Bulgaria
by Rose George
1.
Last year, Daily Telegraph readers voted Bulgaria the worst travel destination in the world. This was puzzling – either they’d never been to the Congo, or they’d never been to Bulgaria.
This is exactly what Bulgaria’s communist leaders would have wanted. Though it didn’t have the Albanian lunacy of Enver Hoxha’s concrete pill-boxes, nor the capitalist venality of Romania’s Ceaucescu, Bulgaria’s hardline ruler Todor Zhivkov kept his communist kingdom well-sealed for 35 years. Bulgarians weren’t allowed out and it was made bureaucratically impossible for foreigners to get in.
Consequently, a country that once ruled an empire stretching from the Caspian to the Aegean became best known for giving its name to a Womble. Though there was also the murder – by the Bulgarian secret services – of a man called Georgi Markov on a London bridge, with a OO7-ish poisoned umbrella. And the sheltering of the Pope’s Turkish assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca, in a Sofia hotel. You may have known Bulgaria for its cheap Merlot, drunk in student halls, or its inexpensive ski resorts, where the food was dire. But that, for decades, would have been that.
Even the last two decades of cynical horror, when Balkan became again a dirty word, didn’t put Bulgaria into newsworthy focus. Even when its nearest neighbours – Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia – weakened into war, it remained creditably aloof. Bulgaria is Balkan, all the same. In the Roman, Byzantine, Austrian and Turkish boots that have stamped on it, in the luscious monasteries and minaret-tipped hills it shares with Serbia and Bosnia, in its underrated beauty. Except Bulgaria’s monasteries haven’t been torched for over a century, and the minarets are still standing. Here you can find minaret and spire side by side, in touching proximity. And you can find corruption, and mafia, and heroin, and racism, and hope, and despair.
2.
In 1999, I lived in an apartment block in Sofia nicknamed the Chinese Wall, because it is huge. The front windows looked over a parking lot. The back had a 360 degree panorama of more housing blocks. Sometimes at night I listened to howling dogs and watched buildings twinkling, and swore I would leave the next day. But I didn’t.
I had been travelling the Balkans with a friend who was writing a book. He asked me to come because I spoke Italian (it was useful in Albania) from Vienna to Istanbul. When it crossed through Bulgaria, it transpired that a Bulgarian ex-lover wasn’t really an ex, with itinerary-changing enlightenment. There were reasons not to stay – his girlfriend, for one – so there was a moment, standing on the steps of Sofia’s Sheraton, 300 borrowed dollars in my pocket, watching the taxi taking my travelling companion to the airport, to Vienna and to an alphabet he could understand, when things froze into deep panic.
I found a room in the Slavayanska Besseda hotel. It wasn’t cheap, but the hotel was. It faced Sofia’s main street, cobbled and tramwayed and pleasant. Last century, the Bulgarians imported tons of yellow bricks to cobble their streets, in a burst of Austro-Hungarian fetishism. Perhaps this was the best way to shake off the memory of 500 years of Ottoman rule – in the Balkans, only the Montenegrins never succumbed to foreign control. Bulgaria now has Turkish words, Turkish kilims, and an inherited dislike of most things Turkish. In 1989, communist bosses forced out 300,000 pomaks – Bulgarians who had converted to Islam under the Ottomans, or pureblood Turks. Either way, their true home was apparently Turkey. In those days, the forced exodus caused a scandal that probably helped topple the regime. These days, it would probably win them votes.
Bulgaria: What the? #1
J came back for a drink to the hotel. The loutish receptionist said something to him and though he is unshockable, he looked appalled. “He asked me how much I charged to be your gigolo and how much his cut was going to be.”
Later, I moved to a room in someone’s apartment. My host spoke Spanish; he had worked in Cuba. He thought anywhere outside Eastern Europe and Russia was the promised land, and his wife made good coffee. Later, in a Wild West town at the end of a narrow gorge in Bulgaria’s Rhodope mountains, I bought ice-cream from a boy who had learned English in Libya. A glimpse of the Iron Curtain friendship schemes, like the Africans in Moscow who graduate from Patrice Lumumba University, or the Cubans who ride Hungarian motorbikes.
