PostCommunism

TOP 10 TENETS OF THE BULGARIAN WAY OF THINKING

Remember: this country never had the Enlightenment. To fathom the overwhelming mixture of the sometimes ostensible controversies of life in Bulgaria, you need to understand how Bulgarians think – and what the main tenets of the mental process that forms psychological associations and models of the world are. Here is a tentative top 10. Peruse sparingly and apply plenty of common sense as well as a little humour.

Conspiracy theories

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BIRTHPLACE OF BULGARIA'S LAST DICTATOR

You are in an unsightly socialist town where rustic houses are scattered amongst prefabricated housing blocks. Men are repairing Ladas and Moskviches and women are dusting carpets in the patches of green. You head for the town square and discover that it is appropriately covered with the large white slabs to be seen in so many other Bulgarian towns, the result of a 1980s plan by Communist rulers to implement pedestrian zones. But there is something a little out of kilter here. The town is oddly clean and the pavement is not falling apart. There are few stray dogs in the streets.

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VANGA GOES GLOBAL

As 2015 was drawing to a close and the unravelling conflict in the Middle East (the ISIS, the refugees, the airstrikes, Russia, Turkey, the EU, etc, etc) spiralled deeper into a state that can best be described with expletives, the name of a Bulgarian suddenly hit the international news.

It was Vanga, the blind clairvoyant who died on 11 August 1996.

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SOFIA IN THE 1990S

After several years of hectic building and reconstruction – including new Roman ruins and roads that need repairing only two weeks after they have been inaugurated by the prime minister – Sofia looks transformed. In many ways it is. Chain stores and shopping malls dominate the urban landscape, foreign tourists fill the downtown area, and Western coffee culture is replacing the older, Balkan one. There is a metro, and the graffiti are much more sophisticated than the erstwhile political or emotional slogans scribbled on walls. McDonalds is not a novelty and sushi has gone out of fashion.

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SIGHTS AND SIGNS OF A NATION

Think again! Communism with the highly ritualised rules for social behaviour its omniscient apparatchiks generated may be no more, but the system that followed it, referred by Bulgarians as the ongoing Transition, failed to change the way the former apparatchiks, many of them now businessmen and entrepreneurs, thought.

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HORROR ISLAND

If there was a competition for the most surreal road sign in Bulgaria, Belene would be a top contender. The standard signposts in the centre of this 8,300-strong town on the Danube list the following places of interest. First is "Municipality," the building of the City Council. Then comes the Bus Station. And then – hold your breath – you can choose to go to either the Nuclear Power Plant or the Prison.

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10 WAYS TO FIGHT OSTALGIA

If opinion polls are anything to go by, Bulgarians are the most pessimistic Europeans. In contrast to the Danes who, despite – or perhaps because of – their climate and taxation levels, have persistently, over the course of many years, emerged as the most contented people in Europe, Bulgarians are becoming increasingly unhappy and morose.

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GEORGI LOZANOV

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.

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BULGARIA'S REMARKABLE RAILWAY STATIONS

To a month-long strike, immense debts with little hope for refinancing, and 2,000 jobs axed add the obsolete rolling stock, frequent accidents, possible privatisation and talk of spending "optimisation": in the beginning of the 21st Century the future of the BDZh, or the Bulgarian State Railways, is looking very gloomy indeed.

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FORGOTTEN VICTIMS

When you travel through Bulgaria you will most likely be stunned by the sheer number of ugly "heroic" monuments dotting the countryside. They all depict more or less one and the same thing: Soviet soldiers holding submachine guns, local peasants wearing raincoats and flat caps, busty women usually carrying a bunch of wheat stables. Stars, hammers and sickles – the symbols of Communism – are omnipresent, and so are plaques celebrating local partizani, or Second World War Communist resistance fighters.

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BULGARIA'S SUNKEN CHURCHES

Fishermen are reluctant to engage in conversation with strangers, as this usually scares off the fish they hope to catch. And "Where is the church?" is not a question one would usually ask near a reservoir that is several kilometres from the nearest village. However, when you're on the southwestern bank of the Koprinka Reservoir, in the Sredna Gora, the question is pertinent – despite the reluctance of the local anglers.

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DUST TO DUST IN CENTRAL SOFIA

It is August 1999 and Lilyana Ilieva from Varna stumbles through the dark that envelopes the centre of Sofia at night. She reaches a huge ruin and, like several other people, crouches down by the pile of rubble that has spilled out of the mesh fencing surrounding the wreckage. Lilyana chooses a bigger fragment and puts it in her bag. "My father was in the army construction corps in 1949 and took part in the building of the mausoleum. When he learnt I was coming to Sofia, he asked me to bring him a piece of it. It was one of his dreams – to see the building demolished," Lilyana says.

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THE JUNKYARD OF HISTORY

If you enter Bulgaria from Turkey through the border checkpoint at Lesovo the first thing you'll be greeted by after passport control will be some tanks lurking on both sides of the new, EU-sponsored road.

Don't panic. They've never fired on anyone, thankfully, except for drills. You can even stop to inspect them if you like. No one will halt you, which will lead you to surmise that the decrepit pieces of machinery have been abandoned, save for the clusters of snakes that have made them their homes.

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