BULGARIA INTERVIEWS

Through the many chats, lunches, dinners and obviously drinks we've had with John Rowan, Ireland's ambassador to Bulgaria, we have discovered that, perhaps surprisingly, Ireland and Bulgaria have a lot more in common than meets the eye. The two couldn't be more different if geography and topography are your guidelines of course, but that's about as far as the differences go. The Irish and the Bulgarians have a very similar history, both having been oppressed by neighbours and both having undergone a sometimes painful search for a national identity.

We have meant to sit down and talk for several months now, but events usually overtook us. They did it this time around, too. Just as we were preparing for the long-overdue interview with Greece's Ambassador to Bulgaria, Terry Stamatopoulos... the Boyko Borisov government collapsed, the prime minister stepped down, and Bulgaria was plunged into the most serious moral, political and possibly constitutional crisis since the middle of the 1990s.

In recent years German ambassadors to Bulgaria like to come and go by... water.

As we sit down for a chat in his office in the German Embassy in Sofia (for those not in the know, this is an architectural oddity erected by the former GDR and still preserving some of the lights known as the "Honecker Lamps" – ubiquitous in the East bloc 30 years ago), I cannot help remembering my first meeting with Matthias Hoepfner back in 2009.

Standing in the doorway of her modest but stylish residence in Central Sofia, Marcie Berman Ries, the new US ambassador, looks petite. But appearances, as usual, are deceptive. Whenever she speaks out, Ries asserts herself as a strong-willed woman, an achiever in fields and areas traditionally considered the domain of men. Taking in her impressive CV confirms the initial impression. Ambassador Ries, a graduate of Johns Hopkins University, has held various positions with increasings seniority in both the US State Department and abroad.

Many branches of the arts are struggling in the current economic climate, but there are still examples of culture that show how, with courage and vision, much is possible. The international Sofia Poetiki Festival is one. Since 2010 it has attracted prominent artists from Bulgaria and abroad, creating an ingenious mixture of poetry, prose, dance, theatre and performance. The man behind Sofia Poetiki is a poet and writer himself, Yassen Atanassov.

At 64 and in remarkably good shape Karel van Kesteren, the Dutch ambassador, seems to be at equal ease riding his 25-year-old Yamaha Maxim 700cc motorbike in Sofia and up the Iskar Gorge, sitting behind his desk in the elegant Dutch Embassy near the Doctor's Garden, and lobbying in the Bulgarian parliament for the adoption of important pieces of legislation such as the Illegal Assets Forfeiture Act. By some twist of fate we are meeting on the exact day when 38 years ago Van Kesteren started his diplomatic career at the Dutch Foreign Ministry.

You don't need to be born somewhere to become a part of it, as the career of artist Deyan Valkov shows. Born 42 years ago in Silistra, he graduated from the National Fine Arts School and the Arts Academy in Sofia, specialising in mural painting. Since then, Deyan has turned Bulgaria's capital into the centre of his work, which takes him to the rest of Bulgaria and abroad.

Tell us something about your work – what have you done in the past?

One is cold and the other is warm: the differences between Norway and Bulgaria by far outnumber the similarities. One is traditionally tolerant; the other has been trying to become tolerant for just 20 years. One is rich - the richest in GDP-per-capita terms in Europe; the other is the poorest.

As I park outside the Israeli residence on the outskirts of Sofia in the sweltering heat a few days after what will probably go down in history as one of the most serious international terrorist attacks in Bulgaria, I cannot help but think of those awful pictures of the burntout bus in front of Burgas Airport. To Israelis, I know, this is the archetypal image of sheer terror, the end of civilisation and the beginning of barbaric fear.

On an afternoon with sub-zero F temperatures, at Boyana church on the outskirts of Sofia in January 2010, I met the man who was to become the next ambassador of the United States to Bulgaria. It was only his second day in the country, yet James Warlick, on his ordinal ambassadorial posting abroad, already had a tight agenda. We admired the amazing ecclesiastical murals dating back to the Middle Ages, we visited Bozhidar Dimitrov's National Museum of History, and then we sat down for a coffee and a chat. That was probably Ambassador Warlick's most relaxed day in Bulgaria.

