An Interview with Deyan Petrof
In downtown Sofia, on a patch of open ground at the crossroads of Sveti Georgi Sofiyski Street and Pencho Slaveykov Boulevard, a food truck serves hot meals with fresh bread and dessert to around a hundred people three times a week. The operation is run by the Volunteers of Saints George (in addition to the well-known martyr, Bulgaria has two more), an Orthodox Christian initiative to help support local people in need. One evening in November 2023, the editor of the East-West Church Report participated in meal distribution at the site. Following voluntary recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, portions of hot stew and loaves donated by a local bakery were served, with requests for particular types of bread (wholemeal, charcoal-black, or soft white) honored as far as possible.
“I wanted to help these poor people who need this food and who are alone,” 76-year-old volunteer Ralitsa explained to the editor. A younger team member, Asya, said she had long sought “a place where I can do something like this and feel alive.” The principal organizer of the initiative is Deyan Petroff, a local lawyer. As Deyan prepared the stew, fetched bread, and hauled water to clean cooking equipment, the editor of the Report enquired about the Volunteers of Saints George, as well as the wider role of Orthodoxy in Bulgaria. The interview took place in English.
How many volunteers do you have?
We have a group of more than 80 people, of whom around 10-15 are most active. Some people also support us financially. Every time we serve food—three times a week—we need at least five people. Volunteers come and go: Nobody here receives a dime for what they do, and it is very demanding, especially on Tuesdays and Fridays, as they are working days. Being a lawyer, I can fit my job around this schedule, but it is challenging to plan even a month ahead.
Do all the volunteers have an Orthodox connection?
Not necessarily. One lady who helps said, “I’m not a believer—I do this only because I think it’s a way to do good.” We are not trying to preach here—we just say a simple prayer before the food is served and that’s it; we don’t require anything from anybody. More than that, we are trying not to make the food the only and main thing here. The food is just the reason to come; we are trying to encourage people to interact—to be the community we are supposed to be in Christ’s name.
What is the scale of your work?
We give away more than 13,000 meals a year here. Since we started four years ago, that makes more than 50,000 meals, freshly cooked and delivered by a non-professional team. The social services have even started sending people to us!
Are the people who come here for food generally homeless?
There are homeless, including people who are alcoholics or addicts of some kind. But sadly, more and more retired people come who do, in fact, have a place to live. We buy Deyan Petroff (G. FAGAN) the ingredients for the meals nearly every day, and I can tell you that food prices here have literally doubled. So what I see is our mothers and fathers queuing for food. It is incredible that this is happening in Europe in the 21st century. People have dignity— they don’t want to admit that they come here because they are poor. So they say that they come to socialize or to help serve the meal.
In the old days, there were no pensions or social institutions. Everything was down to the family or the neighborhood, but now we are living in isolation. We are afraid of others—what I have is mine and mine only. Yet the more isolated we become, the more we suffer. We start drinking, becoming aggressive, and eventually we die alone and unhappy. A lot of us are living in excess. But how much can you eat? How many clothes can you put on your body? How many rooms do you need to live in? Whatever I have that is not essential belongs to those who are deprived.
We are not setting huge goals here; we are not dispensing salvation or trying to build Communism. We are just trying to remember who we truly are, that there is a heart, conscience, and compassion in every one of us, and that this is our true nature. Look at children when they eat—they always share. What happened to us further down the road?
How did the Volunteers of Saints George come together?
Five or six years ago my mother was very sick in hospital. I was walking around this area while she had surgery—one of six operations she had to undergo in the course of 18 months at that time. This area of Sofia is where all the major hospitals are: Aleksandrovska Hospital, next to where we serve food, is the biggest and oldest hospital in Bulgaria, founded in 1884. It has 24 different wards and is a medical university as well. Less than a mile down the road is the emergency hospital for the whole of Sofia. Nearby there is also the military hospital. Inside the yard of Aleksandrovska Hospital I came across a hospital chapel, but it was closed. I waited and waited outside—praying and crying, basically. I came back a few more times and noticed something amazing. There were 20 or 30 flowers that had been wedged into the door by other people who had also come to the chapel. By this I understood that the chapel was never open. I began to wonder why it was closed, and how I could enter to pray, even if just for a while. I thought about how much a chapel was needed, a place where people could go to pray for their sick relatives.
So I started asking around and found out that one of the doctors at Aleksandrovska Hospital had a key to this chapel. I asked him if it was possible to unlock it, so that I could go with my mother to pray and give our thanks to the Lord. She had come through the surgery by this time but was unable to walk, so it would have been very difficult for her to go to another church. The doctor was so busy that it was difficult to meet with him, but when we finally did, he said, “You know what, why don’t you take the key and open the chapel. And whenever you have the time, just come and open it up.”
