“Are you chasing windmills again?” Every dreamer have heard this question since Cervantes created Don Quixote. We are so accustomed to the illusory image of that concept that we hardly remember or even don’t know what windmills truly are. After the mass introduction to electricity, this facility used for grain grinding and flour and oil production will remain forever in the past.

And if we look back in the past of the city we can find, laying hidden in the dark recesses of the dry statistics, the windmills of Burgas. And the appearance of a picture in the Facebook group „The Old Burgas” helped us create their image in our heads.

Records show that as of 1829 there were only three mills in town. One of them was located in the area of today’s Third polyclinic. Originally, it was powered by horses, but subsequently Hristo Borata made it a part of his vegetable garden and converted it into a windmill. The other two were also horse-powered. They were located near the Eshek Boulevard in the vicinity of today’s “Ferdinandova Street”. Most of the mechanisms and innards of the windmills back then were made of wood. There were two types of windmill architecture. There were the massive stone buildings with domes, connected with the mill fins, in order to turn towards the wind, and there were the more simple wooden stepped buildings that needed additional tools to operate.  It becomes clear from the picture that we have published that the windmills in Burgas were probably from the second type. After all, there is evidence of the windmill near today’s “Tsar Asen Street” to have been a massive, 8 meters in height, stone structure.

Due to the geographical features of Bulgaria, the use of water mills prevailed. Because windmills needed a constant gust of wind, most of them were situated along the Black Sea coast. Just shortly after the Liberation of Bulgaria, there were already 5 windmills in Burgas. In fact, some of them were located in the area around the city, because its limits were far narrower than they currently are. Such was the mill in Atanasovo village, which is today’s complex “Izgrev”.

In the 30s, when Burgas was flourishing, its windmills had already became a romantic part of the past and only a décor for photos. And to this day we turn back to them, in order to remember that sometimes it is not that bad to be chasing windmills.

Text: Gergana Kostova

The photo has been provided by Sonya Kehlibareva

Materials used: “How to catch the wind?” by Teodora Vasileva and “The Old Burgas” by Ivan Karaiotov, Stoyan Raichevski and Mitko Ivanov

Magazine “Vij! Burgas”, vol. 14