“Seven Kilos of Camomile” by Rumjana Zacharieva: Growing up under communism in Bulgaria6 min read
Histories of communist Bulgaria often concentrate on the Bulgarian Communist Party, Todor Zhivkov, the security services, collectivisation, censorship or relations with the Soviet Union. Those are indispensable subjects, but they can make authoritarian rule appear as something exercised principally through ministries, party congresses, political prisons and intelligence files. Rumjana Zacharieva brings the political system down to the scale of a child’s hand pulling flowers from a field.
Seven kilos for a school year
How much does a child’s summer weigh? For twelve-year-old Mila, the answer is seven kilograms.
Rumjana Zacharieva’s Sept kilos de camomille (2023) takes place in a Bulgarian village during the summer of 1962. Mila is staying with her grandparents and she is trying to understand a world whose political vocabulary reaches her through school, the radio and the people around her. But hanging over the summer is a task that is both mundane and extraordinary: Mila must collect seven kilograms of camomile flowers and deliver them to the agricultural cooperative. Without fulfilling the quota, she will not receive her schoolbooks for the following year. The flowers therefore become a unit by which childhood itself is measured. Mila is not collecting camomile for pleasure or pocket money. She is working because the institutions around her have made access to something as basic as schoolbooks conditional on completing a prescribed quantity of physical labour.
Zacharieva later recalled that the episode was not simply invented for the novel: in socialist Bulgaria, Pioneers aged ten to thirteen were required to collect seven kilograms of camomile. The state used compulsory mobilisation of pupils and students as an unpaid or poorly paid labour force, particularly during the summer months. Youth brigades eventually became one of the most visible manifestations of the system, sending secondary-school and university students into agriculture, industry and other sectors. Such work not only supplemented labour shortages but also created work discipline and shaped young people into the citizens demanded by socialist ideology.
The reward for Mila’s labour is not actually a reward at all. She wants her schoolbooks. Mila reflects that she does not even want to earn money – she only wants the books. Seven kilograms of camomile are the price. As she struggles with the collecting device, her arm becomes exhausted, she sweats and begins to experience time in grams of flowers. Her entire summer, she says in effect, has acquired the weight of camomile. This transformation of time into quota is central to the novel.
Seven kilograms.
The absurd precision of the figure reveals something about the regime more effectively than a political speech could. The state does not have to appear continuously as violence. It can appear as a target, an obligation, a school rule or a number that everyone has learned not to question.
This is what makes Sept kilos de camomille much more than a nostalgic account of a Bulgarian childhood. Through the eyes of one girl, Zacharieva shows a political system capable of entering the smallest spaces of everyday life – the school holiday, the family kitchen, the village field and even a child’s understanding of time.
Communism from below
One of Zacharieva’s greatest achievements is that Mila does not speak like an adult historian retrospectively explaining communism. She very often misunderstands things. For example, Mila hears political expressions on the radio and takes them literally. She absorbs fragments of Cold War propaganda without completely understanding what the Cold War is. Mila takes words at face value and, by doing so, unintentionally exposes the contradictions of the communist system.
That narrative choice prevents the novel from becoming a conventional anti-communist tract. There is no adult narrator standing over every scene to tell the reader what to condemn. This is relevant, particularly in Bulgaria, where memories of the socialist period remain highly contested. The novel does not need to depict every aspect of the dictatorship as uniformly miserable in order to reveal how profoundly the regime shaped daily life.
The loudspeaker or radio brings the Cold War into the village. The school determines how the summer is spent. The Pioneer organisation supplies expectations of exemplary behaviour. The cooperative receives the flowers. Political vocabulary infiltrates the language Mila is learning to understand. However, communism is therefore not merely the background against which her childhood unfolds. It helps organise her childhood too.
This perspective also gives the book unusual historical value. Official documents can tell us what the Bulgarian state wanted young people to do. Statistics can show the scale of agricultural collectivisation or youth mobilisation. Memoirs by dissidents can show the consequences of open political confrontation. Zacharieva gives us something different: the feeling of growing up under communism in Bulgaria.
A Bulgarian story first written in German
Although the novel is rooted deeply in Bulgarian experience, Zacharieva first wrote it in German – 7 Kilo Zeit (Seven Kilos of Time) appeared in 1990. Only decades later did the novel appear in the author’s mother tongue. In 2018, Bulgarian publisher Hermes published it as Ръкавици за студената война (Gloves for the Cold War). The French edition arrived much later – in 2023 under the title Sept kilos de camomille (Seven Kilos of Camomile). That trajectory is itself unusual: an intensely Bulgarian childhood was first transformed into literature in German, returned decades later to Bulgarian in a rewritten form, and was then introduced to French readers through the German text. Unfortunately, the novel has not yet been translated into English.
The three titles create three different entry points into the same political memory. German and French readers encounter Bulgaria from outside. The specific seven-kilogram quota is therefore an effective gateway into an unfamiliar socialist society – in German – childhood time is weighed whereas in French – the compulsory labour itself is weighed. Bulgarian readers, by contrast, may already recognise school obligations, pioneer culture, cooperatives and compulsory youth work from personal or family memory. Therefore, the Bulgarian title frames Mila’s childhood explicitly within the geopolitical world surrounding it: a country on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain, saturated with the rhetoric, anxieties and absurdities of the Cold War.
The dictatorship in a handful of flowers
For readers outside Bulgaria, Sept kilos de camomille offers something that conventional histories of communism rarely can – it explains how an authoritarian system feels before a child necessarily understands that it is authoritarian. The seven-kilogram quota shows how the communist state could mobilise children for productive labour while presenting that labour as education, duty and normal citizenship. The Cold War language shows how international confrontation penetrated even a rural childhood.
Understanding communism in Bulgaria requires more than knowing who governed the country or when the regime collapsed. It requires understanding how institutions reached into school holidays, how labour and ideology were connected, and how practices that now appear extraordinary could become part of the ordinary architecture of childhood.
Books capable of conveying that experience are surprisingly rare, particularly in translation. Bulgaria’s communist period remains far less represented in internationally available literature than the experiences of countries such as East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia or the Soviet Union. Accounts centred specifically on childhood and the routine forms of compulsory labour imposed on young people are even harder to find.
Seven kilograms of camomile sound almost trivial beside the great crimes and political conflicts of the twentieth century. But that is exactly why they matter. They show authoritarianism at its most intimate: not as an abstraction called “the regime”, but as an obligation placed in the hands of a twelve-year-old girl.
