Let me be clear from the outset; this review is by way of a thank-you note to our hosts for our stay in their guest house, for two weeks in the first half of August this year and the same fortnight in 2009.

We were paying guests and Teresa and Orlin have no idea that this is being written. That is the kind of disclosure that I am most comfortable making.

Villa Oreletz is to be found, not easily at first it must be admitted, in a narrow gravel road in the placid seaside hamlet of Bliznatsi, about 23km south of Varna and just more than three km from where the waters break on the Black Sea shore. Usually, the noisest thing to found anywhere along the road is a gaggle of geese several front gates away.

A modern two-storey modern construction all of wood, with five double rooms (officially numbered, but better known by their themes – the green room, the orange room, the "tiny little room") the place offered us two central focuses of our stay; the elegantly and tastefully-decorated living room (like all the interior, strictly non-smoking), and the invitingly tranquil garden. This latter refuge, when first I rested on a chaise longue under a sprawling tree after our drive from Sofia, I thought somehow English, for its floral touches and little lawn; a favourite foraging point became the dangling thorny bush of wild blackberries, hot from the summer sun.

This year and last, we were quite a mob, occupying all the rooms, we sometimes rambunctious horde of parents and, at one point, a total of something like 10 children, the latter oscillating between garden swings and (fortunately) patient house cat. We self-catered, in the well-appointed kitchen, but took advantage of breakfast-by-arrangement, of banitsa, mekitsi and other traditional fare by which Bulgarians fortify themselves for days on the beach.

Each room has its own private bathroom, we drew on the air conditioning and moreover, especially on the workaholics among our number, on the wi-fi. If memory serves, this year’s count was five laptops, and not all the blackberries were on the bush outside. At night, the stillness of the stars in the clear coastal sky above, the only speeding thing being the annual display of shooting stars in the Pleiades.

Unlike some guesthouses, Teresa and Orlin remain in residence during guests’ stay, in their own private ground-floor accommodation while visitors room on the first floor. Discreetly on hand for inquiries and conversation (Teresa, apart from Bulgarian, speaks masterly French and good English, but thankfully conversed with me only in Bulgarian; I prefer fluent, beautiful Bulgarian to uncertain English; Bulgaria’s hospitality industry, please note), our hosts were otherwise unobtrusive, dining separately. It has been more than a week since the drive away; I wonder if that playful kitten, misses his tall, thin, bearded playmate?
 

Villa Oreletz
Bliznatsi
Tel.   +359 5105 4049 
email: orel59@abv.bg 

oreletz.com