We take a qualitative snapshot of rural entrepreneurs in Bulgaria aiming to shed light opportunities and barriers they face in post communist rural communities. Utilising ethnographical methodology, we capture the complex interplay with the institutional environment. Rural entrepreneurship may be seen as one anchor to address the uneven distribution of economic activity across territorial space, one of the complex rural livelihood pathways. We find that the rural business climate is dominated by distrust in formal institutions: a culture of informality is accompanied by widely-accepted corruption.