The Land of Left Behind

Bulgaria doesn’t top many league tables – for economics, happiness, football or tourism. Here’s why you should go

Central Sofia, not obviously suffering from overtourism

Bulgaria found its way into a few news reports in that fuggy period between Christmas and New Year. No-one is taking much notice of very much then, so I expect only dedicated followers of European current affairs clocked the story.

On January 1, Bulgaria adopted the Euro, although the Lev will still be legal currency for the calendar year of 2026. But the voters thought the switchover had been botched and used as an excuse to raise taxes. They in turn used the Euro move to vent their frustrations at the political class and kick out the government.

Those events in Bulgaria goaded me to write the following, based on a short trip I did to the capital Sofia in October.

More pressing work is to blame for the fact I have been sitting on my Sofia, so to speak. How appropriate. Bulgaria always seems to get shoved off the agenda by bigger and more important issues and louder, more importunate nation states.

Let’s call it The Land of Left-Behind.

It’s late entering the Euro, just as it was late-ish (2007) joining the EU itself. Even the biggest event of Bulgaria’s modern history, its liberation from Soviet Russia in 1989, felt like an afterthought. All the exciting revolutions – heartlifting (Poland), euphoric (Czechoslovakia) or brutal (Romania) – had already happened. Bulgaria’s was…orderly and unspectacular. The country met our fickle western gaze for a moment, and has spent the rest of subsequent European history in the footnotes.

And so – off I went to a medium-sized country in southeastern Europe

I recently worked out that I have visited 85 countries in my lifetime. I want to get to 100 and from Edinburgh, Sofia is the flight-path equivalent of a low-hanging fruit.

Like so many travellers, I had somehow not gotten around to Bulgaria. I was all over central and eastern Europe after and even slightly before the fall of Communism, mainly with my intrepid football team, The Racing Club de Blackheath. But Bulgaria never came up on the tour schedule, despite its rich footballing history (1994 and all that).

It was a nothing kind of autumn day when I landed – grey, a little cold, rain in the air, glowering clouds over the not-too-imposing Vitosha mountain.

But if you choose your destinations based on ease of travel to a capital city from the airport, put Sofia right up there (with Lisbon) at the top. After the usual Faraging* to get through immigration, I found the Metro station right outside Terminal 2. I walked past a dedicated crowd of smokers: blokes in baggy jeans and leather jackets, women with henna-coloured hair and purple jackets. It all felt very 20th century.

Best knock off another 70 years for the metro trains, low carriages the colour of vanilla-ice-cream seemingly designed in the pre-automotive era. The cost of a ticket to Serdika station was also very retro – 72p, or one US dollar.

I spent a lot of time in Spain when the Euro was introduced there. Ditching those tiny little pesetas in favour of the overbearing new mega-currency was always going to be an excuse for businesses to jack up – sorry, ‘round up’ – prices. Bulgarians are probably right to be anxious. The country is at the bottom of the EC’s prosperity league. As Euros and Euro pricing take hold, not for the first time since 1989, Bulgarians seem to be asking: do we belong in a club of rich nations? (They do: see below).

But there was plenty of moderate affluence on show as I walked from the station to my hotel: cafes, upmarket clothes shops in fine buildings, quiet SUVs patrolling the streets. I was mildly astonished by the politeness of drivers, slowing to a halt if I showed the slightest inclination to cross the road. I later learned that strict new traffic rules had been introduced the previous month. Let’s hope they stick: it makes Sofia a stress-free place for pedestrians.

Pedestrianised Vitosha Boulevard (see picture at the top) is the main shopping drag. I guess you’d say it’s Sofia at its most Parisian, with a central arcade of glass bars and restaurants. My hotel, R34, was, and indeed is, just off here. The room, large by European standards for the price [from around £80), was in the approved post-1989 distressed industrial style. The high windows looked out on a fine 19th century apartment block, in that mustard shade you see everywhere in Prague and Vienna, plaster coats of arms beneath the windows. Next to it: a peeling concrete wall and a forlorn alley.

