As an airplane is swooping over a field beside Sofia Airport, two horses and a donkey do not look up, but keep grazing among the rubbish. Shacks made of bricks, corrugated iron and wood encroach upon the field. Heavy lorries with international logos rush by the shacks on the road from the airport and its business park.
This is an everyday scene from Hristo Botev, a neighbourhood bearing the name of the great Bulgarian 19th century poet and revolutionary.
Combining the celebrations of St Trifon, the local patron saint of wine and winemaking, and St Valentine, the imported patron of love – both being celebrated on 14 February, pales in comparison to what happens on 9 May. Long before and long after that date, Bulgarians argue both in restaurants and on Facebook about what should be celebrated: Europe Day or the Day of Victory over Nazi Germany.
Apart from the "proverbial" laboriousness of its citizens and their cleanliness, one of the cliches most often used to describe this Balkan "Land of Roses" is its tolerance. Bulgaria saved its Jews from planned deportation during the Second World War is the historical fact often quoted to support the tolerance cliche.
Like all cliches, however, the "Bulgarian tolerance" may have stemmed from some distant past no one can remember. Anyone chancing to venture into the streets of Sofia in 2013 will see a very different picture.
Woken by the phone’s insistent ring, he rolled to the right to swing his feet to the floor, but his knee hit the hard wall making his pictures rattle. Someone had somehow contrived to move his bed 180 degrees in the night. The phone continued its urgent shriek every four seconds. Georgi A. cursed its mother and especially the mother of whoever was hanging on relentlessly at the other end. Hadn’t he installed a gentle bluesy ring tone, a soothing coaxing musical phrase? This hectoring shriek was becoming shriller.
Sitting with friends in a slick Ego pizzeria, it suddenly occurred to me that it was almost 10 years to the day since a Balkan Airlines plane made up of different coloured bits of metal first deposited me on the melting tarmac of Sofia airport to the wild applause of the passengers. In celebrating the sight of Bulgaria’s once-crumbling infrastructure, I am of course perfectly aware that this kind of "shittiness chic" so beloved of my generation of Western European travellers annoys many Bulgarians. Would I have noticed the colour of the wing metal on a British Airways flight? Probably not.
Three years ago, in New York, distinguished Bulgarian photographer Ivo Hadjimishev was having dinner with Nellie and Robert Gipson, a Bulgarian- American family, who had sponsored educational and museum projects in Bulgaria for years (see Vagabond No. 23, August 2008).
In 1909, 9 September fell on a Thursday. Usually, Thursdays were business as usual for the numerous Jewish shops and other establishments in what at the time was a city with a significant Jewish population. But on that day they were all closed, as if it was a Sabbath. The streets of the Jewish neighbourhoods – the rich lived on either side of what is today Maria Louisa Blvd and the poor in Yuchbunar, present-day Zone B5 – were nearly deserted. The only sound was the buzz of thousands of voices coming from the market near the Banya Bashi Mosque.