Of its people

Like many less-traveled lands, guides to Bulgaria are sparse and/or out-of-date. In his introduction to the excellent 1998 Blue Guide, Pettifer sites as precursors only the French 1993 Guide Bleu and “Frank Fox's pioneering, Bulgaria of 1909.”

As the sole author of the Blue Guide, John Pettifer is a historically thorough, extraordinarily opinionated, and chatty guide – in person perhaps an older gentlemen whose tastes run more towards academic and late nigts at casinos than tramping about Bulgaria's countryside. Pettifer, offers the following wisdoms (so that you might know the country, its people):

On Public Toilets
"Conditions vary from the adequate to the truly Ottoman."

On Nightlife and Relationships (oddly grouped)
"In family and heterosexual relationships, Bulgarians are generally broad minded, moderately hedonistic and tolerant." (Though Pettifer offers useful hints here on where to find prostitutes, conduct homosexual relations and, a little further on, find excellent pot: “Cannabis is becoming widely smoked by young people, and is easy to buy in most towns.”)

An indicator of just how sceptically the average Bulgarian holds the Roma (gypsies), this from a recent article in the paper:
Roma accused of inserting watermelons with horse pee in order to redden flesh.
(Of all things to accuse a group of.)

C - in Koprishtitsa, who had v. red watermellon for breakfast

On menu

For the most part (and depending on quantity of items ordered) Bulgarian food is intensely fresh and wholesome. I'd hazard that Bulgarians consume more fresh vegetables per capita than any other nation.

Lots of beefy red tomatos, cucumbers, feta cheese in enormous blocks, (famous) Bulgarian yogurt atop everything, enormous peaches that break into perfect halves...

As in America, the cheaper the reastaurant, the more pages in the menu. Here, the menus of more traditional places run to book-size - bound folios of 20 salad varieties, pork in many guises and the latter half of listings devoted to alcohol.

These items from a recent meal's menu:
Chicken leg in Monastery way in a pot (6 lev.)
Lamb in Gergyovski's Way (9 lev)
Cutlet in Viennese way
Hodge-Podge (mistranslated from “Mish-Mash”)
Monastery sheep yogurt (in a pot for souvenir) (3 lev)
Cheese in shop's way

Even R could not define all the "ways" but admired the specifications.

Emerging Bulgaria

Returning from charming village #x, drink/dine for less than the cost of a Starbucks coffee, museums so piled high with gold and treasures they almost dull the senses, and speculate on buying farmhouses for less than $20,000, R and I circle back, in conversations, to speculate on why this land's so little known.

Discussing with R's friend's over beers, they offer the following theories:

Hurt by the British association with Great Uncle Bulgaria, star of the popular children's series, the Wombles.

Princess Diana's apparently infamous quote that, when depressed she felt, “lower than a cockroach in Bulgaria."


Ambiguous gender status of Bulgaria's most famous exports – wrestlers. Not helped by Bulgaria's representative team that marched the circle at the most recent Olympics – dour, beefy and genderless to a one.

And, of course, it has a funny name.


I foresee big things. The little land that roared...


C

Koprivshtitsa: all the pretty houses

A breathing town of horse carts and old fellows gathered to breakfast on beers. Also happens to be a well-preserved oasis of cobbled streets and historic houses (of poets, revolutionaries, painters).

In Oleskov's House, a tax collector and (therefore) one of the town's wealthiest, the interiors were intact, down to the dancing lady of the house.

The women's room - alotted to gossip and spinning, the men's kitted with tea trays and caraffes. Communal rooms (mostly gender neutral) fitted with long couches, carpets layered over broad plank pine floors and linen curtains. Walls are painted in deep shades of red, ochre and royal blue and trimmed in chalky white frames. The ceilings are carved wood.

Alpine-Balkan, if I had to name.

Would I live in Koprivshtitsa?

A town the size of a matchbox where winter lasts 9 months?

In a bulgarian second.



C

Monks and monasteries

Seems there's more than a casual link between the countries I've chosen for visits this year.

Won't question the why, but monasteries are emerging as a strong motif. Bulgaria's run through with fantastic ones, well preserved and still active atop mountain perches (the better to hide from the Turks). And, Sikkim's are remote bastions of an earlier time.

