Plovdiv by Simon Heptinstall

The poor place sounds like a schoolboys’ insult dreamed up in playground somewhere in middle Europe. That’s why the current attempts to promote Bulgaria’s second city as a citybreak destination are doomed. Purely because of its name… Plovdiv. Would you dare say it out loud in polite company?

Yet I’d been invited there by the enthusiastic Bulgarian tourist board, desperate to promote their country in the west. They’re making up for lost time. Bulgaria has been slower than most of its neighbours to emerge from old Eastern Bloc-like ways. The communists changed their name to the socialists and remained in power until a few years ago. Compared to, say, Czechoslovakia, things have hardly changed at all.

They sent me a glossy new brochure called “Bulgaria – A Country to Discover’ with a nice photograph of a tree on the cover. Inside there is a page with the words ‘Old Plovdiv’ over a photo of a statue of some venerable classical figure. He’s no doubt thinking: “What have I done to deserve this?”

A month later I found myself in the Roman amphitheatre gazing at the same statue and couldn’t resist whispering under my breath “you poor old Plovdiv.”

Poor old Plovdiv indeed. Somewhere under all that concrete there’s probably a nice town. The famed Roman amphitheatre, for example, is a star photograph in any brochure about Bulgaria. What the carefully placed photos omit is the busy concrete dual-carriageway that has been built right under the Roman ruins which now sit on a motorway tunnel amid the rising fumes and noise from the road below.

Approaches to the city are made across the vast flat and scrubby Thracian Plain. Suddenly you are in suburbs that are an alternating sequence of stained concrete tower blocks and rusting factories so tatty it’s hard to tell if they are still in operation. Every so often there’s a few acres of windswept rough scrubland.

“We’ve given back all the land that was seized by the communists,” explained an English speaking guide from the tourist office. “But some of it is owned by families who have long since moved away. Everywhere there is land lying unused and unwanted.” When the old deposed king was bizarrely voted in as Prime Minister, the Bulgarians started looking for a fresh start. Tourism would bring in much-needed foreign cash. But will citybreaks to Plovdiv catch on?

With direction signs and tourist maps in Cryllic, it’s difficult to find your way to the few sights. There’s a ruined castle at the top of the hill above the Old Town. Keep heading upwards and you can’t miss it. But the walls were covered with graffitti and a gang of worried looking men with moustaches were sitting around drinking cans of beer. The crumbling walls were a relic of Philip of Macedonia, Alexander the Great’s father. He’d founded a city here and deliberately peopled it with criminals and outcasts to keep troublesome natives in check. Pliny later called it the “City of Thieves.” The gang were staring at my camera. I decided not to hang around.

The best bits of Plovdiv are the half dozen winding cobbled streets lined with 150-year-old houses of rich merchants. Some are museums, shops and cafes… some are just empty and starting to fall apart.

The long straight main street is lively, busy and colourful. It may be Bulgaria’s best main street. So I felt confident enough to try a cool looking restaurant with its name K2 etched on its tall windows. But after getting a table for one through the use of creative hand signals I found myself staring at an indecipherable Cryllic menu.

Pretending to know what I was doing I gestured nonchalantly at one of the dishes to the waitress. Ten minutes later I was presented with a plate full of plain boiled meat with no vegetables. “What a silly Plovdiv,” I muttered to myself.