In the shelter of the Rhodope mountain, some of the EU's poorest children face a difficult choice...
Rayme Osman is a young and ambitious woman from a village now called Sredsko (which translates as "in the middle" in Bulgarian) in the Rhodope mountains of Bulgaria. Rayme's ancestors have lived in this small, isolated mountainous village for centuries, when it was still known as Ortacı ("in the middle" in Turkish), picking tobacco.
Since Bulgaria became an autonomous principality of the Ottoman Empire in 1878, the Turks who were born and raised on its territory have been facing marginalization and oppression, escalating in state-sanctioned forced assimilation practices and a mass exodus during the last years of the communist regime in 1985-1989. Today, Bulgaria is an EU member with an upper-middle income economy, but its ethnically Turkish population has been left behind, still suffering immense pressure to assimilate: this time through the economy.
