The Belene Archipelago

IN HUNGARIAN

Nature can create hell on Earth, but a volcano emerging from a cornfield is different from a man-made communist correctional labour camp on an island in the Danube. The Belene prison island in Bulgaria wants to forget the horrors of the communist era, in some ways too well underway, but the black stain of the past is probably indelible from the green island.

Marshes on the eastern part of Belene Island © Александър Иванов (source)

I first read about the history of Belene Island in Nick Thorpe's book "The Danube - A Journey Upriver from the Black Sea to the Black Forest". Its history is quite unknown, but perhaps the story of the Soviet Gulag Archipelago can be paralleled. Belene Island is also unique in that it is the largest island in the Danube in Bulgaria and is located close to the southernmost point of the Danube. We are closer to reality when we talk about the Belene as an archipelago, because sandbar and island formation is still active in this stretch, not only in the main branch but also in the smaller Danube riverbeds. Here, the islands die a "natural death", attached to the larger islands or to the riverbanks. 

The Belene archipelago consists of a main island, also known as Persin (Персин) Island, joined to the north by Kitka (Китка) Island (elsewhere Golyama Barzina), with only a narrow Danube-branch marking the thinning boundary. By the shapes of the floodplain, we can discover several smaller islands hidden in this backwater. To the north of Kitka there is the beautifully named Milka (Милка), in this case not a chocolate, but a female name. Calvados (Калвадос) is the only island in the Danube to my knowledge that is named after a type of alcohol, Calvados being a distillate made from cider from northern France, which some local with a sense of humour must have edited Google maps. There are also a few unnamed Bulgarian islands that have merged with the Romanian or left bank, some that are real islands on the Romanian side of the fairway, and extensive bars in the Danube at lower water levels.

There are three other islands in the southern Danube arm, near the settlement of Belene, namely Magaritsa (Магареца), Belitsa or Štureca and the lowest downstream, Predela (Предела). They also have a descriptive name, and in the same order they are translated in English as Donkey-, Cricket- and -Frontier island. The latter takes its name from the fact that it lies on the border between the Bulgarian provinces of Pleven and Veliko Tarnovo.

The Belene archipelago covers an area of about 54 square kilometres, roughly the size of Szentendre Island in Hungary. It is 14 kilometres long as the crow flies, 16 kilometres according to river kilometres and has a maximum width of six kilometres. In contrast to Szentendre Island, the entire area of the Belene archipelago lies on the floodplain and is basically unsuitable for permanent human settlement.

The Belene Archipelago (edited from Googleearth)

Until the spring of 1949, Belene was a relatively poor village with a Catholic Bulgarian population. Its poverty was due to the fact that much of its land lay on the flood plain of the Danube, and not only the islands but also the land on the right bank was flooded almost every year. And the flooded land was not suitable for wheat, only for maize, so white bread was considered as a luxury. The population of Belene used the islands for floodplain farming, mainly for animal husbandry. In the spring, cows, pigs and sheep were driven across the Danube and then driven back to the village in the autumn. The islands provided timber for building and firewood, the low-lying wetlands were full of fish, and the extensive flower meadows were a great source of bee-keeping. This idyllic land use ceased overnight in May 1949. 

The pontoon bridge at Belene (source)

On May 1, 1949, just four days after the Bulgarian Interior Minister's decree approving the construction of the correctional labour camps, two officials appeared in Belene and the islands were effectively seized on behalf of the Interior Ministry. This involved the arrival of guards who drove the 20,000 livestock of the locals, hives and all, off the island at short notice. Until then, the communists had not had much support in the village, but sentiment reports this summer indicated that the dissatisfaction of the population was so great that the investment was in doubt. 

Later, as time went on, this animosity slowly faded as many of the villagers found work and a good living as camp employees. Among them were most of the guards and administrative staff. Some prison guard later became mayor of Belene.

The situational map of the Belene Island's forced labour camp sites (source)

The first group of inmates arrived on the island in the summer of 1949. The arrivals were difficult to keep secret, as the only pontoon bridge to the island was via the centre of Belene. The first 300 inmates were still living in branch-covered pits, and it was their job to build the camp and barracks. A wide variety of social groups were gathered here, including former members of parliament, members of opposition parties, prominent members of the middle classes, including the former mayor of Sofia, singers and church people of all denominations. There were intellectuals, military officers, kulaks, anarchists, monarchists, social democrats, agrarians and later even communists. In the 1950s, even listening to western music or dressing in western style was enough to get you into a forced labour camp. The only thing they all had in common was that they were all sent to Belene without a conviction. Initially, it was only possible to send someone to a correctional labour camp for six months, but in 1951 the duration was increased to three to seven years. Nevertheless, it was not uncommon to be imprisoned for 14 years in various Bulgarian forced labour camps, as Belene was not the only one, although it was the largest and longest-running. The other equally notorious place was Lovech, in the Balkan Mountains, but there were at least 40 other labour camps, although this is not an exact figure either, as there were temporary labour camps.