So I started going there—it was very cold inside and not many people came at first, if at all. But I felt that this was something useful to do, even for one person. We started to read prayers there, including akathist prayers commemorating St. Luke of Crimea [d. 1961, a bishop who was also a surgeon] and one of our patron saints, St. George the Newest of Sofia [martyred circa 1530 near the present site of Aleksandrovska Hospital], after whom the chapel is named. This is what I could do without any priest present. But the main goal was just to be there so that people could enter and pray. In Greek, the word “chapel”—parekklisi—means “comfort”: it gives people the comfort of prayer. [Editor’s note: the Bulgarian for chapel is similarly paraklis.]
After perhaps a year, more people started coming. The more regular ones among us started to discuss what more we could do than simply keeping the chapel open. We wanted to start a volunteer group to help sick and dying people—those who were alone and who didn’t have other means or options of support. That would be people who are terminally ill, who don’t have relatives, or whose relatives don’t care about them.
Here, we had the miraculous help of one of Bulgaria’s most prominent psychiatrists, Professor Toma Tomov. He is the cornerstone of the medical university’s psychiatric clinic, which he headed for 16 years. He is also an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in the United Kingdom. Professor Tomov offered to provide training to our volunteers free of charge, and he developed his own methodology and schedule for this. For six months we met with him once a week in order to study how to interact with hopelessly sick, lonely, and dying people.
After that, we concluded agreements with the heads of Aleksandrovska Hospital and the emergency hospital, so that our volunteers could visit their patients. With the blessing of His Grace, Bishop Tichon of Tiberiopolis, we had 35 people ready to start. But then Covid came, and we were unable to enter the hospitals. We didn’t know what to do. At that time, a lockdown was in place and people were left alone in their homes. Social services would not enter because of the regulations. They would leave food at the doorstep—but if a person is unable to walk, how can he collect food that is at a doorstep seven stories below his apartment? We decided we would help these people in need: shop, fetch medicine, and prepare food for them. We started cooking at home—each volunteer would prepare around 20 meals, and we would distribute these to people at home. For three or four months during the strictest lockdown, we were driving around the city when nobody else was on the streets. Later on, the pandemic measures were softened and our volunteers had to go back to work, so this became increasingly difficult. We realized that we would have to operate from a physical location, so we started a campaign to collect donations in order to buy a food truck. After receiving the help of many people in the course of over 18 months, here it is!
Faith is the inspiration for your initiative. Were you raised an Orthodox Christian?
No. My great-grandmother was a very strong believer, but she died before I was born in 1974. My parents were both baptized, but they were not churchgoers, so for me faith was something where you find your own way in response to God’s call. I was baptized when I was 26.
That must have been around the end of the Communist period in Bulgaria.
Yes. When Communism collapsed, all kinds of spiritual movements came to Bulgaria. That is when I learned what John 3:16 means [“For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life”]—playing guitar in a park (Chuckles.) I wanted to find my place—I was interested in spirituality and the world beyond what we see and feel about it. I wanted to be very methodical about this, so I went around all the churches and confessions I could find. It took me nine years. In the first instance, I wanted to go with Orthodoxy as the religion of my predecessors. But when I went to a church to say that I wanted to be baptized, the priest just glanced at me and said, “Okay, you have to bring a towel, soap, a bunch of flowers, 20 bucks, and you’re done.”
That wasn’t holy enough for me, so I started shopping around. I was very impressed with the Catholics—such a huge cathedral where everything was white and shining. The priest I spoke with there—a Jesuit, I think—was very serious. I still recall his office, with books up to the ceiling, a fireplace, and him in a cassock with a rope tied around his waist and sandals, as you would imagine Jesus wearing. His response was, “Very good, I’m happy for you. You will have to come here every Thursday for catechism, and after one year there will be a kind of examination, and then we’ll talk about your baptism.” “It can’t be that difficult!” I thought.
There was also Protestantism, of course, and—as I was studying law at the time—I was attracted to Judaism. It seemed so smart and thoughtful, so logical and divine at the same time. But when I went to the synagogue—ours is the largest in the Balkans—I didn’t understand a word. It also didn’t feel right that the women were separated from the men behind something like a fence.
In the end, it was like that joke in which a guy wants to be baptized, except he was blessed with only having to make up his mind between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. His friend asks him: “What did you do?” He answers, “I went to the Catholics, and they were amazing. Then I went to the Orthodox, and the priest was joking around and seemed to be tipsy.” “So you became Catholic?” his friend replies. “No, no, I went to the Orthodox,” says the guy. “I understood that, if this church still exists after 2000 years despite having such clergy, then God must be in it!”
So after a really long journey, I basically came home. It was not something I wholeheartedly accepted mentally or spiritually. I attended Orthodox services for almost a decade without fully knowing what was happening there. I just felt secure, in my place.
Despite Communism’s damaging legacy to the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, there must have been some quality there that made you think, “Something genuine has survived.”
