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Rose oil is part of the national identity in Bulgaria. But now many people prefer to work in the arms factories, which are also in Rosental.
Sevda Jaschar has been putting sweet scents in crackling plastic bags since she was ten years old. “I’m number one.” Hardly anyone in Bulgaria harvests the rose field faster than she does. Yesterday she managed 102 kilograms of rose petals. “The thorns don’t bother me.”
In early summer, when the nights are still cool but the days are already hot, the plain at the foot of the Balkan Mountains looks like a pistachio cake with pink sugar sprinkles, and the Damascus rose has been blooming in the lush green of the Rose Valley for hundreds of years.
The roses make us unique here, everyone else in Europe can do everything else.
Then farmer Hristo Nikolov looks at his rose fields. “The roses make us unique here, everyone else in Europe can do everything else.” Picking alone is an art, people without experience have their hands so bruised in the evenings that he needs a surgeon for them.
Noble note for exclusive perfumes
Folk festivals are part of the rose harvest, bagpipes play. And the tourists are shown how old stills make rose water and rose oil from flower petals – they used to be behind every house in the valley. Today it is distilled in factories.
What has remained the same: rose oil from Bulgaria is valuable, so viscous that it can be measured in kilograms, a kilo costs 8,000 francs, rose oil from Bulgaria is in the most expensive perfumes in the world. Still.
Farmer Hristo Nikolov says his workers are almost as valuable as the oil. “My biggest problem is that I can hardly find rose pickers. Today I need 50, but I only have 25.” What is not picked falls to the ground after a few days and rots.
Hristo Nikolov’s best picker earns 60 francs a day for her 102 kilos of rose petals. If she worked in one of the weapons factories that are also in Rosental, she would get paid a lot more. The arms factories have a lot of orders right now – they are producing for Ukraine. Only those who have always been picking roses or who are not taken in the factories are still working in the fields.
Non-European competition
The fact that picking roses is so badly paid has to do with competition: oil from Morocco and oil from Iran are cheaper. Ever since Bulgaria joined the European Union, its rose growers have had to spend money on things like social security. The competition outside of Europe doesn’t have to do that.
Then there is Corona: The cosmetics industry had to make up profits in the years of masks and closed airports. As a result, Hristo Nikolov and many other rose growers made losses and gave up fields. And now, as soon as Corona has faded a little, the war in Ukraine is making fertilizer so expensive that they are paying more.
Critics identify homegrown problems
The Bulgarian state helps, but only a little. Nikolov – who is also the president of the Bulgarian Rose Growers’ Association – says: If the EU does not recognize and support Bulgaria’s rose oil industry as unique, it will wither.
Critics, however, say that the problems faced by rose growers are also their own fault: they cling too much to tradition and have not mastered modern marketing enough. A new Rose Queen was elected at the folk festival – a young woman all in pink. As soon as she has wished everyone a blessed harvest, it starts to rain.