VIDIN JEWISH CEMETERY

The Jewish Cemetery of Vidin is located at what the locals refer to as Nula Redut, just off the road leading to Vidin Ferry Port. 

The cemetery is indeed a gruesome sight. While under Communism it was just ignored, in the turbulent years of Bulgaria's transition to democracy it was actively vandalised. Many of the porcelain portraits of the deceased have been crushed with stones and many graves have been dug up and left gaping to the sombre northern Bulgarian skies. With its broken effigies, overturned tombstones, scattered human and animal bones and graves that look as if their occupants have just risen from the ground, the huge cemetery evokes an eerie feeling of Doomsday revisited. Trees grow from inside the holes that were once tombs. The last burial at the Jewish cemetery of Vidin took place in 1965. 

The Vidin Cemetery is perhaps the best (or worst) example of the general dilapidation of Bulgaria's Jewish heritage. It stands as a monu- ment not so much to the individual people who were buried there but as a memento to a whole culture, once rich and vibrant, that has irrevocably disappeared from the Bulgarian lands.