‘I’m glad for him.’ She turns away from me and lumbers off. ‘You can take that book or leave it.’ I leave it.
At one end of the square, near the traffic lights, a blind accordionist in an undersized jacket sits on a chair. He is a fitful virtuoso with the keys, and his urgent voice from the past is drowned in the traffic noise of the present. I’ve seen him before, once here, another time in Varna, once even with a blind band. He gets around. Right now, he’s singing ‘Exiles’, a poem by the early twentieth-century poet Peyo Yavorov:
And the time will never come
for us to make it back:
an infinity of water and land,
the world will be a dream to us.
One of the booksellers, a man with a tired pony tail, comes up to him. ‘Uncle, I’ll give you one lev to stop singing these dirges. Sing something cheerful.’
The accordionist smiles with a black mouth, as if to say, ‘I can do that, young man, but you are a philistine’, and changes the minor key to major.
At the other end of the square, an old tramp with plastic bags sits on a bench next to two bronze statues, gentlemen with hats and canes. They are the Slaveikov father and son, two of the classic Bulgarian authors on sale here, and they have the avuncular smirk of historic detachment. What do we care? they are saying. We did our best a century ago, and you went and made dog’s breakfast of this country. Idiots. Now you sort it out.
The tramp next to them mutters in agreement as he crumbles some stale bread for the square’s fat pigeons.
Happy news: today is Palm Sunday. Here it’s called Tsvetnitsa, All Flowers’ Day. People with flower-related names celebrate their name day, and since Kapka means a drop of water, I decide to join them from the more marginal ranks of dew-related names. In the muggy, overcast morning, I head out to Alexander Nevsky Cathedral to watch the festivities.
Several hundred people crowd in the giant gold-domed cathedral underneath enormous crystal chandeliers, while a choir chants mellifluously from the balcony above. The overfed priests in gilded robes, led by a goggle-eyed patriarch, swing incense and chant ‘Boje pomiluy’ from atop their luscious beards. ‘Boje pomiluy boje pomiluy boje pomiluy.’ God save us. Several women with used-up faces and nervous systems wipe quiet tears.
Everybody carries or wears branches and flowers, and the enterprising Gypsies outside are doing a roaring trade with all things green. A bunch of Gypsy kids follow me, and ask what’s inside my camera. You, I say, and they collapse into giggles. An old beggar with a long white beard and rags wrapped around his feet is doing an impersonation of a nineteenth-century Russian serf, and small coins fall into his tin from generous festive hands. He mutters something about Judgement Day. I adorn myself with a laurel wreath and take a walk along the yellow tiles of central Sofia disguised as a mad bacchanalian, eyes running with hay fever.
The antiquarians outside Alexander Nevsky are selling painted icons, Soviet-era memorabilia, matrioshka dolls, wild animals skins, wind-up watches, German antique cameras, silver filigree jewellery, Baltic amber necklaces, fur hats, Socialist militia hats, leather cowboy hats, feathered hats for art deco damsels, photographs of smiling black and white people, gramophones from the thirties, and small busts of Lenin.
Behind me is the deafening gong of Alexander Nevsky’s festive bells, all 100 tons of them. Before me is the glittering new Grand Hotel Sofia, and across, the former King’s Palace. And between them is the empty space where the mausoleum of the Great Leader Georgi Dimitriov stood before it was blown up in 1999. Three generations of bewildered school kids passed through the marble catacomb and gazed at the moustachioed mummy lying inside, wondering, like me, if he was plastic. It turns out that sometimes he was.
Every year and a half, the Great Leader would be lowered into an underground laboratory, where he was re-embalmed by a team of experts trained by Soviet colleagues already experienced with Lenin. The Great Leader’s gutted body took a bath in 300 litres of embalming fluid, was stuffed with fluid-soaked towels, and dressed in a new suit made by his personal tailor. Meanwhile, a plaster dummy was displayed in the cabinet upstairs while the lights were tested. Who knows – and who cares – whether I saw the mummy or the mummy’s dummy.
By 1999, when the mausoleum was dynamited by the army, it had had an eventful series of second lives: as an opera prop for Aida, a shelter for drifters, squatters and junkies, a public toilet, and a giant graffiti board. As the mausoleum was prepared for destruction, two astonishing things were revealed.
