Healing waters: infrastructure and capitalist fantasies in the socialist ruins of rural Bulgaria

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article explores the aspirations of a small community in rural Bulgaria, devastated by postsocialist economic decline. The community’s economic and moral aspirations are linked to the ruins of a thermal bath and the existence of a “miraculous spring”– formerly the source of local prosperity and pride. In the context of a vanishing agro-industrial sector, deindustrialisation and a mass exodus of the local population, the bath is the locus of capitalist fantasies for the villagers, who believe foreign investments will revive the entire community.