Winter is closing in, but the sound of chainsaws still reverberates on the forest-covered slopes of the mountains in northern Bulgaria, while horses stand ready to transport the freshly cut wood down the steep paths.
Many in the EU’s poorest member country of 6.5 million people have rushed to stock up on firewood as Europe struggles with an energy crisis triggered by the war in Ukraine.
“Firewood remains the cheapest means of heating, and demand has increased three times compared to last year,” Bulgarian Minister of Agriculture Yavor Gechev said.
Photo: AFP
Gechev has pleaded for people not to buy more wood than they need as the usual coal deliveries from Ukraine’s Donbas region have largely failed to arrive.
More than half of the households in Bulgaria use coal and wood for heating, especially in rural areas where frequent cuts make electricity unreliable.
Even before the current crisis, one-quarter of Bulgarians were unable to heat their homes properly in winter, the highest percentage across the EU, Eurostat data showed.
In the mountainous region around Teteven, 4,800 households have placed orders for firewood, compared with less than 2,000 households last year, said Stoycho Moskovski, a media officer for the municipality of 18,000 residents.
A lack of snow so far this year has allowed logging to continue well into December, state forestry farm chief engineer Docho Dochev said.
After workers cut down young beech trees from the mountains around Teteven, the logs are cut into 1m-long pieces for transportation, mostly by horses because of the terrain.
On a crisp day earlier this month, workers loaded the logs on the saddles of a dozen horses that waited patiently. Then they started their short journey down a steep forest path to a place from where the wood can be loaded onto trucks.
Ten horses can transport about 3m2 of firewood at a time and usually make two trips per day, Dochev said.
In the nearby villages on the way down to Teteven, piles of logs were seen lining fences, and stocks of firewood, cut and ready for the stove, filled sheds, balconies and staircases.
However, not everyone has received their wood on time this year.
“Every year I use roughly the same amount of five cubic meters of firewood for heating, but this year I waited for quite some time, over two months, for the delivery,” pensioner Blagovesta Dogandzhiyska said as a trucker unloaded logs outside her house in Teteven.
This year, she is also paying double US$49 per cubic meter that she spent last year.
“It’s very hard [to heat my home], and it’s getting even harder,” she said.
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