When the young Patrick Leigh Fermor – a man considered one of the 20th century greatest travel writers – visited Ruse in 1934, he stumbled upon a strange town. It was cosmopolitan and rather rundown, part Danubian and part post-Ottoman – a place where one could drink a huge Viennese coffee in a brightly lit coffee shop that served both Mitteleurope cakes and pretzels, and Middle Eastern kataifi and baklava, and whose patrons would read German newspapers and speak German with Austrian accent, while the surrounding language cacophony contained also Armenian and Ladino – the tongue of the local Sephardic Jewry.

Today Ruse is again a borderland city – this time straddling not different cultures but historical periods. It mixes magnificent fin-de-siècle architecture of the time between the 1878 Liberation and the Second World War, when Ruse was known as the Little Vienna; Brutalist buildings and prefab-concrete residential housing estates from the Communist period; and characterless new construction typical for the period of transition to democracy and the 2000s. All this in various states of disrepair, the result of depopulation and the economic hardships that followed the fall of Communism in 1989.

Ruse in the mid-19th century, an engraving by Felix Kanitz, an Austrian-Hungarian historian and geographer, who visited and researched the Bulgarian lands

Ruse began as a Thracian settlement; but it gained some prominence when the Roman arrived, in the 1st century AD. There, they established Sexaginta Prista, a major military port guarded by a small fort whose remains can be visited today. There are few remains of the medieval Bulgarian Ruse fortress; the location regained its importance as late as the 16th century, when the Ottomans founded here a fortified town, Rustchuk, or Little Ruse. Two centuries later, it was already the principal Ottoman city in this part of the Balkans that connected Constantinople with Bucharest and Transylvania.

Ruse's Statue of Liberty is a fine example of late 19th century sculpture

The best days of Ruse, however, started in the mid-19th century, when its importance as a centre of commerce increased during and after the 1853-1856 Crimean War. Then, in the 1860s, the town and the entire Danube region got a new government – the energetic, reformist Midhat Pasha. His tenure lasted just two years, but this was enough time for him to start serious reforms. His administration brought to Ruse its first printing house, telegraph service and the first street-name signs in the empire. Construction the first railway in the Ottoman Empire started, it connected Ruse and Varna, shortening the journey from Central Europe to Constantinople. Midhat Pasha also introduced modern agriculture and founded a specialised farm facility near Ruse. Thanks to all this, 11 countries opened consulates in the city – from Austro-Hungary and Russia up to the Netherlands, Belgium and Greece.

Ruse's strategic location and economic prosperity is also why the city became a centre of the Bulgarian national revival movement. The city was cosmopolitan and busy – the perfect venue for the young revolutionaries to enter and leave the Ottoman Empire, to meet like-minded collaborators, and to consider stirring up an uprising against the sultan. However, the city itself never saw any revolutionary activities – it was silent during the failed 1876 April Uprising. It did not last for long – Ruse became a major battlefield and was heavily bombed during the Russo-Turkish war that started in 1877. Russian troops entered it as late as February 1878.

In the decades that followed Ruse went through a period of unseen progress and prosperity. In a couple of decades, the town became the home of a string of Bulgaria firsts: a private bank, a technical society, a chamber of commerce, an insurance company, and a manually operated lift. Ruse became the host of the first cinema screening in Bulgaria and welcomed the first automobile imports. Тhe first petrol refinery in Bulgaria was also founded in the city.

These years saw the construction of the emblematic streets of Ruse, with beautiful buildings in trendy European styles which earned Ruse the Little Vienna moniker. The highest concentration of preserved buildings from this period is along the Alexandrovska Street, the Slavyanski Boulevard and around the history museum.

In the interwar period, Ruse went into a decline – as witnessed by Fermor – after Romania added the South Dobrudzha region to its territory – the interrupted access to this fertile region affected trade quite significantly. Despite the difficulties large-scale projects were executed such as the river port complex.

The arrival of Communism transformed Ruse. Private businesses and properties were nationalised, society and economy were refashioned after the Stalinist model and start of new, large-scale industrial projects were opened, attracting thousands of people from across the country. Adamant to develop transport connections to other Eastern bloc countries, in 1952-1954 Bulgaria constructed the Friendship Bridge between Ruse and the Romanian town of Giurgiu.

The face of Ruse changed, too. Many old buildings were knocked down to open space for new residential housing, parks and squares. The emblematic building from this period is the brutalist Ruse City Council, which resembles a ship. Another grandiose urban development was the Revival Period Heroes Park. It occupies the space of Ruse old cemetery that used to be the resting place of thousands Bulgarians, Turks, Armenians, Jews and foreigners. Yet the Communist authorities decided that Ruse was in need of a large green area near the city centre. In the course of a couple of years, in the 1970s, thousands of graves were moved to a new cemetery – or bulldozed into the Danube. A small part of the hundreds of graves was preserved – those of prominent figures of the Bulgarian Revival Period. The beautiful 1898 All Saints sepulchre church was knocked down, and on its place was erected the so-called Revival Period Heroes Pantheon.

The building of Ruse City Council resembles a ship. It was constructed in 1985 as the seat of the local Communist Party

Despite Communist destruction and post-Communist neglect, Ruse is still a delight to explore, for much of its multicultural heritage is preserved and, sometimes, taken care of. Its East Orthodox cathedral, embodies the city's endless capabilities to change and morph – its core was built in the 17th century, possibly over the remains of a Late Antiquity church, and its chapels and belfry were built after 1878, with stone blocks from the demolished Ruse Fortress.

The 1892 St Paul of the Cross Catholic church has a 31-metre-high belfry and an organ considered to be the oldest one still in use in Bulgaria. The Armenian St Virgin Mary church, situated in the heart of the erstwhile Armenian neighbourhood, was built in 1832 after its wooden predecessor burned down.

The pantheon of Revival Period heroes

Ruse also has two mosques, which still welcome worshipers from the small Muslim community that still lives in the city, long after most of its people left, following the Russo-Turkish war. There are also two synagogues, an Ashkenazi and a Sephardic one. After most of local Jews left Bulgaria for Israel, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Ashkenazi synagogue became a Jewish community centre. In the 1990s, the Sephardi one was sold to the US-backed Church of God of Prophecy.

A luxury carriage, Transportation Museum 

Ruse is also the home of some curious museums. The Regional History Museum is among the most active in Bulgaria and has exhibitions in several old houses, including the charming Urban Lifestyle Museum. Ruse's old railway station, for its part, is the home of Bulgaria's first and only National Transport Museum. The engines and carriages parked in its yard have carried some important people – Ottoman Sultan Abdülaziz and Midhat Pasha, French Empress Eugenie, the monarchs who ruled Bulgaria between 1879 and 1943 – prince Alexander I and kings Ferdinand I and Boris III, and Soviet Marshal Fyodor Tolbuhin, who entered Bulgaria in September 1944, effectively paving the way to making it a Communist country. In short, this small and often overlooked museum represents Bulgaria's recent past in a nutshell.