“It Helps for Our Pensions over Here” International Retirement Migration to the Northeastern Bulgarian Countryside
This article explores international retirement migration to rural Northeastern Bulgaria – an understudied but growing phenomenon in the country within the context of the contemporary European mobility patterns. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with 21 persons of 11 families, the study examines the diverse motives and settlement strategies of foreign retirees, situating their movement within wider debates on counterurbanisation, ageing, and spatial inequality. While affordability is crucial – summed up by one participant as “It helps for our pensions over here” – the findings reveal a more complex interplay of economic, environmental, socio-political, and affective factors. Beyond lifestyle aspirations or amenity-seeking, we argue that this migration is shaped by strategies for navigating structural insecurity in later life, including discontent with welfare retrenchment, political instability, and socio-cultural shifts in home countries. Drawing on the concepts of geographical arbitrage and precarity in later life, the article shows how global asymmetries intersect with post-socialist conditions to shape Bulgaria as a space of alternative ageing. The study contributes to wider debates on international counterurbanisation and the changing geographies of ageing. It also reveals how foreign retirees are reconfiguring the meaning of rurality in contemporary Europe.
Desislava Pileva
Desislava Pileva holds a PhD in Ethnology and is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographic Museum, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on migration and mobility, international counterurbanisation and rural entrepreneurship, sociocultural adaptation and intercultural communication, and mixed and transnational families. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7897-5903
Ivaylo Markov
Ivaylo Markov holds PhD in Ethnology and is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographic Museum, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. His research generally covers the following topics: historical patterns of human mobility and their reflections on the contemporary migratory dynamics; role of financial and social remittances in socio-cultural transformation’s processes; transnational family-kin relationships; counterurbanisation and socio-economic dynamics in rural areas, communities and nature conservation, etc. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9651-2208
Desislava Pileva
Desislava Pileva holds a PhD in Ethnology and is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographic Museum, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on migration and mobility, international counterurbanisation and rural entrepreneurship, sociocultural adaptation and intercultural communication, and mixed and transnational families. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7897-5903