Bulgaria

In 1943 the trains carrying Jewish deportees from Aegean Thrace stopped at the Dupnitsa railway station. Over 1,400 Jews from Komotini, Xanthi and Alexandropouli, in Greece, were incarcerated at a tobacco warehouse called The Cartel, from 7 to 9 March. Five died, but 18 were rescued following the intervention of Mois Hadzhi Davidov from the local Jewish community and Dimitar Ikonomov, an MP. Ikonomov was later sentenced to death by the People's Court. The tobacco warehouse, located at 64 Prince Boris Street, has been demolished. 

In 2018, a commemorative plaque was placed at the station to express "gratitude to the citizens of Dupnitsa for protecting their Jews from deportation and for alleviating the suffering of the 4,000 who passed through town on their way to the death camps." 

A memorial to 997 Jews from Aegean Thrace, who spent a night in Gorna Dzhumaya, now Blagoevgrad, before being shipped to Poland in March 1943.

The plaque is placed on the façade of a school where the deportees spent a night.

The memorial was vandalised before its official opening, in 2009.

All that remains of the Jewish heritage of Sliven, is a Jewish plot in the municipal cemetery with about 40-50 granite and marble tombstones. 

Not far from the border with Turkey, Yambol used to be a thriving Jewish centre. Now there are only a few Jewish families left. The town had a large synagogue which ceased being a house of prayer when most of the town's Jews left in the 1940s. 

Yambol has a small Jewish section in the town's municipal cemetery but the really interesting experience comes in the municipal park, situated on an island in the Tundzha river. Walk to its outer reaches, off the path at the back of the tennis courts and the sports hall, into the part known as the Komsomolets, or Communist Youth, sports site. There, in the thick of the trees, you will see two marble Jewish tombstones, with exquisite Hebrew writing on them. The story of these two tombstones is as remarkable as the story of Bulgaria's Jewry as a whole. 

At the beginning of the 20th century, the old Jewish cemetery used to be located on the Tundzha island. In the 1930s, however, the city council decided to turn the island into a park and most of the tombstones were relocated to an area now occupied by a major shopping centre. Many were given away to local butchers and fishermen to be used as chopping blocks in their shops. These two remained in situ, a quiet if somewhat sombre testament to Yambol's Jewish heritage. 

Not far from the border with Turkey, Yambol used to be a thriving Jewish centre. Now there are only a few Jewish families left. The town had a large synagogue which ceased being a house of prayer when most of the town's Jews left in the 1940s. For many years it was cordoned off with a barbed-wire fence, right in the middle of town, because it was used as a munitions de pot by the Warsaw Pact military. It was reconstructed as the city art gallery in the late 1970s, and it continues to operate as such under the name Georges Papazoff Art Gallery. No indication of its Jewish past survives. 

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The Sephardi synagogue, known to most citizens of Varna simply as the "Large Synagogue," was erected in 1890. Its architecture is the typical mixture of Neoclassical and Moorish styles, which was very popular at the time. 

Situated right behind the Neo-Baroque building of the Admiralty House, the current General Staff of the Bulgarian Navy, the Sephardi Synagogue (on the intersection of Pres- byter Kozma and Vardar streets) was off limits for most of the second half of the 20th century. Next door to it, the house of the Sephardi rabbi was used by military intelligence. Now the fence around the former synagogue is gone, but its roof has already collapsed, trees sprout inside its interior, and it is doubtful whether the fine late-19th century structure can ever be restored. The courts returned the rabbinical house to the Jewish community but the military refused to vacate it, citing reasons of national security. In 2017 plans to restore the building into a cultural centre were unveiled but so far these have stalled. 

Varna has a functioning Jewish cemetery, which is a part of the Central City Cemetery, sometimes called the "Old Cemetery". It has about 400 graves and a non-functioning chel. Most of the graves are in good condition but some of them are overgrown with vegetation. 

In the 1930s, however, this was the "New Cemetery." The old "Old Cemetery" was by the sea. It was demolished to make room for the city's famous Maritime Garden. 

Most of the remains of the Jews buried there were transferred to the Old-New Cemetery, but some were not – and their names were in- scribed on a special wall next to the chel. 

The Ashkenazi synagogue of Varna, called the "Small Synagogue," was a brilliant example of the German Jügendstil. It was constructed in 1908-1910. After most of Varna's Jews emigrated to Israel in the late 1940s-early 1950s, the Ashkenazi synagogue fell into such disrepair and dilapidation that it had to be demolished around the mid-2000s. The site was sold to a private company which erected a business centre in its place. In a rare instance of sensitive modern urban architecture, the façade of the former synagogue was reconstructed from scratch, down to the minutest detail, a huge Star of David beaming down from the concrete-and-glass structure.

The Jewish tombstones now exibited by Stara Zagora's municipal swimming pool date back to the 18th and 19th centuries. They were "rescued" by the local museum from the town's old Jewish cemetery (located by the railway line, off Slavyanski Boulevard), when it was partly demolished in the 1950s to make room for an industrial compound. Though some of the tombstones have been vandalised with spray paint, they are the "lucky" ones: many more were just destroyed without a trace. 

Exquisite arches, decorative columns and balconies, fine stucco ornaments depicting prosperity and fertility: Ruse's best known feature is its splendid Secession architecture. Some of Ruse's old houses have been restored, others have been ignored and neglected, but the whole city centre as it stands now is a major tourist attraction and leaves little room for doubt why Bulgaria's largest town on the River Danube used to be referred to as "Little Vienna." 

Take in the small plaques listing these buildings as monuments of culture and you will see some non-Bulgarian names. The truth is that many of the townhouses were commissioned and owned by Jews. Indeed, Ruse used to be home to what was perhaps Bulgaria's most prosperous and Europeanised Jewish community. 

The earliest trace of a Jewish population in what was then Rustchuk dates back to the 1780s. At that time two groups of Jews arrived. They had come from different places and were fleeing different kinds of trouble. 

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One came from Adrianople. Despite its relative proximity to the High Porte, the town had been left to the mercy of brigands and highwaymen. Constantly the victims of crime, the Jews of Adrianople decided to leave. Some went southwards, to the capital Stamboul, but others headed north and eventually reached the shores of the Danube. 

The other came from the west: from Belgrade and Nis. They fled the uncertainties of yet another war between the sultan and the Austrian Empire. 

The newly-arrived Jews were quick to partake of the commercial opportunities Ruse offered, and their communities quickly grew bigger and richer. But ill fate soon befell them: the 1806 war between the Russian and the O toman empires forced them to flee again. After a prolonged siege, the Russians captured Ruse in 1810. Jewish shops were plundered, the synagogue was turned into a stables and was torched soon thereafter. 

Jews would return to Rustchuk in 1812, after the end of the war. In the ensuing years the wealth of the whole Danubian Plain continued to flow through the city, whose importance for the Ottoman Empire grew exponentially, especially as it had already lost a number of markets in the Balkans as a result of the independence of Serbia and Greece. Ruse's heyday came after the 1853-1856 Crimean War, when trade and cultural contacts along the Danube intensified, and the city emerged as a lower-Danube rival to all the other large cities upriver. 

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A Jew is somewhat stereotypically depicted as a money changer in a modern mural at a posh restaurant in Levent Tabia fort, celebrating Ruse's post-1878 multiculturalism. In the first decades after Bulgaria regained its independence, the Jews of Ruse were involved in a wide area of activities from industry to culture