One, the mausoleum was a labyrinth of corridors, passages and underground shelters as sturdy as the Civil Defence bunker we visited at school, complete with surveillance cameras. It had been built by the army to house the entire Politburo in a nuclear emergency. Just how sturdy it was became clear to onlookers when the same army that had built it had to blow it up not twice or thrice, but eight times, over the space of several scorching August days. As the explosions went on, the surrounding streets struck up a cacophonous orchestra of car alarms, a last salute to all those decades in which school kids had worshipped the mummy of a murderer.
Two, before the army came to remove the body in 1999, the scientist in charge of the mummy surreptitiously extracted the Great Leader’s brain. He wanted to test it for mercury, and the forensic analysis suggested that the Stalinist murderer was likely murdered by Stalin himself. The theory goes that Dimitriov was urgently called up to Moscow in 1949, where he was exposed to mercury fumes. He died in Sofia two months later.
But not before thousands of Sofia’s decadent capitalist bourgeoisie, previously known as the middle class, had been executed at swift kangaroo trials with Dimitriov’s blessing. Thousands more were dispossessed and interned in the provinces: 23,399 people, to be precise. When the ban on these families was lifted in 1953, they were free to live wherever they wanted. Except in Sofia, Plovdiv, Burgas, Blagoevgrad and Varna (then called Stalin) or any other city. Or anywhere near the borders with Greece and Yugoslavia. This ruled out most places, which was the idea. The lucky ones were allowed to stay in their own homes, which were no longer theirs but the State’s, and pay rent to the State. The luckiest ones were allowed to occupy a single room in their own house, for free, and share the rest with strangers who paid rent to the State.
Could Stalin have killed his protégé Dimitriov for being too soft on enemies of the people? Easily: Dimitrov was just a small squiggle in the grand Stalinist design. And since the Bulgarian State couldn’t investigate its big brother at the time, the awkward question was suspended for fifty years.
Meanwhile, it’s lunchtime, and across the yellow-tiled square outside the Presidency the guard is changing. Two uniformed guards ceremonially march away from the gilded gates, and two fresh new guards march in. I walk past them and look at the four faces squeaky with youth. They were born around the time when East Berliners were pushing their way through the Wall.
For them, Sofia has always been like this: the café over there outside the archaeological museum, charming with ivy and Roman ruins; the gleaming, anatomically explicit, gold and bronze statue of Sofia with a crown bearing the city’s motto ‘She grows, but never ages’; the glamorous shopping arcade opposite. It is still called Central Universal Store but it’s unrecognizable from the store of the children’s red boot stampede. I go in.
It’s a glittering, air-conditioned, clinically tidy emporium with an escalator snaking up its middle. The girls at the perfume stands offer me the latest Givenchy with toothpaste smiles. Upstairs, in the spot where my sister had put on those miraculous red boots, a shop sells sophisticated natural cosmetics: perfumes in large glass bottles; natural sponges built into translucent soap bars. I buy a bar of soap with rose petals trapped inside. The fragrant shop assistant offers to gift-wrap it. I’m the only customer. When I step outside, I glance back at the Party HQ. The red star and the portraits of Lenin and Georgi Dimitriov are long gone, of course, but the building still looks sinister. I’m not the only one to think so, beca
use for years it’s been empty. They can’t decide what to do with it. Personally, I see a large red KFC sign at the top…
I head for the plump-naved St Nedelya Church to check out the action on Palm Sunday. Among much chanting and swinging of censers, a displeased one-year-old girl in a silk white dress is baptized by bearded priests. Everybody in the baptism party is wearing their finest clothes today, 16 April. But they are glum and sombre with their candles, and they may as well be holding a funeral.
The sixteenth of April is a memorable day. On this date in 1925, a bomb went off right here, in the biggest terrorist attack in the country’s history. Six hundred souls were gathered in the church for the funeral service of a general assassinated two days earlier by a Communist terrorist. The assassination had been only a pretext for the real attack, which targeted the government of Tsar Boris III. The Tsar himself was away that day, attending the funerals of those who had died in the latest attempt on his life, ironic for a man who refused to sign death sentences as the constitution required of him. But the bomb went off anyway, and the collapsed domes of the church buried 150 people, not one of whom was a government minister.