Oh yes. That was His Grace, Bishop Tichon. He was the Chairman of the Board of St. Aleksandr Nevsky Patriarchal Cathedral in Sofia. As a student at the seminary, I had to attend Orthodox liturgy there on Sundays, but every week after the service I would rush straight to the cathedral to catch Bishop Tichon’s sermon at the end of the liturgy there. I was very impressed—he was like no other bishop, ever. His sermons were succinct, understandable, and sincere; he spoke like an ideal father, like an older, wise, and caring person. On top of that, he was a bishop, which—from the perspective of a seminary student—was the most senior church level imaginable.
I can tell you a few things about Bishop Tichon’s story. He was born in Germany—his mother was German. In 1946, when he was one year old, his family moved back to Bulgaria. His mother was then permitted to return to Germany, but it was more than 20 years before he saw her again because he was not allowed to travel outside the country. By the 1970s the Eastern Bloc was trying to convince the West, “We’re not so bad. We respect human rights, religious freedom.” The German government began to insist that their citizens in Bulgaria should be allowed to leave, and Bishop Tichon was one of them.
After that he spent 27 years working in a German hospital, first as an orderly and then as a certified nurse. As his education was in theology, there was not much else he could do. At the same time, he was secretary to the then metropolitan of the Western European diocese of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. On becoming a monk, he was made a bishop in 2003—he flew to Bulgaria for the consecration, attended a formal dinner with the other bishops, and then flew straight back to Germany to resume washing patients. He became rather respected in Western church circles, for a bishop who works with his bare hands is very rarely seen.
Was Bishop Tichon assigned to a diocese?
He became auxiliary bishop of the Western European diocese, but in practice he was leading it, as the metropolitan was old and sick. Bishop Tichon would do eight or ten nightshifts at Katharine Hospital in Stuttgart and then drive to Rome for three weeks at a time—he was moving around constantly. When people asked, “Where is the seat of your diocese, Your Grace?” he would say, “My seat is in my car.”
I was also drawn to a few older priests and other Christians who had managed to preserve their faith. But there were more who were the opposite. During my time as a seminary student, I even came across a few clergy who I’m not sure believed in God at all.
They just ended up there somehow?
Or they deliberately wanted to be there for an easy life with a salary.
Is this also part of the Communist legacy?
Yes. Essentially, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church was very strictly controlled and used as a political instrument. It was filled with clergy who had few qualifications, who were unable to make a living unless they were fed or supported by somebody.
Did this put many Bulgarians off church?
Absolutely. To wider society, the Church became a symbol of laziness and other negative characteristics. Nowadays, Christians are in the minority here. On paper, 75 percent of Bulgarians are Eastern Orthodox. But in practice? A recent Pew Research study found that only around five percent are active churchgoers [Pew Research Center, “Religious Belief and National Belonging in Central and Eastern Europe,” 10 May 2017, https://www. pewresearch.org/religion/2017/05/10/religious-belief-andnational-belonging-in-central-and-eastern-europe/.]
Bulgaria was always the closest satellite to the USSR. You know how strong and influential the Romanian Orthodox Church is today—well, it would be the same here, if it weren’t for the fact that the Bulgarian Church was so deeply soaked in the poison of Communism. In 1944, when the Red Army entered Bulgaria and the Communists seized power, our church was in schism. In 1953 the Bulgarian Patriarchate was restored under strong pressure from the Kremlin, whose influence over the hierarchy has continued.
So the situation for Bulgarian Christians under Communism was comparatively tough compared with other Eastern Bloc countries?
Oh, yes. There would be cordons of police around the churches at Easter, physically preventing people from attending services. Or there were secret agents—who weren’t very secret because everyone knew who they were (Chuckles). They would be inside the churches taking notes on those attending, who could then be fired or even sent to a labor camp.
Was it possible to attend church if you were someone without a significant job, or a pensioner?
Yes—and a lot of people were baptized secretly by those grandmothers. They would take the baby and go to church, or priests would baptize in people’s homes. When I was younger, we used to laugh at our grandmothers, but several times I have encountered priests who told me: “These old ladies saved the faith, with their funny singing, their stubborn everyday life, and by simply not giving up on church traditions, like making bread for memorial services.” Even if they didn’t always recall what the tradition was about, they were keeping the faith alive. So, more respect to them!
What is your hope for the future of your initiative, the Volunteers of Saints George?
To be living in a more compassionate society. I dream of a day when I will come here to find that nobody is waiting for food because they have relatives, friends, or neighbors— whether Christian or not—who support them. A lot of people say, “What you do is great—these people should be thankful.” But I don’t think so, because it is just our duty, and we do not expect any gratitude for doing what is, in fact, our duty. Also, we are doing very little of what we are capable of doing. Sharing is the least thing you can do in this world, and it makes us feel content to multiply goodness.
For further information on the Volunteers of Saints George, see: https://www.dobrovolcite.bg/en.
Food distribution is livestreamed at: https:// www.facebook.com/dobrovolcite.bg.
