Cultural exchange: tiny Bulgarian village woos China, after ‘longevity yogurt’ spawns billion-dollar industry

The Bulgarian villagers hunker over their books, struggling with their Chinese characters and Mandarin pronunciation.

But they are not going to China – the Middle Kingdom is coming to them. Because of yogurt.

“It’s difficult. You have to be quite tough not to give up,” says pensioner Tsvetka Radkova, 66, as she puffs and pants in the classroom in the village of Momchilovtsi in southern Bulgaria.

But her daughter Veselina, 37, accompanied in the lessons by her nine-year-old little girl, trots out whole sentences in Mandarin, to the cheers of her classmates.

Few Europeans, and not many Bulgarians for that matter, have heard of tiny Momchilovtsi, perched high on the slopes of the Rhodope mountains in south-eastern Europe near the border with Greece.

But for some in China, Momchilovtsi conjures up images of mystery, wonder and longevity, having given its name to a kind of drinking yogurt that is all the rage for Chinese consumers and spawned an industry worth nearly a billion dollars a year.