The priest is now sprinkling the ever-more displeased baby with a gilded cross dipped in holy water. And now exit the baby, the priests, and the candle-carrying believers. I straighten my laurel headdress and follow them out. I’m off to the Synagogue for a change of scene.
The Synagogue gate is locked, and when I buzz the bell, a middle-aged guard opens it. ‘We always lock it, you know how it is these days.’ He’s glad to have company in his solitary kiosk. On the little table is a notebook in which he has scribbled Hebrew words with Bulgarian translations.
‘I’m not Jewish,’ he catches my glance, ‘but I meet so many Jews that I became interested in their culture and thought I’d learn some Hebrew to pass the time. They come from everywhere, you know, America, Australia, Israel. Some tell me incredible stories. Some grew up here. They say they’ll always be grateful to their fellow Bulgarians, even if they can’t speak Bulgarian any more.’
‘So why did they leave?’
‘Ah, well, because they could. Israel was a better place to live than Bulgaria in the sixties and seventies, wasn’t it? And maybe even in the eighties and nineties…’
He buzzes in another visitor: a dazed-looking Italian with a cloud of frizzy hair. The Italian stops dead in his tracks and points at my wreath. He speaks Italian only. The guard and I manage to explain in a mixture of pidgin Italian and English that this is a pagan Bulgarian festival. When the guard gives him a kippah to wear inside the Synagogue, he seems surprised and questions it with wild gestures. ‘For respect,’ says the guard in English. The Italian shrugs and stumbles into the Synagogue. Inside, we discover – or I do anyway – that the century-old Synagogue has been wrenched out of disrepair with donations from Jewish foundations, mainly in Israel. The largest Sephardic synagogue in the Balkans is splendid, and splendidly empty.
The Jews – the 2,500 who remain in Sofia – are fairly invisible. It was partly this invisibility and lack of enviable financial success that made them indistinguishable from their average struggling countryman, and meant that when anti-Semitic propaganda infected Europe in the 1920s and ’30s, Bulgaria remained largely immune. After all, Bulgarians had plenty to worry about, for example recovering from the First World War, during which they fought on the losing side at the cost of nearly two hundred thousand lives. As well as coping with Macedonian terrorists, Communist terrorists, and the police terror of the tsarist government. Really, Bulgaria was psychologically booked up far in advance, there was no room for anything more.
So when the rest of Europe was dispatching its Jews to the trains, and Hitler was putting pressure on the government of Tsar Boris III to join in, city Jews were displaced to the countryside and forced to wear the Star of David while doing heavy labour on roads and railways. But when the trains and boats were prepared, public figures and ordinary people stood up against the deportation.
In a curious triple stroke of ignorance, self-deprecation, and Semitic apathy, Bulgarians don’t celebrate – or often even know – the fact that all 58,000 Jews in the country were saved thanks to letters and public speeches from progressive and sometimes Communist politicians. The Metropolitan of Plovdiv vowed personally to lie on the rails if the trains left. And so the trains of the Holocaust never departed, although it was a close brush. Later on, the trains of emigration did depart, leaving behind only 16,000 Jews.
The dazed Italian and I walk to the Hali market together. Our language barrier is too great to explain ourselves to the other, but I manage to establish that he is from Bologna and he’s here on a three-day holiday. What makes an Italian from Bologna come to Sofia for a three-day holiday? He shrugs his shoulders, as though he’s surprised to be here himself. What else should he see? I point to the big blue mountain looming over the city. Vitosha, I say. ‘Vitosha,’ he memorizes. He kisses my hand with a florid gesture, and extracts from his trouser pocket the kippah he has nicked from the Synagogue. He waves it at me with an impish wink as he walks away, and I wish I could speak Italian. Now I’ll never know whether he’s newly released from a psychiatric ward, won a trip for two to Sofia but had no one to take along, or wants to invest in property.
