Nikolaevo, Bulgaria (CNN) -- The homes are built with mud and straw. The streets are dirt and puddles. An old Roma lady gestures that she's so hungry it feels like her belly has been slit. This is Nikolaevo, a tumbledown Roma village in the heart of Bulgaria. If fate had dealt a girl known as "Maria" a different hand, she would have grown up here, surrounded by decay and poverty. DNA tests have now solved part of the mystery of Maria, the child called the "blond angel" by Greek media after she was discovered during a police raid on a Roma camp in Farsala, Greece. Her birth parents are Bulgarian -- Saska Ruseva and Atanas Rusev -- and, like the Greek couple who had been raising Maria, they, too, are Roma.
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CNN's Karl Penhaul visits the Bulgarian Roma village where "Maria" grew up
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"We gave her away. I didn't take any money," her biological mother says
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DNA match traced birth parents of Maria to the village of Nikolaevo
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Greek Roma couple who raised Maria are in custody charged with kidnapping
They say once they give birth they pass their children off to childless @placeholder couples for an agreed payment.