Belene Island

Worth a detour

Fourteen kilometres of willow, poplar and drained farmland in the middle of the Danube, reached from Belene by a pontoon bridge. The western end is a working prison standing on the site of the labour camp that held political prisoners from the late 1940s. The eastern end is the Persinski Blata reserve. You do not wander here. It is a place to understand rather than to walk.

Story

Background

Persin on the maps, Belene to everyone else: about forty-one square kilometres formed where several smaller islands silted together, built of river sediment fifteen to twenty metres deep and rising barely nine metres above the water. Drainage works turned the higher west and centre into arable land. The low east is still abandoned channels, permanent marsh and flooded forest, and it goes under when the Danube comes up.

The camp is why most Bulgarians know the name. It ran in phases from the late 1940s through the 1950s and held political prisoners; it is the closest thing Bulgaria has to a single place-name for that decade. A prison operates on the site today, and that half of the island is closed.

The eastern half became the Persinski Blata reserve in 1981 and is now the core of Persina Nature Park. Over 170 bird species have been recorded, among them glossy ibis, pygmy cormorant, lesser grey shrike and red-breasted goose, with wild boar, jackal, fox and otter in the forest. The two facts sit on the same fourteen kilometres of mud, and there is no comfortable way to hold them together — which is, in the end, the reason to come.