At different times in its history, Sofia led, early-adopted and innovated. Roman Serdika was named after a Celtic tribe, the Serdi. It was early to Christianity. But whenever it prospered independently, a big empire, Byzantine, Ottoman, Soviet, would, ultimately, take it over.

Okay, Sofia, what’s your angle?

It’s not a smiley place, Sofia. Maybe it was the weather. I did see a group of laughing businesswomen at a traffic crossing who seem to be returning from a jolly lunch (or maybe they were celebrating the new traffic laws). Otherwise, no, not much evident happiness. Late at night I heard what sounded like rowdy partygoers, or football supporters, chanting in Vitosha. It turned out this was the beginning of the protests that would bring down Rosen Zhelyazkov’s government on 11 December.

After an overpriced pizza made with cheap ingredients recommended by the hotel, I decided to stick to local food for the remainder of my stay. You’re in the Balkans: you want filling, slow-cooked, meaty food, a bit spicy, and decent local wines. You get both at Moma and Shtastlivetsa, the former homely, the latter Hapsburg-era glittery and packed.

Let’s talk about Bulgaria and tourism. As I wrote in this blog (paid subscribers only) nation-branding is a crude and simplistic art. Name the most successful countries at the game, and a host of images, sounds, even smells should materialise instantly. Others are not so blessed, and Bulgaria is one of them.

But one niche market that has opened up since 1989 for places like Bulgaria is the frozen-in-time Communist-era attraction. Ever since I first stepped off a train into a country called East Germany, I’ve been a sucker for the vast empty squares and mighty ministries, part Roman, part Art Deco dedicated to the people – the ones that loom over those same people with Orwellian forbidding. Sofia has plenty of that.

Sofia also has a great attraction that brings the Soviet era back down to the human level. The Red Flat is an apartment in the centre which has been preserved exactly as it would have been in the days of Todor Zhikov.

I bought a box of 1970s matches from the bookshop and ticket office, then wandered around the corner and up the three flights of stairs. The flat was full of millennials from Italy, Germany, Spain and elsewhere gawping at the plastic phones, doilies and bad hi fi equipment. I didn’t find the decor so exotic: I’d see identical living rooms in 1980s Poland – and, indeed, in my own Grandmother’s in 1970s Wolverhampton.

Old Gold in the Red Flat

I usually refusethose headsets museum people try to give you – why block off one of your senses and hand the experience over to a disembodied voice? But the narration on the Red Flat audio is excellent. You learn about the family, their humdrum but not-so-terrible lives, their holidays in prescribed places, their work connections with fellow Comintern-friendly states. There’s a poignant glimpse of a yearning for something more exciting in the pile of illegally-imported vinyl records. Mum, Dad and uncles might have been okay with state TV and marching bands. Their children longed for Michael Jackson and Dire Straits, for colour, glitter, shoulder pads and synthesisers.

But a unique place, and an argument in itself for visiting Sofia, is the park outside the Museum of Socialist Art.

The cheap metro from Serdika took me south east to G M Dmitrov station and a bland cityscape of parks, offices and highways. Outside the station, a young woman asked me for a light, a thing that has not happened to me since about 1991. Google Maps tried, with mixed success, to guide me around a very 21st century office block housing a pharmacy, a Thai spa, an Italian restaurant, a coffee shop, an art gallery, a jewellery outlet and the Sofia office of the global consultancy Accenture. Finally, I found the gate to the park.

When that orderly revolution happened, they didn’t destroy the statues to actual and idealised heroes that were such a feature of Communist states. That might be because the winner of the first free elections in modern Bulgaria was…the Communist Party. So they took down all the statues and parked them here thinking, perhaps, that they might be reinstated on their prestige-location plinths once the fad for western-style democracy had passed.

But there they are still: a couple of Lenins, a Stalin, a Che, many anonymous workers and soldiers, and the aforementioned long-time dictator, Todor Zhivkov.

The effect is somewhat poignant and borderline comical. The heroes and leaders look like inhabitants of a care home, The Institution for the Historically Confused, perhaps, allowed out for a mid-morning exercise.