Finally, the Chinese Wall. A loan from a friend with an extra flat and absent parents. His dog had left urine on the floor and some other dog had left something else on the stairway. But it was four rooms of blessed space. To conform with the new post-Soviet spirituality of the country – only in Bulgaria have I seen teenagers in running shorts praying in their lunch-hour – the cranky lift proclaimed, “Jesus lives.”
Bulgaria’s communists were said to be more Stalinist than Stalin. Bulgarians, when they dared joke, called their country the Soviet Union’s sixteenth republic, so slavish were its rulers. It was a familiar bargain: A guaranteed apartment, a job, a place in society in return for conformity. Dissenters went to labour camps, where schoolteachers who weren’t Marxist enough could die breaking stones. At Belene, the worst of them all, transgressing prisoners were used as target practice. Sometimes they were marooned on rafts in the river to freeze to death, or be bitten into agony by clouds of mosquitos. Tour guide Lubomir says of his country’s camps, “they didn’t burn people but they were good at atrocities.”
Czechs have their revolution. Bulgarians talk of their transition from one misery to another as “the changes.” They weren’t velvet, but they weren’t too violent either. Zhivkov, who had lost face with pomak expulsion, was purged in 1989. The communists changed their names to socialists and pretended to be democratic. It worked for a while: They were elected in 1991, but thrown out in 1994. But neither the Socialists nor the pro-Western parties that followed have shortened the bread queues.
3.
In the New York Review of Books recently, writing about Romania, someone commented that “by all conventional measures, Romania is now best compared to regions of the former Soviet Union, and has even been overtaken by Bulgaria.” That “even” says a lot. The average wage is £60 a month. There are towns – mostly Roma (Gypsy) ones – that have 90% unemployment. At least 10,000 women – again, mostly Roma – have been sucked into the European sex trade.
You wouldn’t guess this in Sofia. It’s not the most glittering of capitals, but its buildings have been spruced up, its Communist-era department store TSUM turned into a shopping mall, its taxi fleet painted a uniform yellow and black checker. There are ATMs galore. The shops are full, unlike in the early days of transition, and there are all the usual suspects: Benetton, Nike, McDonalds.
There is money here, of course. Bulgaria is smack on the Balkan smack route, from Afghanistan to Western Europe, and the mafia rules. The mafiosi drive tasteless Mercedes and don’t hide their guns. They’re called bortsi (wrestlers) or mutri (animal-faces): When the changes began, the professional athletes had the money (from international competitions) and the muscle to turn into racketeers. Former state security agents – 17,000 lost their jobs in 1991 – were also well-placed to turn crooked. If you don’t insure your car with their insurance companies, they will steal it. Animal-faces and spooks now monopolise Sofia’s French restaurants. Their girlfriends look like hookers. They are easy figures of fun, but Bulgarians who laugh at the mutri also have to use them for loans and protection. The young people I admire in Bulgaria, the ones who want to set things up, build things, have to borrow mutri money. The democrats have tried to shake them, but the mutri are the ones in control.
Bulgaria: What the? #2
In Sofia, driving with J, we stop for petrol. It’s a one-pump kiosk and there is no-one about. The garage attendant comes out with his belt undone, with blood on his hands. He says to J, “Sorry, my colleague has her period.” I can’t put this down to cultural differences, because J is flabbergasted by this, too.
Ten years of wrestlers, and the World Bank, and the slowness of change this year simmered into an event. Sick of IMF austerity, Bulgarians voted with their nostalgia, and elected their king to be prime minister. Except they couldn’t elect him, because he wasn’t standing for a post. He wasn’t even a member of the political party named after him, and theoretically, he wasn’t a king, either. Simeon was a boy when the Nazis poisoned his father, King Boris, and forced him into exile. Boris had helped save Bulgaria’s Jews, but he also clung to a dangerous fence between Axis and Alliance, and it got him killed. Simeon grew up in Spain, married a Spaniard and became a businessman. Now, he speaks a Bulgarian of sixty years ago and bears a monstrous burden of hope on his shoulders, one that most of my Bulgarian friends think he is unfit to carry. They are spiteful and hopeless and ashamed. “When the September 11 attacks happened, he was asked by a TV station what he thought,” says one with disdain. “Oh, normal, normal,” he said. “And New York is very far away.” “You see?” says my friend. “You see?”
