How Gara Bezimenna Started Everything
Some places stay with you long after you leave them. For me, that place is a small railway station near Paisievo, the village in Bulgaria where I spent my childhood. Its name is Bezimenna, which means "the nameless one".
It was never an important station. A short platform, a small station building, a few lamps and the tracks disappearing into the fields.
In winter, my father and I would go there to meet guests arriving by train. On cold, snowy days, while we waited for the train, we would step into the waiting room. I still remember the moment the door opened and the warmth of the wood stove burning inside hit my face.
Years later, working as an architect and slowly building a second life in computer graphics, I realised I wanted to bring that place back. Not as it really was, but as I remembered it. In my render, the station is much bigger than the real one. Maybe that is how it looked to me as a little boy: a child's big dreams, and a building that seemed enormous. I wanted to capture the warm light of a summer afternoon, and the silence of a winter night when only the platform lamps and a single window are still lit. When I lit that window in the winter version, I was thinking of the warmth of that stove.
I modelled the scene in 3ds Max, rendered it in V-Ray and finished it in Photoshop. The summer and winter versions became two sides of the same story.
In 2016, Gara Bezimenna won First Prize at the Computer Space International Computer Art Forum in Sofia. It meant a lot to me that a station almost nobody knows was recognised in the country where it stands.
Bezimenna station in 2024
When I went back in 2024, this is what I found. The roof is falling in, the windows are empty and the walls are covered in graffiti. A tree has grown right in front of the building, as if trying to hide it. The waiting room where I once felt the warmth of the stove is open to the wind. And it is so much smaller than I remembered.
Maybe that is exactly why I needed to build it again. In the render, the station is as big as it was in my childhood. The lamps are still on, the stove is still burning, and the station still has a train to wait for.
But the biggest thing this project gave me was a name. In Bulgarian, gara means "station". And 89 is for 1989, the year we left Bulgaria and moved to Turkey, the beginning of a new life. When I brought my work together under one studio in 2023, the name was already there: Gara89. The place where everything started, and the year everything changed.
Everything I create today, the quiet winter streets, the lonely lighthouses, the warm windows in the dark, somehow leads back to that nameless station. I think every artist has a place like this. Bezimenna is mine.