From Bulgaria to Boston: A Water Journey

Submitted by Maria to the Women Mind the Water digital stories project, in conjunction with the Smithsonian's Museum on Main Street storytelling website and traveling exhibition "Water/Ways."

This story was recorded at School for the Environment, UMASS Boston.

"My name is Maria Petrova and I’m originally from Bulgaria. I grew up on the Black Sea coast in the town of Varna which is right on the water. From very early on I was connected to the water, not only by going to the beach, but the fact that my dad was in the Merchant Marines. I had the opportunity to travel with him around the world. He had the option of taking one member of the family during certain years. I grew up under communism so they had pretty strict rules about traveling abroad. When it was my turn, I was 18. We left on a big cargo ship from Varna, Bulgaria and we were originally going to travel to Argentina.

For me that was very exciting because I was going to cross the equator and travel on the boat for at least three months. It turned out when we got to Gibraltar, in leaving Europe, that instead of going to Argentina the boat was going to go to the United States. That was my first visit to the United States in 1989. So during that time I had the opportunity of looking at the ocean for a long time, for three to four months, and thinking about how humans have been using the water and relating to it and using it not only for extracting fish and trading and sailing on it but using it for medicine and natural resources. I have always thought about: 'What is the human connection to the ocean?' ever since then. And, when I was choosing a topic for my dissertation, probably not by accident, I started to work on wave energy which was a brand new technology that is going to be placed in the water.

So I was interested in how this technology was going to affect ocean inhabitants and what would be the human relationship to it? So ever since then I’ve been studying wave energy and later on wind energy and especially now that wind energy, offshore wind, is coming to Massachusetts this is a great topic of interest to me. I continue keeping up my interest to the ocean and to the humans by managing the coast and communities program here at UMass Boston."

Asset ID: 8018
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