather local testimonies, but that’s not easy. The generations who knew the first camp are disappearing, and the subject remains sensitive’ – Vencislav
In truth, the fact that Belene bears witness to extreme brutality is itself an obstacle to development. Historians Daniela Koleva and Tea Sindbæk, in an article that compares the cases of Belene and the Goli Otok camp in Croatia, elucidate: “It is not simply a question of cultural heritage of significant events that must be remembered, but rather of unwanted heritage.”
This concept of “difficult heritage” has been defined by anthropologist Sharon Macdonald as “a past that is recognized as significant in the present, but which is also contested and troublesome for public reconciliation with a positive and assertive contemporary identity”.
That is all the more true in Bulgaria, where perceptions of the communist period remain heavily influenced by partisan positions and geopolitical cleavages. The formerly hegemonic Communist Party is now a member of the Party of European Socialists. It has held power several times since the fall of the one-party state, and indeed is part of the motley coalition that governs Bulgaria since January 2025.
Places of memory – and tension
In neighbouring Romania, similar questions are arising from the ruins of communist labour camps in the Danube delta, starting with the site at Periprava. Are visits appropriate? What form should the facilities take? How to make them economically viable? And should digs be carried out in places that may have been used as mass graves?
Romania is unique in having requested a UNESCO listing for its former prisons (of the Ceausescu regime). The country has begun to reflect on its past by creating an International Centre for the Study of Communism in Bucharest, as well as a museum and memorial at Sighetu Marmației. There is no equivalent in Bulgaria.
For its part, the European Union supports initiatives to commemorate the crimes of totalitarian regimes, notably through European Remembrance. However, only two subsidized projects concern Bulgaria (1 and 2). The most high-profile initiative is that of the Open Buzludzha Foundation, which aims to restore the former meeting hall of the Bulgarian Communist Party. Perched on a summit of the Great Balkan massif, this spectacular brutalist structure already draws international tourists.
For now, comparable initiatives in Belene have relied almost exclusively on American benefactors. One such is the America for Bulgaria foundation, which supports educational and civic tourism projects. Louisa Slavkova confides that Sofia Platform only applied once for a European grant, unsuccessfully. “Maybe we weren’t ready yet. But we’ll probably have to go that way, because if the Belene camp is classified as intangible cultural heritage, the Bulgarian state and the municipality won’t have the resources to develop and maintain the site.”
Inside the builing. | Photo: ©Francesca Barca
With funding from the American foundation, Sofia Platform has set up a training course for teachers about Bulgaria’s communist past. So far, 220 teachers have benefited. The organisation also offers in-situ educational visits, bringing together teenage students and volunteers aged 18 to 24. Since 2018, over 800 young people have taken part in these summer schools, which are guided by historians, members of the association and other local volunteers. Sofia Platform has also carried out extensive interviews with former prisoners. Their testimonies form the basis of a website that has been consulted by over 100,000 visitors.
Louisa Slavkova is aware of the difficulties involved, but is optimistic about Belena’s future, especially if Budapest decides to place it on Bulgaria’s list of intangible cultural heritage. “Even in Germany, where substantial funding is available for this kind of initiative, it was often small local NGOs that pushed for the restoration of former Stasi prisons. It was only much later that the German state began to support them financially, in order to turn the sites into genuine places of remembrance. […] The people involved in Belene have learned to be patient. It’s the project of a lifetime.”
For a visitor centre to coexist with a nature reserve does not seem insurmountable. The parties would just need to agree on some rules and ensure that they are respected. The thornier question is whether a working prison should be maintained on the site of the largest forced-labour camp of the former People’s Republic of Bulgaria.
🤝 This article was produced as part of the Thematic Network of PULSE, a European initiative supporting cross-border journalistic collaborations.
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