In the southern Ukrainian town of Bolhrad, on the steppe between the Danube and the Dniester, stands a 19th-century school building that predates the modern Bulgarian state. The Georgi Sava Rakovski High School, opened in June 1858, was the first modern Bulgarian-language gymnasium anywhere in the world. It came into being two decades before the Principality of Bulgaria itself, in territory that was then briefly part of the Principality of Moldavia, and it has functioned through every regime that has ruled the town since. In April 2026, the Bulgarian News Agency opened its 45th press club inside the school, alongside a new student-run media center called BG Focus. BTA Director General Kiril Valchev noted at the opening that mentions of Bolhrad in Bulgarian-language reporting jumped from a handful per year a decade ago to 673 in 2025 alone.
The reason for the attention is partly the school’s anniversary and partly the war. Bolhrad sits in the Budjak, the borderland triangle between the Danube delta, the Black Sea, and the Moldovan frontier, and it is the unofficial capital of one of the largest historical Bulgarian communities outside the Balkans. Ukraine is home to around 200,000 Bessarabian Bulgarians, more than five times the number across the border in Moldova. Since February 2022, the war has reshaped the community’s self-understanding and its relationship with both Kyiv and Sofia.
How they got there
The first Bulgarian and Gagauz refugees from the Ottoman lands appear in Russian imperial records around 1769. The main waves of migration came after the Russo-Turkish Wars of 1806-1812 and 1828-1829, when entire villages crossed the Danube northbound to escape Ottoman taxation and reprisals against communities that had aided the advancing Russian armies. The Russian Empire allocated land in the Budjak steppe of southern Bessarabia, recently emptied of its Tatar and Nogai populations, to anchor the new frontier. The Russian general Ivan Inzov, today honored locally as the founder of Bolgrad, organized much of the resettlement. By the middle of the 19th century, the migrants had established around sixty villages and the new town of Bolhrad, founded in 1819. The settlers came primarily from eastern and central Bulgaria, particularly the regions around Sliven, Stara Zagora, and Veliko Tarnovo, and many villages in today’s Odesa region still carry the names of their original communities back in Bulgaria.
The Bolhrad gymnasium opened in 1858 at the request of forty Bulgarian villages and with the blessing of the Romanian principalities, which then controlled the southern strip of Bessarabia under the 1856 Treaty of Paris. It became one of the major institutions of the Bulgarian National Revival, training the educated class that helped staff the new Bulgarian state after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. Aleksandar Teodorov-Balan, the first rector of Sofia University, was a Bessarabian Bulgarian. In 1861, around 20,000 Bessarabian Bulgarians moved further east into Russia’s Taurida Governorate, founding what became the separate Tauridan Bulgarian community. Their descendants still live in the Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv, and Kirovohrad regions of Ukraine.
The 20th century brought the familiar pattern of dislocation. Romanian rule over the Budjak from 1918 to 1940 came with assimilation policies. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact transferred Bessarabia to the Soviet Union in June 1940. Stalin’s deportations of June 1941 swept up thousands of Bessarabians, Bulgarians included, sending them to Siberia and Kazakhstan. The Holodomor of 1932-1933 hit the Tauridan villages in Soviet Ukraine particularly hard. After the Soviet reoccupation in 1944, the Bolhrad gymnasium lost its Bulgarian character for nearly half a century. The Cultural and Educational Society Rodolyubets, founded in 1989 to represent the Bessarabian and Tauridan communities, marked the beginning of the post-Soviet revival.
The numbers today
The last comprehensive Ukrainian census was held in 2001 and counted 204,600 Bulgarians, the fifth-largest minority in the country. Current estimates put the actual figure at around 140,000 to 150,000, reflecting more than two decades of emigration to Bulgaria, the European Union, and other destinations. The community is concentrated in three regions. Odesa oblast holds the largest share, more than 150,000 in 2001, with around 50,000 to 60,000 in the city of Odesa itself and the rest spread across the Budjak districts of Bolhrad, Izmail, and Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi. Bulgarians form roughly 61 percent of the population of the former Bolhrad raion, the only Ukrainian administrative unit where they are a clear majority. Smaller historical communities live in the Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv, and Kirovohrad regions, descended in part from the 1861 Tauridan migration.
Bolhrad itself has around 15,000 residents and remains majority Bulgarian. Its centerpiece, alongside the Rakovski high school, is the Transfiguration Cathedral, built between 1833 and 1838 with funds raised by the local Bulgarian community and consecrated on 29 October 1838. That date is now celebrated as the Day of Bessarabian Bulgarians.
Institutions and Bulgarian state engagement
Unlike the Moldovan branch, the Ukrainian Bulgarian community has no autonomous district and no Bulgarian-medium higher education institution on its territory. Under Ukraine’s 2017 education law, instruction in minority languages is permitted through primary school, after which lessons shift to Ukrainian, with the minority language continuing as a separate subject. Bulgarian is currently taught as a subject in 42 public schools across Ukraine, supplemented by 62 Bulgarian Sunday schools run by community organizations. Bulgaria’s then-ambassador to Ukraine, Krasimir Minchev, publicly supported the 2017 reform at the time, noting that Bulgarian had never been the sole medium of instruction in the affected schools. A 2018 declaration signed by the Bulgarian and Ukrainian education ministers guaranteed continued access to Bulgarian-language teaching from preschool through grade 12.