Sikkim's monasteries slightly edging out Bulgaria's monk-wise. Bulgaria's monks = severe older gentlemen with long, whispy beards, souffle-hat to frock-covered toe in black.

Sikkims monks = largely smiling gentlemen in bright crimsons and yellows. And, NOVICE monks. (Haven't yet seen any cute black-robed lads here).

This one's the spectacular Rila Monastery, 2 hours via sporadically good roads from Sofia - past shepherds (have the Chilov family on high-alert spotting them), clusters of gypsies (now called Roma - PC), red roof-ed villages.

Pretty as a Bulgarian picture postcard.

Too easy to fall back on tattered-touristic metaphor of the old co-existing beside the new but, really, that's what we've got going on here.

I'm on WiFi, drinking tiny espresso, Barry White soothing brunch crowd puffing away around me. On the steps of the Alexander Nevsky Church a block away, the stooped and kerchiefed Roma ladies arrive by horse cart to sell flowers.

Bulgaria's going for it. Don't be the last on your block to visit.

C

Cardboard cars

Just another of our favorite things about Bulgaria.

Efficiently built, still running (albeit in the far right lane), cardboard cars (from East Germany). R reminded me there's a sequence that runs through Black Cat, White Cat: cows, roadside, steadily disemembering and consuming a Trebant as the film unfolds.

Hope to report much more soon - have seen (and photographed) so much that updates have fallen behind the Bulgaria-experience. (Plus, there will always be time to write.)

C in Bulgaria.

(Photo is of R in Plovdiv's Historic Old Town)

The little-known country that, according to my brusquely authoratative Blue Guide, would be on everyone's lips if only Lord Byron had choosen to write about it.

Of bears, Balkans and decorated twigs

A contact in Sofia sent me the website of Sofia's "TimeOut" equivalent. It's absolutely excellent, thorough, snappy.

But my favorite page lists the city's Exhibitions.

From which comes these two jewels, now topping our to-do's when R and I visit at month's end.

At the National Gallery of Fine Arts:
Art objects caught at the bulgarian customs
from 6 December (fri) until 31 May (wed)

And over at the National Museum of Natural History, just below the usual suspects of the permanent collection (minerals, rare crystals, insects, birds, amphibians, mammals, corals, herbs), this highlight:

Stuffed Brown Carpathian Bear
from 1 January (sat) until 31 January (tue)

The Bulgarian word for today requires two definitions:

Survakar: Boy who goes from house to house
wishing people a happy new year
by hitting them on the back with a survaknitsa.

Suvaknitsa: Decorated twig borne by a survakar.

Of course.

Bulgaria's won my heart.

C

Bulgaria or bust

"Creative Nation"

Blog woes continue - Blogger's not interested in my formatting issues so for archive/profile infrormation, to scroll way down.

In meantime, soldiering on with posts.

Photo above c/o R who's been diligently bugging Bulgarin-based contacts to help me with my travel article pitches.

Scenario:
I spend the day trolling about Bulgarian travel sites, deciphering Cyrillic to the extent I can determine a site's usefullness, mining my few Bulgarian travel guides.

Throughout day, with a concentrated flutter at the very end, I skype/email R with my latest finds.

R pesters friends (ostensibly on vacation, like the rest of Europe):
"Courtney's found X-hotel in X, is there anything similiar/newer/more newsworthy in Y?

And so it goes...
Got one live pitch out tonight. Will regroup tomorrow and work on more.

Bulgarian Word of the day:
Bashibazouks: Murderous bands of pomaks and Turks, employed to punish rebellions against th Ottoman Empire. Essentially, Turkish mercenaries...



Balkan-on-the-brain, c

Thracian Gold

Speedy becoming the Bulgaria blog.

But this is beautiful.

A Bulgarian archeologist shows a golden wreath of laurels, discovered late Saturday by his team while working working on excavations near the village of Zlatinitsa, some 290 kilometers (180 miles) east of the capital, Sofia Sunday, July 24, 2005. Archaeologists have unearthed a 2,400-year old golden treasure in an ancient Thracian tomb in eastern Bulgaria. The Thracians lived in what is now Bulgaria and parts of modern Greece, Romania, Macedonia and Turkey from 4,000 B.C. to the 8th century A.D., when they were assimilated by the invading Slavs.

It will be on display at the National Museum (Sofia) when we're there.

C