But Simeon’s voters weren’t the lucky expats who can mock, from their cocoon at the BBC Bulgarian Service, or in the Bulgarian City brokers association (star member: King Simeon’s son Kyril). They were the ones who stayed put after universal employment disintegrated, like the elegant old men who play chess every day in the National Theatre park, wearing paper hats last seen in urchin films. They wear bad shoes and are listless with poverty. The road from Istanbul to the Bulgarian border is wide and spacious and new on the Turkish side. After the border, it narrows to two lanes and is stocked with people in donkey carts. Picturesque, but someone says, as we slow down behind another, “ten years ago, these people were driving tractors.”
4.
A fine night on a cobbled street in Sofia, 1895. Prime Minister Stefan Stambolov has been with his wife to the opera, in the grand building on Rakovski street. They are walking home, when several men with knives attack him. They hack so ferociously, they almost sever his hands. Doctors amputate them while they are trying to save his life, but Stambolov is cut to pieces, and dies a couple of days later. His wife takes a photo of him, quiet in death, his severed hands placed carefully by his body on a velvet cushion. It looks like a ghostly piano player with crumpled fingers is attending the dead minister. I find the photo in an English-language book of Bulgarian history in the British Council Library, and most Bulgarians have never seen it.
My friends knew only what they had been taught; that Stambolov – whose strict and brutal policies made him historical – had been “brutally slain.” Another prime minister, Aleksandur Stamboliski, was captured by Macedonian militants in 1923, tortured for days then killed. It’s safe to say Bulgarians have a love-hate relationship with their leaders.
In a small square on the corner of Rakovski street, near the sparkling prettiness of the Russian church – built by a homesick diplomat – and the glorious domes of Alexander Nevski cathedral, a huge stone head, split down the middle, is the city’s monument to Stambolov. The face is Asiatic, brutal, alarming. Every year, flowers appear on this head on the anniversary of his hacking, just as they used to on the mausoleum of supposedly despised leader Todor Zhivkov, who died in 1998, and was entombed in a squat neo-classical building in front of the King’s Palace.
That summer, there were rumours that it was to be demolished, that it didn’t suit the New Bulgaria and that its removal would impress the World Bankers and the people in Brussels. It had already been painted black and used as the backdrop to an open-air opera, hardly a sign of respect. One day, near the palace – actually not much bigger than a suburban mansion – there is a small crowd. The army has cordoned off the mausoleum, about 300 metres away, and there are sandbags around its base. I wait for an hour in roasting heat and nothing happens and when I leave for shade, there is a dull thud and a great cheer. The symbol of 35 years of nasty, mean communism has been dynamited. Then laughter – the mausoleum does not collapse into rubble but sinks slowly to its knees, sort of like the Communist Party. “Oshten! Oshten!” (again! again!) they shout, but the army is embarrassed at its deficiency and shoos away the crowds, and the building is demolished out of sight at night.
“It doesn’t matter what you think of Zhivkov,” says J, not known for his communist sympathies. “That monument was built in 48 hours by volunteers and it should have been preserved, because it stood for something.” Milena, a young receptionist in the Sheraton, prefers not to think about it. “Perhaps people don’t talk about communism because it’s not yet history to them, they’re still living it. When the changes happened, I just noticed that before, my parents took us on holidays all the time, and then they couldn’t.” All Milena wanted to do was leave.
5.
Lubomir runs a travel agency in Sofia. He has a sign in his office which says, “Information is a valuable asset. 5 minutes free then 5 leva a minute.” I learn later that this sums him up, but I decide to take one of his “Exploring Bulgarian monasteries” tours, to get out of Sofia and away from my self-destructive stupidity. When the rest of the group turns out to be single Frenchwomen, I wonder how much sanity can be worth, but there’s fresh air and scenery and the monasteries are worth it.
The Turks weren’t the worst overlords, though no Bulgarian would agree, and the pashas tolerated Christian churches if they were a certain height and out of sight. The monasteries may have been chased up hilltops and into deep woods, but they’re intact.