The Rakovski high school in Bolhrad anchors the community institutionally. Beyond it, the main civic structures are the Association of Bulgarians of Ukraine, long led by Verkhovna Rada deputy Anton Kisse, who has held a seat from the Bolhrad electoral district almost continuously since 2004, and the older Rodolyubets cultural society. The Cathedral of the Transfiguration continues to hold services in Bulgarian, Romanian, and Church Slavonic, just as it has since 1838. The Bulgarian Consulate General in Odesa, headed by Svetoslav Ivanov, the BTA press club opened in Odesa in June 2023, and the new BTA press club opened in Bolhrad in April 2026 form the main Bulgarian official footprint on the ground. Bulgaria’s diaspora policy toward the community is run by the Executive Agency for Bulgarians Abroad under Director Rayna Mandzhukova, with simplified Bulgarian citizenship available to applicants of Bulgarian descent.
The war
The full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022 has been the most consequential event for the Ukrainian Bulgarian community since the Second World War. The Budjak has not been occupied, but Odesa city and its port infrastructure have been hit repeatedly by missiles and drones, and the broader region has lived under sustained military pressure for nearly four years. Ethnic Bulgarians have served in the Ukrainian armed forces, border guards, and police in significant numbers. According to reporting from the Bolhrad Regional Military Administration and from Bulgarian community organizations, hundreds of Bessarabian Bulgarian soldiers have been killed. Their names appear on monuments in village cemeteries across the Odesa region.
The war has also shifted political identification. Before 2022, the Budjak Bulgarian community had a reputation for Russia-leaning sympathies, partly because Russian remained the regional lingua franca and partly because Moscow had cultivated channels of influence in the area for decades. Sergei Dimitriev, mayor of Bolhrad, told Voxeurop in 2024 that the war had divided his town along sharp lines, with neighbors arguing in the streets. Other community figures, including environmentalist Ivan Rusev and Izmail State University rector Yaroslav Kichuk, have spoken about a generational realignment toward Ukrainian identity. The historical Tauridan Bulgarian communities in occupied parts of Zaporizhzhia oblast have been cut off from contact with both Kyiv and Sofia since 2022.
The war produced one less obvious symbol of the community. Petro Poroshenko, president of Ukraine from 2014 to 2019, was born in Bolhrad in 1965 and grew up speaking Bulgarian. In a 2017 speech at the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, he used his own multilingual upbringing in the Budjak to defend Ukraine’s new education law.
The pressures
The community faces a more acute version of the same demographic squeeze that affects Moldova’s Bulgarians. Emigration to Bulgaria has been the single biggest driver of decline since the 1990s, with several thousand Ukrainian Bulgarians applying for or activating Bulgarian passports since February 2022. Research by Bulgarian academic Aleksandar Ganchev of Odesa has documented a related disillusionment: Bessarabian Bulgarians arriving in Bulgaria are often not recognized as full Bulgarians by the local population, which has eroded the idealized image of the homeland that older generations passed on.
A separate tension involves administrative reform. Under Ukraine’s 2020 territorial restructuring, the historical Bolhrad raion was replaced by smaller hromada-level units, prompting a sharp protest from the Bulgarian National Assembly in May 2025, which declared its categorical disagreement with the changes. Ukrainian officials and local Bulgarian leaders responded that the reform did not affect the community’s right to elect local mayors or run cultural institutions. Independent analysts noted that the declaration appeared to be driven in part by Anton Kisse, whose own electoral district was affected. The episode is a useful illustration of how Sofia’s interventions on behalf of the community can run into local realities that look different on the ground than they do from the Bulgarian National Assembly.
Looking ahead
Two hundred years after the first ox-carts rolled into the Budjak, the Bessarabian Bulgarians of Ukraine occupy a more complicated position than their Moldovan cousins. Their community is larger and more dispersed, and it is more directly affected by an active war. Their institutions are older and in some respects more prestigious, with the Bolhrad gymnasium and the Transfiguration Cathedral standing as monuments to a Bulgarian National Revival that took place largely on what is now Ukrainian soil. Their political voice in Kyiv has been carried for decades by a single legacy parliamentarian approaching the end of his career, even as the community’s overall numbers continue to fall.
For the children studying Bulgarian as a subject in Bolhrad, Izmail, and Mykolaiv this winter, the most immediate question is whether their schools will stay open and whether their fathers and older brothers will come home. For the institutions that hold the community together, the larger question is whether the postwar map of southern Ukraine will still include a recognizable Bessarabian Bulgarian space, or whether emigration and dislocation will have hollowed it out by the time the fighting stops.