FORUM

To understand why Bulgaria has become the only EU country – and one of a handful of states in the world with dubious media records – to ban the BBC World Service on FM, one has to consider the historical background.

Since the BBC started broadcasting to the world in the 1930s, the Bulgarian governments have been either less than enthusiastic about it or openly hostile – exactly the opposite of what listeners who relied on the BBC for fast and reliable information felt like.

The attitude of Bulgarians to the gay pride parades of recent years curiously resembles their sentiments towards the Orthodox Church: it is obviously wrong, yet presidents, prime ministers and many ordinary citizens vie to be seen kissing the hand of some octogenarian bishop because it does their "patriotic" image good.

Over 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain Sofia City Council has decided to dismantle dozens if not hundreds of Communist-era signs that still adorn the façades, sides and roofs of houses and blocks of flats. For the time being council employees will reportedly be going around central Sofia jotting down the details, including locations, of the city's long-defunct neon lights in a log book. It is unclear when the actual dismantling will begin, nor how the sometimes massive signs, mainly wrought-iron and electrically illuminated letters, will be disposed of.

In a much publicised U-turn, the GERB-dominated Bulgarian parliament scrapped previous legislation to ban smoking in all public places. Instead, it decided to let restaurant and bar owners decide for themselves whether to make their properties non-smoking. Larger establishments will have to provide nonsmoking sections, a requirement critics say will mean nothing in reality.

You have a birthday and your best Bulgarian friend has a gift for you: a leather wallet. You unwrap it carefuly, you admire it and then, on closer inspection, you find one stotinka (the equivalent of less than half a penny) inside it. Giving an empty wallet is a bad omen in Bulgaria. It means that it will never get full.

Now that Bulgaria is not going to ban smoking indoors you reach for your cigarettes. Do not even think of lighting a cigarette from a burning candle, especially if you are on the Black Sea coast. It means that you will be taking the soul of a sailor.

Thousands of Bulgarians, including some of the hacks and Boyko Borisov himself believe that an unregistered herbal medicine will save mankind from all kinds of cancer, diabetes, cirrhosis and even AIDS. That it can't is pretty obvious. But why are so many Bulgarians captivated by what can at best be described as a pretty ridiculous idea?

Most Bulgarians will proudly assert that for centuries their predecessors have peacefully lived side by side with neighbours of various nationalities such as Turks, Armenians and Greeks. "We were the ones – the only ones in Europe – to have saved the Jews from the Holocaust," they claim. "We are a nation of ethnic and religious tolerance!"

Bulgarian pensioners in their thousands have become glued to Turkish soap operas and numerous travel firms (presumably unregistered) now offer trips to the colourful locations and sets where these passionate stories are filmed. Each advertisement, of course, hints at the chance of meeting the stars in the flesh.

It is not London or Berlin, nor even Athens – even when talking about such an eloquent expression of subculture as street art. Explore Sofia's streets and you will discover that even in the outer suburbs the images are more notable for their size and colours than for their ideas. As an expression of art – as well as of everything else – during the 20 years that have elapsed since the fall of Communism, Bulgarian street artists preferred visually attractive paintings to those that might be provocative.

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.