Every spring, around March to June, Bulgaria hosts a controversial bride market where virgin girls between the ages of 16 to 20 are sold off by their families to male suitors who’ll marry them.
The market is the biggest annual get-together for Bulgaria’s 18,000-strong Kalaidzhi Roma clan, a subgroup of the Roma people who face constant prejudice and exclusion across Europe.
The Kalaidzhi are Orthodox Christian gypsies who have battled with continuous discrimination all over Europe.
They were predominantly skilled coppersmiths and lived in the rural areas where they fixed copper pots for a living.
Nowadays, demand for their trade has since dwindled, and they face the challenge of economic hardships.
In Bulgaria, they are ranked as some of the poorest, and as such, they seek unions based on marriages that are financially advantageous.
In the documentary, ‘Young Virgins as Bulgaria’s Controversial Bride Market’, a mother of two who also met her husband through the market explained how it is imperative that Kalaidzhi girls remain virgins to be able to get the best prices.
“It is very important because a lot of money is given for virginity. If the girl is not a virgin when you sell her, they will call us whores, sluts, and disgraceful women,” she said.
Typically, girls are bought for between $290 – $350, but Vera said that she was offered $3500 for Pepa and even more for Rosi.
“I am very happy when boys are bidding a lot of money. This means the girls are beautiful. The boys like them.
The factors, which denote the price of the girl, are purely based on aesthetics – how nice her clothes are, and how pretty she is. The idealised concept of beauty is fair skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes. Because of this, there is a proliferation of cosmetics many girls use to try to appear to have whiter skin.
According to Velcho Krustev, an ethnographer with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences as cited in the New York Times, “the man is not buying a wife, but her virginity.”
He also said, “If she’s really beautiful, the prices can go up.”
Most of the girls are also taken out of school in their 8th grade because of the belief that they would be stolen otherwise by their suitors.
From that period, they are locked up in homes. Although, there is no favourable data to prove this point, some are of the opinion it is a face-saving story when a daughter elopes.
This leads to wide-scale illiteracy of the women leaving one in every five women illiterate.
Education has always not been a priority of the society with women facing the greater brunt of it.
According to the World Bank, only 10 percent of Bulgarian women and 16 percent of the men have secondary education.
A recent study by Amilape, a nongovernmental organisation in Bulgaria found that 52 percent of the Roma opposed the choice of parents involving the spouse of their children.
Very few young Roma people accepted the tradition. With the intervention of mobile phones in their life, they are also opened to new ways of living involving social media exchange.
Of course, this has been often made discreetly, not to attract the attention of the older family members.
As the world continues to evolve, this tradition may end soon as the girls are rebelling against not having little or no say in the matter.
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