We sit on the porch of one of Sofia's most elegant residences and sip some sweet Turkish tea. The large house, located next to Sofia University and overlooking the remnants of the much reviled and intermittently painted-over Red Army Monument, was built in 1903 for the Sirmadzhiev family. It was acquired by Turkey for its embassy a few years later. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the "Father of modern Turkey," worked here as a military attaché when Bulgaria attacked Turkey in the Balkan Wars of the 1910s.

Arguably Bulgaria's most prominent intellectual, Georgi Lozanov – a philosopher, professor of mass communications in several universities and the current chief of the Electronic Media Council – has always been an outspoken critic of the system, any system. Some compare him to Noam Chomsky – but with a strong dash of the Wildean penchant for bons mots – no matter whether he is talking about the legacy of Communism, organised crime, the games played in the Bulgarian media or the best restaurants in Sofia. But Georgi Lozanov is a lot more than the Chomsky-Wilde cliché.

We sat in a side room of the British residence in central Sofia a day after someone had broken the window of Jonathan Allen's Landrover and stolen his GPS. Of course, this could happen anywhere, Allen laughed, noting that his car has been broken into three times in five months, the other two in the UK. The Bulgarian police were very efficient, he told me. "At the end of the report-filing procedure – I did learn some new vocabulary, ogled – the policewoman said, because you are a foreigner we will have to inform your embassy. OK, I said, I am well connected with the British Embassy."

Juliana Roth has spent most of her life outside her native Bulgaria, yet she has never lost her connection to the joys and heartaches of this country. She is professor of Intercultural Communication at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, where she is one of the founders of the new discipline that promotes the idea of mutual understanding between cultures in the context of migration and globalisation.

"I am not more interested in tolerance than anyone else. I was just surprised to find that, in Bulgaria, there is such ethnic, linguistic and religious tolerance; a diversity without which Bulgarians would not have survived the last 800 years. I mean that this somehow even predates Ottoman rule, that something in the Bulgarian DNA made it possible for different people to live together. I know Katunitsa exists, and not only Katunitsa; I know what some people think.

On the eve of the millennium a snowstorm forces a German flying to Istanbul to stop in Sofia. Wishing to reach the Bosporus as quickly as possible, he decides to take the train instead. It is only a matter of time before he falls into the surreal Bulgarian reality, and becomes a part of it himself.

Blueberry Hill (2002) is a film by Aleksandar Morfov, an emblematic Bulgarian theatre director who mostly lives and works abroad. So is Blueberry Hill's star. Samuel "Sancho" Finzi has been living in Berlin, where he went to study acting, since 1989.

"We don’t need a workers' revolution. What we need is a players' uprising," says entrepreneur Steve Keil in his 18-minute TED Bulgaria presentation, which has been watched on YouTube by more than 34,000 people. In a convincing way he explains to a bewildered public how essential play and fun are for things to start working in Bulgaria.

A book seller in Slaveykov Square, Sofia's equivalent of the Left Bank in Paris, checks out a grey-haired gentleman who is inspecting the books displayed on a makeshift stand. Here you can buy the latest self-improvement bestseller or a 1970s Bulgarian translation of the complete works of Dostoyevsky.

"Oh this," the seller says. "This is by Orhan Pamuk. A Nobel Prize laureate. He is in Bulgaria right now." He hardly looks at the man fondling his books.

At the age of 16 she joined the New York City Ballet and soon became a principal dancer. 50 years later she's the artistic director of her own ballet company and stages performances all over the world. "People have betrayed me but ballet hasn't," smiles Suzanne Farrell, who is to be envied not only for her prominent career, but also for her vital energy and enthusiasm.

Not particularly uplifting? © Anthony Georgieff