Sofia City Break by Simon Heptinstall
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Kempinski Hotel Grand Arena Bansko
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“And here,” gestured the guide, “is the historic church of St. Petra.” Excuse me? I stared open-mouthed at the elevated concrete intersection of two of the Bulgarian capital’s biggest and busiest roads.
“This church was built in the 14th century…” she began, shouting above the noise of Sophia’s trams, lorries and Ladas. I blinked with incomprehension. Finally, as her well-practised voice slipped into full Russian-trained automaton drone, I actually spotted St Peter’s. The merest teat of a dome was indeed protruding… right between the carriageways.
This Romanesque church, famous for its medieval frescoes, is encased to within a few feet of its terracotta roof by fly-overs. One of Bulgaria’s most celebrated churches is buried under the junction.
Down steps beneath the traffic I found the church walls disappearing up into the stanchions of the road system. In the vibrating darkness you can just make out 500-year-old patchy portraits on the walls. There is a sunken plaza with souvenir icon shops in a busy adjoining underpass. The subway walls have even incorporated some of the city’s Roman remains, permanently floodlit in their new subterranean home.
The Bulgarian capital, I was discovering, does have treasures, but like poor old St Peter’s, many are buried, either literally or metaphorically.
At first, it’s hard to think of a European capital with fewer sights. There are a few more churches, plenty of Stalinist office blocks and a couple of parks. The Lonely Planet Guide covers Sophia’s “Things to See and Do” in just two pages… And that includes the map. Yet this little-known and seriously unvisited city is now offering city breaks as its newly privatised tourist industry tries to make up for lost time. But in lieu of any castles, theme parks, acclaimed galleries, pretty old streets or a chic restaurant district, why would anyone go there?
The closest thing to an attraction and the image most likely to fill the Sophia page of any brochure is Aleksander Nevski church – a multiple-domed Orthodox church. The different strands of Bulgarian history are cemented together in its structure. It was built at the start of this century to commemorate the successful war of liberation against the Turks in 1878, the domes were gold-plated by Bulgaria’s Soviet overlords in the sixties and it still houses the empty thrones of the deposed Bulgarian royal family.
Through the Communist era the church stood as the city’s prime monument to Bulgarian national identity. No wonder locals lower their voices in hushed reverence when they speak of their city centre cathedral. “It’s the biggest and most beautiful church in all the Balkans,” a middle-aged woman told me full of patriotic exaggeration. The vast pew-less interior has an exotic atmosphere of dark, smelly, eastern Christianity.
On my first visit, that alien ambience was shattered by a badge-wearing church jobsworth – surely a former Party petty bureaucrat – bellowing across the echoing expanse at an old woman who had not paid the correct 6p donation to light a candle. Between the icons, frescoes and thrones of onyx, the church holds 5,000 worshippers. When I returned to experience such a football-sized service it had been mysteriously cancelled. Outside, a gang of Romany beggars were so irritatingly persistent they nearly pulled my jacket off by tugging the sleeve.
It was only on a third visit, after dark, that Aleksander Nevski looked its inspiring best. Its wide, windy square was silent - no beggars, no traffic – and the floodlit domes beamed like half moons against the night sky. The rest of Sophia’s centre is a grid of monumental boulevards lined by severe Communist architecture recalling massed May Day goose-stepping.
Unfortunately the interesting extremes of the Soviet era were destroyed in the zeal to forget the past – all Lenin statues, the mausoleum of the founder of the Bulgarian People’s Republic and the giant Red Star that used to top the Party HQ have been demolished. All that’s left are the dull concrete bits.
After some hunting, I found the city’s oldest church, St George’s, containing 1,500 year-old murals. The little rotunda is closely framed by a monstrous square of dour Stalinist office blocks, like a delicate trinket kept in an industrial tool box.
For those who miss the good old days of missile parades and quotes from Trotsky, the three-star Grand Hotel Bulgaria offers an accurate time-traveller’s experience. When I asked to change my smelly, cold and noisy room with its home-made chipboard door and brown plastic bathroom suite, I was told by a robotic receptionist: “This is not possible”.
Unlike its neighbours in the former eastern block, the Bulgarian state is relaxing its grip slowly. 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.