There were five camps scattered on Belene Island, marked with a Roman numbers. Site I is still in operation as a prison, since 1953. Currently, 500 prisoners are serving their sentences here. It is the closest to  Belene settlement, with a straight road leading from the pontoon bridge. What distinguished it from the work camp was that the prisoners were brought here by court order, which did not mean that there was no overleap between the camp and the prison. In 1953, when following the death of Stalin amnesty was granted to political prisoners sentenced to forced labour in Bulgaria, many were not released but transferred to the prison. In 1957, the supervision of the prison was transferred to the Ministry of Justice. Site No. II was the actual forced labour camp, enclosed by barbed wire, moats and watchtowers. It was far away, in the eastern part of the island, surrounded by marshes, 10 kilometres from Belene. Here political prisoners were overseen by guards with machine guns. Because of the island's great distances, these guards were mounted on horseback and equipped with whips. The prisoners here did hard physical labour, building dykes, draining swamps, agricultural work and deforestation.

According to camp residents' recollections, the barracks had no heating, there was no medical care and contact with the outside world was restricted. The camp was designed for 3,000 people, but between 1949 and 1953 a total of 12,000 people stayed there. If we take the whole period between 1949-1989, this number could reach 30,000. The food was most often diluted soup, with dry and/or mouldy bread, and sometimes the soup or tea was frozen in winter. Most died of starvation, freezing, lack of medical care and torture. According to survivors' recollections, the bodies of prisoners were sometimes fed to pigs, but flogging was a common punishment, after which the prisoners were tied up naked in a swampy place where the mosquitoes carried out the rest of the torture. The people who died on the island were buried in mass graves, but their location has not been discovered to date. 

Site IV was located on the island of Shturets, where the women prisoners were housed. Camps III and V were working places for prisoners, one was an agricultural facility and the other a brick factory. On Belene Island, a total of 2,000 hectares were farmed after the Danube floods were eliminated by a system of dykes built by forced labour.

Belene Site II. (source:  Krum Horozov)

Despite being the longest running and largest forced labour camp in Bulgaria, Belene was not permanently in use. Such camps operated in Bulgaria from the communist coup of 9 September 1944 until the fall of socialism, despite Bulgaria's public denial. Even at the very end, in the summer of 1989, people were interned in Bulgaria without trial. Belene was first operated as a labour camp from 1949 to 1953, with a 3-year break until 1956, but the Belene prison continued to receive detainees. In the autumn of 1956, after the failed October revolution in Hungary, the camp reopened and operated until 1959. According to memoirs, this period was the most brutal period of Belene. In 1959 the camp was closed and the prisoners were transferred to the quarry of the Lovech forced labour camp. However, the bodies of the victims who died there were transported back to Belene Island by trucks until 1962. There were two rounds a day, one in the morning and one in the evening. The bodies were sometimes dumped in the Danube, but most of them were buried in unmarked mass graves on the smaller islands. The simultaneous operation of the prison and the labour camp blurred the boundaries in the memory of the locals. Very few of those who recalled the events could tell the difference between the two, so the two institutions were often lumped together. 

Site II. reopened in 1985, when the national-communist government began forcibly assimilating the Turkish and Pomak minorities. You could get to Belene just by refusing to change your name to Bulgarian. Typically, resistance leaders were interned on the island. These measures lasted until the fall of state socialism, and when the borders were opened 300,000 Bulgarian Turks emigrated to Turkey.

The Belene Island memorial (source)

The fall of state socialism in Bulgaria should be put between quotation marks, because in 1990, in the first free elections, the Bulgarian Socialist Party, the successor to the Communist Party, won an absolute majority in the new Parliament. Although there were trials against the people who supervised the forced labour camps, none of them were convicted. On the one hand, most of these people were no longer alive, some of them died during the trials, but they were not fully prosecuted because the official documents were mostly lost or destroyed. In other words, in the absence of official documents, it could be said that such camps never existed in Bulgaria. It is therefore difficult to come to terms with the past, based solely on the accounts of guards and prisoners. The documents have disappeared, there are no traces of old mass graves, and the survivors are slowly dying out. In Bulgaria, survivors feel that there is a lack of confrontation, that there is no institution to deal with the crimes of the communist period.

And on the Belene Island, nature is slowly reclaiming what was once taken away. The eastern half of the island has been a protected area since 2000 and is home to many bird species. Four of the island's former large marshes are being revitalised; the dykes, built up from the inmates' blood sweat and tears, are being dismantled by conservationists to allow the Danube to reclaim its floodplain. This is why the Belene archipelago is now known as both "Bulgaria's Dachau" and the "Pearl of the Danube". 

Monographies, images and memories on Belene for further reading:

• https://beleneisland.org/history/?lang=en
• https://www.businessinsider.com/my-visit-to-the-gulag-where-my-grandfather-was-tortured-2021-9
• https://vagabond.bg/dark-tales-belene-3275
• https://us4bg.org/news/belene-2019/
• https://webcafe.bg/report/483133946-belene-syakash-nikoga-ne-e-bilo/gallery
• https://belene.bg/en/tourism/belene-memorial-park/
• Daniela Koleva: Belene: remembering the labour camp and the history of memory. 2012.
• Lilia Topouzova: Reclaiming Memory: The History and Legacy of Concentration Camps in Communist Bulgaria. 2015.