The neo-Byzantine Hali is a covered market that sells Greek olives, oriental pastries, Bulgarian honey by the vat, German delicatessen items, Italian clothes made in Turkey and Greece, domestic appliances made in Spain… It’s clean and tidy like the Central Universal Store, and not nearly as smelly and exciting as it was in its early days in the 1900s. Nobody is shouting or proudly slapping the carcasses hung from hooks. The butcher used to hack off the chosen part, then make a finger-sized hole in it. The customer departed with a piece of meat hanging from his index finger, brushing away the flies.
For a taste of good old squalor, I drop in to see the much cheaper Old Wives’ Market behind the Synagogue. There’s no meat, but the mountains of fruit and veg, the string of nargile shops, the sellers gossiping on low stools and eating sunflower seeds is the closest you can get to old Sofia’s oriental vibes.
The mosque of the Baths, Banya Bashi, is just across from the Hali. A Turkish boy wraps me in a green mantle and flicks the hood over my head. I rejoice in my religious promiscuity. Inside the carpeted mosque, a single man reads the Koran, back against the wall. The mosque is bare and minimal, with the predictable orange and blue Koranic flower motifs. Until the early twentieth century, Sofia was an Ottoman backwater with muddy streets, oriental markets, and dozens of mosques, but Banya Bashi is the only surviving memento of those times.
Outside, a well fed, middle-aged Arab addresses me in Bulgarian. He looks familiar. Then I remember.
‘You are Abdel,’ I say.
‘Yes, Abdel. How do you know?’
I know his name because I met him here two years ago. He came from beneath the oak shade to chat to me outside the mosque. He told me he was Palestinian, but had a Bulgarian wife, a Bulgarian passport and a Bulgarian business – ‘import-export’ – here in Sofia, which wasn’t doing so well. He was thinking of leaving, for Switzerland or Italy.
But now he doesn’t remember me.
‘How’s your business going?’ I ask.
‘Business is OK. Better with European Union now.’
‘And you’re still living here…’
‘Ah, still living here. I love Sofia too much. But maybe I go Switzerland, Italy…’
‘Abdel,’ I say. It’s a long shot, but it’s worth trying. ‘Do you know a man called Fadhel? Algerian. Must be about your age now.’
‘Fadhel? How he looks?’
‘He looks… good. With glasses.’
He blinks.
‘I know Fadhel in Lyon.’ Abdel looks at me. ‘With glasses. He have three childrens. He live in Sofia before. You know him?’
It must be him. How many bespectacled Fadhels from Algeria have lived in Sofia?
‘But he not looki
ng so good.’ Abdel mimics a paunch bigger than his own. ‘I looking better.’ He laughs and pretends to smooth his thin grey hair. Then he points at my wreath. ‘All Flowers Day,’ he declares, and shakes my hand. The conversation is terminated, and he returns to his job as a full-time dweller in the oak shade of the mosque. I walk away in a daze, my delicate memory of Fadhel dislodged collectively by the paunch of an Arab in Lyon, three teenage kids, and a wife with a covered head.
A mellifluous chant distracts me from these thoughts. Actually, it’s two chants. The muezzin is calling for prayer, and someone else is calling from loudspeakers behind the Sheraton Hotel across the road.
I peek into the excavated courtyard where some of Sofia’s Roman life lies scattered about. The voices of angels are coming out of the pink-hued St George Rotunda. It’s evening vespers. I walk down a white-tiled street towards the church, the only remaining street from Serdica, the Roman city that stood here.
They found Roman Sofia in the 1950s, when the authorities decided to remove the old heart of the city, with its narrow streets and bazaars, and erect a brave new centre in its place. This would have giant modern buildings, like the Party HQ and the Central Universal Store, which was built on the site of a flea-market and a popular Bohemian hang-out, the Armenian Café.
The only building they spared was the Mineral Baths, with its medicinal healing waters. In the course of the digging, the workmen hit a mineral water spring which burst onto Vitosha Street and flooded it. It was the middle of winter, and all along the city’s main artery, the Gypsies of Sofia removed their shoes, rolled up their trousers, and paddled in the warm water.
The St George Rotunda is not quite as old as the Roman ruins – it’s from the sixth century. In the sixteenth century, the Turks under Sultan Selim painted over the Christian saints and angels with flowers, and called it the Rose Mosque. Three centuries later, the Bulgarians stripped the Koranic motifs to reveal the saints and angels again. The result is a piece of layered time-art.
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