What makes a home? Family, friends; belonging to a community, a village, a city, a nation? Why do people choose to uproot  themselves from their existing home to make a new one in a different country? What are the consequences of this for the citizens of the second country?

Professor Judith Allen from Westminster University, London, UK, and Dr Iskra Dandolova from the Institute of Sociology of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia are working on a project which addresses these questions and more in examining the increasing trend of migration of British citizens to Bulgaria.

The West to East migration of UK citizens investing in land and property in Bulgaria has generated strong local reactions, both positive and negative.The processes of  UK settlement in Bulgaria raise questions reflecting the  issues involved in creating nationally mixed communities as opposed to nationality-based enclaves in the context of EU integration. By interviewing a variety of people - Brits and Bulgarians - in the Bourgas (south Black Sea coast) and Elhovo (southeastern Bulgaria) regions, Allen and Dandolova began to build up a profile of British citizens settling in Bulgaria, the reasons for their moves, and the impressions they were making on the Bulgarian communities they entered. They presented some of their findings in "British Citizens Settling in Bulgaria", a talk delivered for the English Speakers Union, Bulgaria at the One World British-Bulgarian Information and Training centre, in April.

Movement of the people
"I've studied migration figures til I'm blue in the face and and it's not just that Bulgarian figures are missing, basically, but I think that there's a new phenomenon now happening in Europe," says Allen.  "The notion of `free movement of people' is taking on a new meaning and none of the national statistics can cope with this."

She has coined the phrase "European circulatory migration" to refer to this phenomenon in which people are moving much more frequently between countries. "Academic literature talks about where they move to as a second home, but what we were looking at is people who were making their first home in Bulgaria."

This raises questions concerning what the notion of "home" actually means.

Home is where the heart is?

"Why does someone move to a new place altogether and say: `this is my home', rather than saying, `my home is in London, or Nottingham, or Preston, or someplace else'?" Allen asks.

The fact that more Brits are calling home somewhere other than Britain is increasingly obvious, and is also confirmed by statistics that the two discovered. Last winter, about eight per cent of heating allowance payments for pensioners were made outside of Britain. This means that eight per cent of British pensioner households were living outside of Britain. "Eight per cent of people over the age of 65 is quite a large number." They also discovered from data from a life insurance survey that 25 per cent of people living in Britain are dissatisfied with living there. "That's a quarter of the population that's dissatisfied with living in Britain." So, what are the reasons behind this dissatisfaction?

Dissatisfaction in Britain
Deterioration of working conditions was found to be a large factor in this feeling of dissatisfaction with life in Britain. "People are working very much harder now than they worked 10 or 15 years ago and many forms of work which were secure are now casual," says Allen.  She cites the example of one man they spoke to, a lorry driver, who had been made redundant five times. "He could always get another job, but he was tired of being made redundant."

 "It's sad because we had - or we thought we had - a left wing government, but somehow it didn't work that way," she says.

A second factor, connected to this, is England's welfare state system and the "benefit trap".

 "The welfare state in Britain means that if you're not working and you're claiming social benefit it's very difficult to start working. We met people in Bulgaria who were very dynamic, but because of the way the English system stopped them from being dynamic, found coming Bulgaria was a tremendous relief and found work they wanted to do."

Another contributing factor was related to ideas about belonging and community, which Allen says can be summed up in three common English utterances:

"It takes knowing someone 10 years to become a friend."

"Do you belong to this village?". "No, we won't belong to this village until at least one of our family is in the cemetery."

"People keep themselves to themselves."

In contrast, Brits perceived everyday behaviour in Bulgaria as very friendly, very warm and very welcoming, the reverse of the their perceptions of their British "neighbours".

Other, more general, factors connected to people's choice to make their new home in Bulgaria were to do with life changes, "points in our life when we lose key relationships". These included: retirement; the death of a spouse; and divorce. One way of dealing with these changes, says Allen, is to move to another country and form different relationships and reconstruct ourselves in relation to these new relationships.

"Older people (we spoke to) had frequently sold a place where they'd raised the children. So-called `emancipation of the children' often linked with retirement and a lump sum of money." This meant people could buy a small house in Britain to rent out while they lived in Bulgaria in their "third age", and which would act as security for their "fourth age". But this house in Britain "is not their home, their home is in Bulgaria, there's no emotional attachment."

Physical investment, the idea that "there is no better way to make a place your home than to actually build it," is also important in establishing a new fixed co-ordinate to call home. Often people settling in Bulgaria are involved in actually building their new home, or at least invest a lot of time and energy in improvements or renovation of existing buildings. Dandolova points out that this is a reason why owner occupation is so important.

But once the physical environment of the home is established, what of the this emotional attachment to the wider environment, to neighbours, a village or city?

The British on Bulgarians
Britain is not  a "gift culture" and Brits see the exchange of goods such as a neighbour giving them a bag of tomatoes from their garden as unusual. "They see Bulgarians as very neighbourly, and perhaps over-interpret a bit something that is customary behaviour," says Allen.

"Generally people balanced  extreme dependency because they don't have the language, with gratitude for people that helped them," she says.

However, she says, "They were very confused by the complexity of the bureaucratic process. (though this shared by Bulgarians too I think!). They were sometimes suspicious of it too."

They found the banking system to be "like England 30 years ago", and, therefore, manageable, but people were unable to "read" the cities to find the things that they needed, as the urban environment was not "legible". However, this was noticeably changing, with the introduction of signs in Cyrillic and English.

The British were impressed by the way property transfer is organised. "The process of documentation and transfer, etc. - the English keep dreaming of getting to that stage," says Allen, herself an experienced property professional. The ease of buying property in Bulgaria and the desire to buy went hand in hand.

Allen and Dandolova said that the attitude of the Brits towards the Bulgarians was overall very good. But what of their "hosts"?

Bulgarians on The British
"One thing Bulgarians cannot understand is why English people don't have vegetable gardens," says Allen. Also, a common perception was that English incomes are very high. That's one reason why it's very important to understand why Brits come to live in England, says Allen. She gives the example of a single mother they met who had two children. Her income was not enough to feed the children nutritiously in England, but "that income is huge by Bulgarian standards and the ability to receive benefits across borders means she's perceived as well off in Bulgaria." The same applied to pensioners. Left with the choice of "heating or eating" in England, they were relatively materially wealthy in Bulgaria.

Many Bulgarians appreciated the dynamism of the Brits, who worked hard to make improvements to properties, but overall the attitudes of the Bulgarians that they spoke to towards Brits was mixed.

The perceptions surrounding economic issues appeared to play quite a substantial part in these attitudes. Brits coming to Bulgaria have a form of "social promotion", their status is increased, says Allen. "Eighty pounds in Bulgaria goes a long way; it goes nowhere in England, it's hard to live on that."

People's reasons for settling in Bulgaria were both economic and emotional. On an emotional level, people feel Bulgaria to be their home because they they feel "it's where I work, where I built my home, it's where, after a big change in my life, I came for refuge and comfort." They are attracted to the hospitality and welcoming neighbourliness of Bulgarians- "but probably don't realise how much Bulgarians discuss them!" Allen concludes.

Allen and Dandolova conducted their research with funding form the British Academy as a year-long feasibility study. They are now working on securing further funding and considering which of the many avenues their work has opened up to pursue.

The One World Information and training Centre is located at 22 Veliko Turnovo Street, Sofia.

For information on the ESUBg, go to: www.esu.org/contact/international/bulgaria.asp