During the 17th of March, participants representing DBSV – Germany, EGED – Turkey and Views Italia – Italy arrived in Liège and they were greeted by our representatives. Everybody seemed to enjoy their trip and the reunion with their acquaintances from Liège.

The next day the Transnational Meeting officially started. During the event, we discussed the final design of the project results, in which our partners presented the results of the questionnaires answered by people who took part in the project’s activities. In total, 247 people took part in the survey from which 87 people from Germany, 12 from France, 92 from Italy and 56 people from Turkey responded to these questionnaires. The questions were grouped into different categories, from travelling and discovering, to what they experienced. The conclusion was that people who answered the questionnaires wanted to hear audio descriptions of the places they visited, local music, local language and the sounds of nature. For the smell, participants wanted to smell nature, local spices, food, beverages, parts of the cities or different buildings like libraries and churches.

During the event, partners exchanged ideas, experience and advice regarding the organization of the Learning, Teaching, Training Activities (LTTA). We look forward to meeting the teams again in April for the final event of the project, the LTTA.

The project partners had already started working on developing activities connected with accessible city tours for visually impaired people and organized its first learning training teaching activity in Berlin, Germany. Between June 3 – June 5, project partners came together again in Bologna, Italy to evaluate and discuss the learning points from the first LTTA (Learning, Training, Teaching Activityà and map out what needs to be done and improved for the future activities in Italy and Turkey respectively.

The project partners initiated the meeting with the reflections on questionnaires that were sent to the participants of the first activity of the project and went over the received feedback in order to assess the impact of the activity and plan improvements for the future. Based on the experiences of the coordinating organization, German Association for the Blind, the project partners discussed in detail ways to make the accessible city tours more inclusive by taking advantage of GPS technology. To this end, partners analyzed the outcomes of previous accessible city tours in Berlin and considered proposals such as making use of GPS apps and ensuring the audio quality of self-guided accessible city tours in order to increase the effectiveness of the future activities.

Following the administrative section of the transnational meeting, partners went on to contemplate new and creative ways that can immerse visually impaired tourists in a new city and for this purpose visited the International museum and library of music of Bologna to do an on-the-spot case study. The Music Museum of Bologna is home to the nine rooms of the exhibition, which illustrate about six centuries of the history of European music with more than eighty antique musical instruments most of which can be touched and explored by visitors. The project partners toured this museum and checked its accessibility to test whether it could be a suitable venue to be included among one of the possible activities for an accessible city tour.

The projects that VIEWS International is a part of not only aim to promote responsible citizenship and enshrine European values, but also offer opportunities on the cultural sphere. Thus, it could be only fitting to reserve our last words and impressions of this transnational meeting for the city of Bologna, the intersection of art, architecture and food which the project partners sampled all during their stay. Home to the oldest university in Europe and famous for its towers, churches and lengthy porticoes, Bologna was a feast on the eyes and other senses with its rich cuisine, wide arches, and iconic red Spanish tiled rooftops.

It was a delightful coincidence that the transnational project meeting took place in Bologna and after a productive reunion, project partners returned home to start working on the concrete actions that came out of this administrative gathering with the help of delicious cups of espresso and cappuccino.

The Regional Historical Museum (RHM) in Dobrich – a municipal center in the Northeastern region and the tenth largest city in Bulgaria – has developed and is about to test three accessible tours for blind and partially sighted visitors. The work on these three urban routes was carried out as part of the Museum’s cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices with four other NGOs – The Mediterranean Association for Local Development in Bari and Tiflo technical center in Lecce, both in Italy, Association Las Ninas del Tul in Granada, Spain, and the cultural Association ACPELIA in Cyprus. The Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership for youth project is a 2-year, € 149 414 international initiative, entitled Another Way and registered under No. 2019–IT03–KA205–016466. The project itself has three distinct stages. During the first one, information about the Italian methodology to be used and educational materials in four key areas – Neuropsychology, Ethics, Accessibility and Tourism – were shared with the four national teams in electronic format. In other words, a training course for forty youth workers – 10 participants from each country – was performed remotely. During the second stage, the team in each country had to develop 3 VI accessible city tours on different topics. The specialists, working at the RHM in Dobrich, chose theatre, grain and crafts. There are 4 stops in each of them.
The theatre route begins at the house of Adriana Budevska, who studied the art of theatre in Moscow and then returned to Sofia and married Hristo Ganchev, regarded as one of the fathers of the professional theatre in Bulgaria. A mini model of the house in approximately correct proportions was produced for the blind and partially sighted. The second stop along the route is by the building of the Yordan Yovkov Dramatic Theater. Even though Yordan Yovkov was not born in Dobrich, he had a significant contribution in presenting and preserving the field workers’ daily living through his famous collections of short stories. The other stop is by the city lapidarium – an open space similar to a Roman amphitheatre exhibiting stone archeological findings such as statues, columns, carvings and writings and fragments of them. Visitors will use paper masks like emoticons to present an emotion they feel at the moment in an artistic way of their choice there. The route ends at the House-museum of Yordan Yovkov where a part of a radio adaptation of Albena, one of the most popular dramatic literary works of the writer, will be played for the visitors.
The second route is focused on the cult toward grain as a source of life. It begins by yet another lapidarium in the city, this one exhibiting large earthenware for grain-keeping called pitos. The second stop is at the Art Gallery, where there is an exhibition hall with many topic-related paintings and sculptures. The hall is entitled The Gold of Dobrudzha, due to grain’s color similarity with gold, and Dobrudzha is a geographical term and the popular name for the Northeastern region of Bulgaria. Then, the third stop is by a special reproduction of an ancient fireplace for bread baking and a nearby bakery for traditional small and round breads with a hole in the centre. The route ends by an old stone water fountain with the rather unusual shape of a kobilitsa – two water pots, connected by a wooden stick for easier carrying over the shoulder, used in the past.
The third route follows the so called Street of crafts in the old part of Dobrich. The place offers a rich variety of opportunities for gaining an insight of the retro urban environment by means of the other four senses – hearing, smell, touch and taste. There are works of art made of wood, clay, embroidered traditional clothing, typical food and drinks by old family recipes, organic fruits, vegetables, nuts, wine, honey and many other goods available in the small workshops.
The routes’ testing is set to begin on November 15. Upon its completion, these three routes will be provided to the Italian NGO for publication in an electronic edition along nine more – three from each of the other three countries, involved in the project. That’s the third and final stage of this strategic partnership, extended for a period of six additional months until February 2022 due to the pandemic.
Desislava Hristova. an archeologist at the RHM in Dobrich and the project coordinator for Bulgaria, worked closely with Boyan Michev, a blind participant from the Black Sea town of Balchik and a well-known VIEWS International activist, in developing the theatre route. A separate interview with both of them via phone and Microsoft Teams, followed by an Internet-based desk research, served me as the main source of information for drafting this text. Hopefully, it would be useful or at least interesting for the regular VIEWS News readers, especially those in Germany and Turkey.