An hour’s trudge up one mountainside is the Glozhene Monastery of the Holy Glorious Martyr George, Victory Bearer and Wonder Worker, or Glozhene for short. It bristles behind fortress walls, and must have been built with a Bulgarian Monastery Kit, because it has all the trimmings: Dark wooden verandas, whitewashed walls, fuchsia flowers and technicolour frescoes. It’s delightful and empty – the last monk left years ago. I like Bulgaria’s monks. Some of them can get married, for a start, and they have a pleasingly warlike history. The country couldn’t have kicked out the Turks without them. During the early nineteenth-century National Revival, the monks ran the Bulgarian language schools. Then they sheltered freedom fighters, dug them tunnels and took up arms. In 1835, Abbot Sergei of Plakovo was hanged for plotting an uprising, and Preobrazhenie’s friars ran a rifle factory. Now, Plakovo is a secluded scrubby courtyard housing centuries-old books and a monument to Sergei. Brother Kaliste wears jeans under his robes, and works part-time as a cook to keep the place going.
Most monasteries have some monument to intrigue. At Glozhene it’s a cell with a threadbare carpet. On the walls are photos of revolutionary superhero and frequent guest Vassil Levski; under the carpet is the escape tunnel he used when the sultan’s agents came calling. A handsome, principled ex-priest, Levski is a textbook national hero, though the Turks hanged him three years before the 1876 April Uprising he’d helped to plot. (Policemen now chasing mutri have his portrait in their offices). But the uprising failed anyway, and it wasn’t until the Ottomans’ savage reprisals — “disembowelled women, beheaded infants,” says Lubomir, like he’s reciting a shopping list — gave Victorians a Kosovo-like guilt trip, that Russia stepped in to help, and the Turks were removed.
The Kosovo comparison isn’t melodramatic. In the village of Batak, in 1876, irregulars from the Ottoman forces sliced, stamped on and killed 5000 Bulgarian Christians, largely women and children. Most were locked in a church and burned alive. Still, this is mild compared to the sultan who put out the eyes of 5000 Bulgarian soldiers, but left one in 100 intact so they could lead the others home. The great Uzbek emperor Timur the Lame, in his Balkan war-trips, cemented heads into columns to show his power. Once when he was besieging a city, he promised not to shed a drop of blood. He buried 6000 people alive instead.
Bulgarians were forced to be obsessed with their liberation – the Communists sent schoolchildren on a Hundred National Objects tour – but the obsession is genuine, too. Maybe it’s something to do with “ethnic hatreds,” or maybe five centuries of occupation give you long memories. In Koprovshtitsa, where the National Uprising began, they still have a Place of the Scimitar Charge and the Street of the Counter Attack.
I don’t subscribe to the “ethnic hatreds” theory of the Balkans’ troubles. Or Rwanda’s, or Burundi’s, or anywhere where political manipulation is screamingly obvious. “Civilised” countries like mine hacked off plenty of hands and chopped plenty of heads, but they did it out of sight and abroad. There’s no historical reason, if things were fair, why “Balkan” should have come to mean violent and messy, and “British” has not.
6.
Bulgaria: What the? #3
One evening, in a half-empty bar, there is a quartet of young people on the next table. They’re from the provinces, from their accents, and they’re drinking hard. Slowly, one girl starts dancing, then builds to a striptease. Finally she’s dancing round the room topless, laughing maniacally. It’s 9pm on a weekday.
Bulgaria’s Rhodope mountains have produced Orpheus and Alexander the Great and yogurt. I’ve been told often about Bulgarian’s greatest invention (though their arms factories aren’t bad either). This country eats yogurt like the British drink tea. The Fortnum and Mason version is served in ceramic pots with fresh fruit berries, but the commonest Tetley version is in plastic pots. The Japanese import bacillus bulgaricus in huge quantities, but over here, French multinational Danon has been been buying up small yogurt producers, and the master yogurt-makers – under the communists, every village had one – have mostly been fired.
In Trigrad, the master yogurt and cheesemaker is a knackered young woman with a baby on her hip. Trigrad is near the Greek border, in a place where borders are meaningless to farmers and crucial to statesmen. Ten miles of a one-track road though a gorge whose sharpness Afghans would recognise yield a dusty town with chickens and goats in the main square. Kostantin – who keeps a guesthouse, drives a Harley and collects neolithic daggers – takes me to the dairy factory for a visit. Inside, stone tables hold white slabs of sirene (feta) and kashkaval (harder cheese), dotted with flies. The young woman uses an old stone press and, shifting the baby on her hip, picks up huge slabs of rock as if they were polystyrene. “See! No machines!” Like in Cuba, where they rig up doorbells from old telephones, and there is no such thing as disposable, I’m not sure whether I’m looking at the future or the past.
