Bulgaria is in second place in the European Union in terms of the number of outdoor toilets, according to Eurostat data.
9.6% of people in Bulgaria do not have an indoor toilet. Leaders in this statistic are the Romanians - 15.4% of them have outdoor toilets.
This opens up the topic of the lack of sewage in Bulgaria. After an inquiry by bTV, the Ministry of Regional Development stated that 46 cities and 4,228 villages are without sewerage.
Kalin Slavchev from the village of Kriva bara is among the hundreds of residents in Montansko without access to normal water supply and among the thousands without sewage.
He invites us into his home to show us how he lives without both. His house is big, but there is no indoor toilet.
For the elderly and disabled, these conditions are even more painful.
A dozen years ago, the construction of a water cycle was completed in the village, but the project was without sewage. To top it off, instead of being solved, water problems are becoming more frequent.
And while hydrophores replace water pipes, the lack of a sewage channel is compensated by septic tanks. The new ones are built as rakes so as not to pollute the environment.
Executing a water cycle with sewage turns out to be extremely rare. According to the information of the VK-Montana company, only Montana and the village of Kopilovtsi have fully constructed sewers in the district.
The sewage system in the village of Rasovo, where the project also includes a treatment plant, is almost complete. Lom and Varshets have a partially constructed sewage network.
The water company in the region is replacing and rehabilitating the water supply network with its own funds. However, there is no consolidated plumbing association in the region, which makes investments in large and expensive projects unattainable.
Even if in the next few years the unification of the municipalities to improve the water supply infrastructure becomes a fact, the probability that they will fit into the program period for financing large European projects is minimal.
Thus, the accidents will continue, and the sewers will be a mirage, and our outdoor toilets will still be a natural and essential detail of the domestic exterior.
In response to bTV's inquiry, the Ministry of Regional Development and Public Works replied: "With European funding, 21 waste water treatment plants were built and reconstructed in the country in the past years, and 1,800 km of water supply networks were built."
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