They say that Divna Shalich Lafchieva was a woman with many homelands. Like the multifaceted nature of her soul, she was also a woman with many vocations. But the most important thing is that from the paths she has left her mark on, she took great love for life - it illuminates her words, her paintings, her friendships.

Until March 26, the Sofia Press gallery-bookstore in Sofia presents paintings by Divna Shalich, who was born in 1928 and has already left our world. The works "teach a wonderful lesson in love for the homeland", according to the exhibition curator Olimpia Nikolova-Daniel. It is no coincidence that they are united under the name "Homelands."

"Her father is Montenegrin and her mother is Serbian,” says her daughter Rada Sharlandzhieva, translator, writer and journalist. “She was born in the city of Pec in the Kosovo and Metohija region of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Later she came to Bulgaria, married a Bulgarian and lived here with her family as a Bulgarian until the end of her life. This entire conglomerate of different geographical places, historical processes, people, cultures, aesthetics accumulated as an emotion, experienced in difficult, beautiful and joyful times and became part of her."

The future journalist and translator by profession and artist by inner calling grew up in the family of a lawyer who graduated in France and a high school teacher of French and German. Unfortunately, the invasion of the Italian-Albanian occupation troops during World War II interrupted her carefree childhood in the beautiful nature of Montenegro and marked it with many trials - among them escapes, arrests and even the threat of execution.

"My mother's entire family, including her two brothers, became partisans and went to fight in the mountains," Rada Sharlandzhieva continues her story. "She also wanted to go with them, but her parents did not allow her, since she was too young. One day, their house was set on fire and everyone fled with whatever they could grab with both hands. They went north to Niš and Kragujevac, where the German troops were stationed."

There, Divna Šalić joined the youth anti-fascist movement and together with her group spent three months in custody, but was later released, since there was no evidence of any subversive activity. In 1945, at the age of seventeen, she arrived in Bulgaria as a teacher of Yugoslav children left without care, sent to this country by agreement with the International Red Cross. What was she teaching the infants in in the town of Dryanovo?

"She taught them the most common human values,“ Rada Sharlandzhieva says. „These were children who had seen everything - death, shootings, atrocities. Some were traumatized, others could not understand that their parents were gone. They were taught how to be together, to love and help each other. And the main thing - how evil war is."

When the children returned home a year later, Divna Shalich added Lafchieva to her surname and lived as a Bulgarian in Bulgaria until the end of her days. Years of catch-up education followed, including in the Bulgarian language and first steps in journalism and the profession of film translator. She finished her career at the "Tehnichesko delo" newspaper, in whose editorial office she spent years of productive work.

And finally, the time came for spiritual transformation and a transition from a life of words to a world of images, colors and lights.

According to the artist's daughter, her works are poetic commentaries of the soul, directed towards the beauty, meaning and possibilities of life. They vibrate with spontaneous joys and pains, fleeting celebrations and hopelessness, premonitions and dreams of a rich, dramatic, fulfilling life path, experienced as a holiday despite all the vicissitudes.

"This is a woman from the interwar generation who had an extraordinary life and her extraordinaryness was to do beautiful things, not to conform to the matrix of society, as she started painting very late,“ Olimpia Nikolova adds. „This desire to do things she loves, to do things beautifully, is a lesson for me and I will be glad if many people see this exhibition. They will learn from it that the homeland can be anywhere, as long as people open their heart, love the place they are in and have a real attitude towards it."

"She was one of those old romantic souls who believed that here, in our region, we are all brothers and should live as brothers. She herself loved people and in this way increased their love, too," her daughter says in conclusion.

Photos: Diana Tsankova, personal archive of Rada Sharlandzhieva

Publication in English: Al.Markov