It took me two nights to find a bar for a simple beer. Admittedly I didn’t try the Presidencia with its “no guns” sign where an Italian was killed in a mafia shoot out. The Whisky Club turned me away because “you’ve got the wrong shoes on”. The posse of heavies at the Karamba was less imaginatively unwelcoming. They stared above my head and announced: “We’re full to the end.”
The next night a young Bulgarian woman recommended Biblioteka bar under the library. She said rather mysteriously: “It was most popular with Canadian Mounted Police serving in Kosovo”. Anyway, it has two bars. In one, top local band Dragon performed on a central podium with girl dancers in red satin hot pants. In the other, a beer was £2, four times the normal price. Giggly teenagers monopolised the karaoke machine at one end. I didn’t spot any Mounties.
I had better success eating out. ‘Behind the Alley, Beyond the Cupboard’ is a rare 19th-century house in a backstreet, converted to a chic restaurant. On a shelf in the toilets an old Bakelite valve radio was tuned into a crackly big band station. The £5 bill was hefty by local standards but I ate veal in lemon sauce and drank wonderful local red wine under lemon trees outside.
The James-Bond-1972-style of the Kempinski restaurant – the top floor of a suburban tower block – was more in keeping with the rest of Sophia. The meal was traditionally Bulgarian: starting with a glass of rakiya brandy and salad, then an endless sequence of various meats. When I went downstairs looking for the gents I found a small room full of bored prostitutes waiting for business.
That post-communist black market world is everywhere. Godfather figures cruise around in new Mercedes. Their footsoldiers are gangs of short-haired heavies in leather bomber jackets known locally as “the wrestlers” because they usually are former steroid-constructed, state-funded sportsmen forced to switch to new employers.
A friendly non-wrestler called Stephan said: “They’re not a problem, we laugh about them.” They didn’t seem very funny to me, especially the ones who barged into the club I’d just been told was full. Or the Serbian paramilitaries out for a night on the razzle just an hour’s drive from their border.
At least the wrestlers’ girlfriends are entertaining, simultaneously sporting the world’s shortest miniskirts and highest heels. Jordanka, a middle-aged Sophia mum in a huge crimson dress with shoulder pads, told me her daughter dressed in the extraordinarily tarty way too. “Bulgarian girls all want to look like the Spice Girls,” she said sadly.
Sophia’s black market means street stalls sell perfect pirate copies of pop CDs – highly illegal but infuriatingly tempting at £2 each. But this crime-plagued society also means Maden, the driver for a guided city tour, carries a baseball bat under the seat of his minibus, “just in case”.
Most British people’s experience of Bulgaria is as a “can’t afford anything else” ski destination or beach-potato holiday in one of the purpose built Black Sea resorts. Will the Sophia choice add to the country’s appeal?
Despite the lack of major sights this cheap and sunny little city left me with some happy memories: the gaggles of old men playing chess round a city centre fountain, the restaurant that proudly maintains a thirties telephone once used by the king in special cubicle and the shambolic hourly changing of the guard at the President’s palace. I’ll never forget the stork’s nests built on top of streetlights or the matronly receptionist at the city’s top hotel, the Sheraton. When I asked her for a rate card, she looked me up and down and bizarrely barked: “You want to stay here? I’ll send a letter to your wife!” But stack Sophia up against neighbouring capitals, like Istanbul or Athens, and its lack of attractions rings out painfully. In the European league table of exciting short-break destinations Bulgaria is currently down there in the relegation zone with Albania and Moldova.
The rest of Bulgaria does have icon-filled monasteries, classical ruins and pretty countryside. Trips out of town, however, are difficult. You’ll need to read the Cyrillic alphabet to negotiate public transport or road signs, and few people speak English or are used to dealing with tourists.
My five-mile taxi ride to the beautiful little Boyana monastery in the foothills of Mount Vitosha demonstrated the difficulties. The driver was large, scary and charged me £10 for what locals pay £2. The ivy-covered monastery was locked, and I eventually found the woman with the key hiding, crouched behind her kiosk drinking coffee. Inside, scaffolding obscured much of the interior… but thankfully not the images I’d gone to see.
Boyana houses Europe’s first ever portrait paintings, dated at 1259. The delicately realistic murals of patrons and royalty beat Giotto, Italy’s so-called father of the Renaissance, to that important first artistic hurdle by 50 years.
Like the submerged church of St Petra, Bulgaria’s tourist treasures are usually in there somewhere… but it can be darned hard work finding them.