“It’s a natural pairing,” Stefana Gospodinova, a 64-year-old resident of Staro Zhelezare, a remote Bulgarian village, said of herself and Brigitte Bardot, the French femme fatale. “I am mistaken for her all the time.”

The two may not exactly look alike, but they do share a love for animals. Hence the depiction of Ms. Gospodinova and her donkey alongside Ms. Bardot and her horse in a photo-realistic mural painted on a whitewashed wall.

Staro Zhelezare, population 400, is like so many other Eastern European hamlets withering in the face of low birth rates and the exodus of young adults to more prosperous points west. Except for the murals, which two Polish artists, Ventzislav and Katarzyna Piriankov, began painting a few years ago in hopes of starting a revival.