Down the road from Trigrad is the Devil’s Throat Cave, billed as the gateway to Hades. Earlier this decade, the British government donated money to clean it up. (The Tory government cleaning the mouth of hell – it is a thought to treasure).
Bulgaria: What the? #4
An interview with Bulgaria’s British representative Christine Winterburn. She has recently arrived from Peru. I ask her how different Bulgaria is to Southern America and she replies in diplopuff. “They have the same problems – unemployment, poverty. There’s no difference, really.” She has lessons every day to improve her Bulgarian, but I think her lying technique needs improving more.
7.
The communists had a habit of hijacking pretty villages and preserving them in the name of national heritage. Arbanassi, home to an unspeakably beautiful church, even has an architectural police. Koprovshtitsa, at the foot of the Sredna Gora mountains, used to hold a huge folk festival on a hillside twenty minutes walk from the town. They may have been regime-funded, but such festivals put the Bulgarian Voices choir CD in HMV. Koprovshtitsa is still the public face of Bulgarian folk, but the festival has been privatised. There are no more wild gatherings on hillsides, but a small stage and microphones in the main square. People grumble that it’s not the real thing any more, but as public faces go, it’s still not bad. I want to take a picture of a beautiful girl in traditional costume – vibrant embroidered skirts and sleeves, an apron over white embroidered socks, gold coins in her hair, at her throat – but she guesses why, and hides her fag behind her back.
The village of Mogolitza, on the other hand, screams neglect. It’s a dump. This is a pomak village, though you wouldn’t guess from the miniskirts, and you can only tell by the minaret. Bulgaria has a lot of minarets, despite the 1989 purging, sponsored by rich Arabs. In next-door Macedonia, I met Roma – Gypsies – in a town outside Skopje. They were as Muslim as the pomaks, but they led me to some foundations and looked bitter. “We keep asking the Saudis for money to build this mosque,” said the mosque leader. “But they don’t believe we’re Muslim.”
Bulgaria’s pomaks have a half-century history of religious persecution to prove it. Every so often, the politburo declared that all Muslims should “Bulgarianize” their names. Suhil should become Slavcho, Mohamed should be Mirko. It’s rumoured that in Gotse Delchev – a flat and dusty town named after a Macedonian rebel, like calling Milton Keynes “Dick Turpinville” – pomak leaders were hanged because they wouldn’t sign up to the name changes. What’s in a name, indeed.
Mogalitza may have a mosque, but it doesn’t have jobs or money or a dinky folk festival. I don’t know what’s more depressing – drinking green chemical lemonade in a country that used to be called the market garden of Europe, or the mayor’s delusion that he can turn these dusty streets into a tourist attraction. It’s a common enough ambition: Bulgarians are now as hobbled by economists as they used to be by politicians, and tourism is salvation. But the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia dried up the trade and the country needs a second coming. Cynics would say it’s as likely as the religious version.
8.
I spend a week with J near the Black Sea coast. Varna, the biggest resort, is a good place in summer. Bulgarians are blended from Slav and Central Asian genes – making them often dark and sultry – but their soul is Latin. Cities don’t wake until 9, and the sauntering of Varna’s skimpy women on their endless legs would get a perfect 10 in Piazza Navona. On Varna’s main drag, loudspeakers play Balkan pop – tinny, with shadows of Gypsy rythms, but dreadful – which J calls “turbofolk.” But an orange-juice seller sings a truer song of Bulgaria’s youth. “I hate it, I want to leave. There are no jobs. Anywhere’s better than here.”
That evening, J’s girlfriend arrives unexpectedly. I hide in the hotel. Later, eating uncooked food and not knowing how to say “heat it please”, it’s suddenly time to leave.
Bulgaria is not the worst country in the world, no matter what Telegraph readers say. It makes fine wine, and the yogurt is good. It can be beautiful and its history can be noble. I wish it luck. On the plane home, I think how eight hundred years earlier, a sect called the Bogomils enraged the Byzantine church. They were accused of sodomy and burned at the stake. The confusion of Bogomil and Bulgar, over the centuries, became the English word “bugger.” As we approach England, I say in my head “bugger”, over and over, and it’s almost a comfort.
Published in TANK magazine