In 1921 the young girl Vanga, born in an abandoned Turkish house, loses her sight and becomes a fortune teller, later called “The Nostradamus of the Balkans”. Her first vision: a lost sheep. And the visions keep rolling in her dream. Vanga sees it all: 1912. Eastern Macedonia and Thrace. Vanga keeps on dreaming, the year is 2015: Syrian people on boats, trying to reach the shores of Europe, its new boundaries, its abandoned houses and its animals waiting for justice.

The performance is part of the multinational coproduction project “Haunted Houses”. In its frame Bulgarian, Greek and Turkish theatre makers use documentary approaches to dig into the history of the waves of population displacement between 1913 and 1923. The history of violence in this period, which is during and after the First World War, is marked by expulsions and ethnic cleansing in order to assert that these newly formed nation states were pure and homogeneous, which, centuries ago, were simply multi-ethnic. In a process that’s taken over a year, the project participants researched, exchanged ideas and developed three evenings of theatre for War or Peace. These performances were created in three separate cities but relate to one another. Together, they show how frighteningly similar today’s demands for purity and unity sound to the ones used back then.

Ikar National Theatre Award 2019 for best original music

Ikar National Theatre Award 2019 Nomination for best actress

With English surtitles.