Based on the number of victims, the passenger liner’s sinking was a tragic incident for the world, but for one village in Bulgaria, it was a true disaster.

Text by Yana Vladimirova | Photographs by Anthony Georgieff* and Archive - Doytcho Boyadzhiev and Gumoshtnik Museum

In the last years of the twentieth century, James Cameron’s film shook up the planet. The 1912 sinking of the symbol of European splendour in the Atlantic and the tragic fate of its passengers made thousands around the world teary-eyed. But if the Hollywood production changed anybody’s fate, it was that of the residents of a mountainous village that is usually absent even from maps of the Balkans.

“His grandson is fifth generation from Titatic,” Doycho Boyadzhiev, a 64-year-old bohemian from Gumoshtnik says, as we pass a man wearing a yellow shirt, who nods at us proudly. We have just come out of an improvised museum – an ethnographic exhibition grown poorer after a series of robberies, which shares a space with the history of the Titanic, displayed on a kind of a bulletin board.



Made with the good-willed effort of several of Gumoshtnik’s residents, and mainly Doycho’s, it contains important artefacts: the death certificates of eight people from the village who died during the catastrophe, a list of the victims sent over from the United Kingdom, on which – in pen, are marked the names of the Bulgarians – a total of 36 people, mainly from the region.

When I heard this story for the first time, I thought I had misunderstood.

I couldn’t fathom how eight poor villagers from the south-eastern European village of Gumoshtnik ended up in 1912 aboard the most luxurious liner of all times. How and why did they reach the port of Southampton, just to sink disastrously in the middle of the Atlantic?

It is a fact not widely known that at the beginning of the twentieth century, America to Bulgarians was similar to what Germany was to the Turks in the 1980s: a Mecca for people who tried to make some good money with low-skilled labour. Hundreds of young men from Bulgaria’s poor mountainous regions travelled to the US; some – two or three times in their lifetime, while other stayed as emigrants.

This relatively common practice was also encouraged by agents, who went around Bulgaria and offered their help in organising the trip. Families sold their property, in order to collect what was an enormous sum for them – the 75-80 US dollars necessary to send their men to the coasts of the New Continent.

Once there, for a few years they would work in mines, on stone quarries or on the laying of rail tracks, before going back home to their families with a little bit of money.

The 38 Bulgarians aboard the Titanic were precisely that kind of men – people from different regions of Bulgaria who – united by their poverty, ended up on the ship together as third-class passengers.

Their last trip in pursuit of success turned out to be a kind of equivalent of buying an aristocratic estate near St. Petersburg in 1917.



The highest number of victims came from Gumoshtnik, with about two dozen families in one of of its neighbourhoods – Duevtsi, losing six of them. For these people, the luxurious liner’s sinking robbed the village of half of its men – a disaster comparable with the damage from the Second World War.

Doycho, who in the last few years has gathered the village’s entire memory of the events from the beginning of the last century, takes us across the village church’s courtyard. Built in 1830, it is renowned for its exceptional wooden iconostasis.



“These are the two memorials for those who died in the Balkan Wars, and behind them is that for the Titanic victims,” Doycho explains. The stone human-size obelisk looks quite tidy – tilted with the years, it has been straightened back up, and the faded names of the eight men from Gumoshtnik have been refreshed with bronze used for stoves. It was built by the victims’ relatives with part of the money they got from Lloyd’s, the company that insured the passengers. Besides Bulgaria, the only countries that have made memorials to the drowned people are the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland.

“In memory of those who sunk in the Atlantic Ocean with the ship Titanic in the year 1912,” the writing on the monument reads, in old Bulgarian style, followed by the names of the deceased.

Doycho is the ultimate authority on the Bulgarian participation in the 1912 tragedy. “Don’t you write about the two survivors from Sennik, because there is something sketchy in their story. They aren’t in any of the official lists that I’ve seen. Who knows what their real stories are,” he says. A painter, illustrator and an active participant in the nearby town of Gabrovo’s public life, our guide is the intelligent living memory of the repercussions of the Titanic catastrophe in Bulgaria.



Having grown up in a house about 100 metres away from the victims’ memorial, he was always curious about the hypnotising apocalyptic story, of which these victims were part.

Until recently, he was the only person who took an interest in the events. James Cameron’s film, however, to an extent turned around his life and is about to do the same to the fate of the entire village.



After “Titanic,” Doycho became a media star – he took part in the stories and the shows about the deceased Bulgarians of almost all major newspaper and television stations.

Impressed by the interest the story generates, the people of Gumoshtnik are starting to realise that it can be turned into an exceptional tourist attraction. Especially now, when Bulgaria, for the first time in its history, is starting to develop real rural and cultural tourism.

In the village centre, an old house is being restored in preparation to turn it into what would be the village’s only hotel.

“We straightened it a bit, it had tilted quite a lot,” the village mayor Milen Kolev tells Doycho of the memorial. He nods in approval and shows us a thick ship chain lying nearby: “It was brought to us from the Black Sea, we still need to hang it up.”

The relatives of the eight victims are no longer in the village. A year ago, the last one of them died – Petko Chakarov, a real child of the Titanic tragedy. In 1912, two of the victims from Sennik left their wives pregnant. The children who were born were orphaned early and got married, and Petko is their child.

We are on the way to his wife, when Doycho informs us: “This one is a son of a Titanic widow.” An elderly gentleman, not suspecting anything, smiles and waves at us from his wheelchair.

In the home of Petko Chakarov it becomes quite clear that both the luxurious liner and America have left deep traces in local folklore.

“Not much is remembered because before nobody was interested in those things. It so happened that most of the victims’ wives passed away early and couldn’t tell their children very much,” Petko’s widow tells us.

According to her, the whole thing with making money on the New Continent was quite senseless – there wasn’t a single case of somebody who came back rich.

“You remember Grandpa Mincho Shestaka?,” she asks Doycho and explains to us: “He had gone deaf from the cold in Alaska.”

“People said that he brought from there a small bag of gold dust.”

“Yeah, yeah, and used the money to build a house,” Doycho remembers.

“Unlikely! That probably only paid for the windows,” the widow says.

Their stories tell of Grandpa Mitko, who in America was known as Michael; people from the Duevtsi hamlet who raised the victims’ orphans; a leftover emigrant suitcase eaten by mice; a granddaughter who wants to write her grandfather’s story in a newspaper; and a yardstick inherited from one of the deceased.

In their memories, the events of 1912 sound quite close, as if from just a generation ago. Expressions, names, ties, belongings – everything has gained a new meaning in Gumoshtnik, as if the Titanic sank again in 1997.

“Please come and visit the monument of those deceased with the Titanic ship and the cultural-historical complex in the village of Gumoshtnik, the Seltsi hamlet, 5 km. Welcome!” – reads a hand-written, already rusty sign, on the way to the village. The almost deserted Gumoshtnik, which used to be the biggest village in the Balkan Mountain and a regional centre at the beginning of the twentieth century, is starting to get revived again.

* The photographs in this text were taken in 2004.

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