My favourite piece is this seated Lenin. I think the sculptor meant to have him looking steadily into some brave future. Instead, he looks like an anxious visiting uncle who’s wondering where his cup of tea has got to. A close runner-up is a woman chewing her fingernails wondering when the kids are getting out of school. Again, I am not sure this is the effect the sculptor was aiming for.

It’s a quite hilariously brilliant place and I’d recommend it to anyone.

In the afternoon, I did another familiar feature of the modern touristic landscape, the free food tour. Balkan Bites meets by the bust of Stefan Stambolov, a reformist Prime Minister who was hideously disfigured in a knife attack. Very Balkans, that

This tour is warmly recommended, too. If you have never nibbled a Lyutenitsa or sipped a Sarva, and I bet you haven’t, this is your chance.

Let’s hear it for the small guys in 2026

There’s a Gladston [sic] Street in the middle of Sofia. It’s in memory of the British Prime Minister, William Gladstone, who drew attention to Ottoman atrocities against the Bulgarians and was a doughty supporter of its independence.

But international attitudes to Bulgaria and the struggles that have pockmarked its modern history are better summed up in the notorious words of another British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, who airily dismissed quarrels in ‘a faraway country between peoples of whom we know nothing’.

I know a little, only a little, more about Bulgaria and Bulgarians after my short visit. But I am increasingly thinking that knowing more, showing an interest, and visiting is vitally important to the future of small countries, especially in Europe.

In 1997, after a banking collapse, Bulgaria was the sickest and poorest man in Europe. What followed was, in the words of the Institute for Market Economics, ‘a long period of mostly steady growth’ and ‘gradual convergence’ with wealthier EU members.

I treasure the reassuring words and sober advice of such institutes, but wonder if that’s enough as Bulgarians face the next election, still seething after years of corruption and their frustrations over the Euro.

We know what happens next: Russia bribes oligarchs and politicians, spreads disinformation and tries to recruit Bulgaria into its club of hard-right, neo-Soviet apologists currently led by Hungary, Slovakia and significant figures within the MAGA movement.

The future is looking ominously Orwellian. I don’t mean that adjective in the usual sense, although mass state surveillance and the suppression of free speech and independent journalism are undoubtedly happening.

The world described in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is divided between three superstates, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia (the grey parts are neutral zones.

Sound/look familiar? It might if you have been following the news this week. You wonder about the future of a Venezuela, a Greenland, a Taiwan or a Bulgaria in the ‘spheres of influence’ that sound scaringly like a harbinger of Orwell’s world. For its part, Bulgaria just needs to look back three or four decades to know what life in those spheres of influence is like.

I want to see the world map like a very complictated jigsaw puzzle, not three daubs denoting ‘strength’.

In my little world of travel writing, I’m going to be all about and all for the small countries from now on…the smaller, more individual and less dependent the better.

Songs that take you places

Stani Mi, Maytcho

Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares

In the late 1980s, a French record producer put out a recording of Bulgarian village women singers. It became one of those unexpected successes that heralded the rise of so-called ‘World Music’. British alternative bands like the Cocteau Twins latched onto the singers’ pure, yet somehow unsettling tones. Kate Bush went to Sofia and recorded a track with three Bulgarian singers.

But nothing cultural came out of the Soviet Union without it having a political meaning. The singers were recruited in the 1950s in an attempt to champion an authentic Bulgarian peasant life – that is, one unsullied by Ottoman, Western or Muslim influences. Like Olympic athletes, the singers were removed from their villages to the city and drilled hard. The full, fascinating story is here.

And the full MARKLANDS playlist is here.

Let’s end with advice on how to endear yourself to a Bulgarian

Try to pronounce shkembedzhiynitsa.

That’s from ‘TOP 10 MISTAKES First-time visitors to Bulgaria will make’ from Vagabond, Bulgaria’s English language magazine.

The danger with pronouncing shkembedzhiynitsa correctly is that a newly-endeared local might take you to one. It is a specialist tripe soup restaurant.

*To Farage (vb) The act of standing in a frustratingly long immigration queue created by bogus economics and cynical promises of ‘sovereignty’