Welcome to ExpatBG: why I built this, and why I need your story

Hello, and welcome to ExpatBG. I’m Stephan.

I’m Lebanese, but I lived and worked all my life in Qatar. Then my wife Atanska, who is Bulgarian, and I started having kids, and our priorities changed. Life in Qatar was always busy, and there was never enough time for family. Bulgaria felt like the better place to raise our children.

So in 2020, we started a new chapter.

It didn’t happen all at once. Atanska and the kids moved first, and she opened a neighbourhood coffee shop here in Plovdiv. For a couple of years I kept coming and going before I moved here permanently.

Then came the lesson I’ll never forget.

After five years, I applied for my permanent residency. I waited, and waited, and in the end it was rejected. To be eligible, I had to have been living here for those five years, not just renewing my residency.

Nobody had told me. I found out the hard way, after all that waiting.

That frustration is why ExpatBG exists.

I’m a self-taught developer and digital marketer, and a site like this had been in my head for a long time. Work always got in the way. Now the time was right. I want people to find solutions here, so they don’t have to go through the same hard times and frustration I did.

On ExpatBG you’ll find guides to life in Bulgaria, a directory of businesses and professionals who can help, events around the country, and stories from people living here.

Those stories matter most to me. A guide can give you the steps, but only someone who has lived it can tell you what surprised them and what they’d do differently. If someone had shared my story with me five years earlier, it would have saved me a lot of waiting.

So I have two small requests.

Keep coming back. This site will keep growing, with new guides, listings and events. Save it, and check in whenever you have a question.

Share your story. You don’t need to be a writer, and it doesn’t need to be perfect. Your first winter, your favourite neighbourhood, the mistake you’d warn others about, the moment Bulgaria started to feel like home: someone is about to arrive, and your words might be exactly what they need.

Whether you’ve been here for ten years or you’re still packing, I’m glad you’re here.

Welcome,
Stephan
Founder, ExpatBG