Prayer for Home Photography Project Features Ukrainian Refugees in Bulgaria

Jerusalem, 11 December, 2022 (TPS) -- SOFIA, 11.12.2022 (BTA)
Photographer Valery Poshtarov’s new project, entitled “Prayer for Home” features portraits of Ukrainian refugees in Bulgaria, on the backdrop of the Black sea, separating them from their homeland, the creator told BTA.

For the project, Poshtarov took a week to roam the beaches of the Black sea resorts where Ukrainian refugees were accommodated in hotels. He invited the participants “to send a prayer home” and noted, that the prayers are now reaching their intended destination, as the photographs are being circulated in Ukrainian media.

Poshtarov said that he does not imagine this project as an exhibition and chose to only publish it online.

There are nine thousand Ukrainian refugees in Bulgaria according to the latest data from December 8, said Deputy Minister of Labour and Social Policy Emil Mingov at a meeting of the Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights, Religions and Citizen Complaints.

There are 1,200 refugee children in Bulgaria, 437 of them are unaccompanied, Mariana Tosheva, chair of the State Agency for Refugees under the Council of Ministers, said later that Thursday during the Lex Talks 2022: Children and War legal discussion forum organized by the National Network for Children and the Legal Aid Network. The coordinator of the Legal Aid Network, an informal association of lawyers and children’s rights advocates, Georgi Elenkov, added that since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, 52,000 Ukrainian refugee children have sought protection in Bulgaria.

Valery Poshtarov is a Bulgarian documentary photographer, whose works are part of the collections of renowned international institutions such as the Presidency of the Republic of France, the French Embassy in Ireland, the Bulgarian Cultural Centre in Paris, the Museum-Gallery of Yevgeny Yevtushenko. in Moscow, etc. After graduating from the Varna National School of Arts, Poshtarov studied at the Sorbonne, and then founded the first online art gallery in Eastern Europe in 2011. At the end of 2021 he founded the PhotoAnthology foundation with the aim of promoting artistic practices in photography and carrying out documentary projects for the public.

This year, Poshtarov published his first photobook, entitled “The Last Man Standing in the Rhodope Mountains”, which is a result of expeditions to 985 local villages in the span of 14 years. His next project is entitled “Father and Son”, and will feature portraits of fathers with their grown sons holding hands, in all 28 regions of Bulgaria.

The Prayer for Home project has been realized with the financial support of The National Culture Fund of Bulgaria.