Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
21. Sofia
I was looking forward to Bulgaria. It had been easily the most interesting, if not the most comfortable, of
the places Katz and I had visited.
I remembered Sofia as being a city of broad boulevards so empty of traffic that people walked down
the middle of them, stepping aside only to make room for the occasional black Zill limousine carrying Party
functionaries to some dark, Orwellian ministry or other. I have never been in a more timeless city. It could
have been any time in the last forty or fifty years. There were simply no clues to suggest what decade it was;
the shape of the few cars on the road, the clothes people wore, the looks of the shops and buildings were all
curiously uninformed by fashion.
Sofia had a dark and enormous department store called TSUM, at least as big as Selfridges in
London, spread over five floors and containing not a single product that appeared to have been produced
more recently than 1938 - chunky Bakelite radios, big stubby black fountain pens that looked like
something Lord Grade would try to smoke, steam-powered washing machines, that sort of thing. I
remember standing in the television and radio department in a crowd of people watching some historical
drama in which two actors wearing beards that were hooked over their ears sat talking in a study, the walls
of which were clearly painted on canvas. The television had - no exaggeration - a four-inch circular black
and white screen and
this
was attracting a crowd.
I spent almost a whole day in TSUM, wandering in amazement, not just because the products were so
wondrously old-fashioned but because whole families visited it as if it were some sort of marvellous
museum of science and technology. I hoped things hadn't changed.
I arrived at Sofia Airport a little after nine. The foreign-exchange office was closed and, as you cannot
get Bulgarian money outside of the country, I was effectively penniless. I woke a sleeping cab driver outside
the front entrance and asked him if he would take me into the city for dollars. This is illegal, and I had visions
of him reporting me to two guys in trench coats, but he was only too pleased to get his hands on hard
currency and took me the nine miles into the city for $10. The cab, an ancient Moskvich, was propelled by a
series of smoky blue explosions from the exhaust. It would move ten feet, pause and then lurch another ten
feet with the aid of a fresh explosion. We were almost the only car on the streets.
He dropped me at the Sheraton on Lenin Square, quite the grandest hotel I had stayed in on this trip,
but I had been told that it was the
only
place to stay in Sofia. Until a couple of years earlier it had been the
Hotel Balkan, but then Sheraton took it over and the company has done a consummate job of renovating it. It
was all shiny marble and plush sofas. I was impressed.
The girl at the check-in desk explained the hard currency system in operation at the hotel, which was
very confusing. Some of the hotel's restaurants, bars and shops accepted only hard currency and some
accepted only Bulgarian leva and some accepted both. I didn't really take any of it in.
I went straight out for a walk, eager to see the town. I was delighted to find that I remembered so much
of it. There across the square was the big statue of Lenin. Facing it was TSUM, as vast as I remembered it
and still clearly in business, and around the corner was the Place 9 Septemvri, a boulevard paved in golden
bricks and dominated by the massive headquarters of the Communist Party, soon to be sacked by a mob
and nearly burned down. I walked down it now and plunged off into the dark and narrow streets of the
downtown.
Sofia must be one of the darkest cities in the world. Only the occasional lightning flashes of a tram at
the far end of a street revealed the full outlines of the buildings. For the rest there were just weak pools of
light beneath the well-spaced lampposts and a little seepage of illumination from the few bars and
restaurants that were still open and doing, without exception, a desultory business. Almost every shop
window was dark. None the less the streets were crowded with people, many of them evidently having just
concluded a night out and now standing in the road trying to flag down the few cabs that flew past.
I made a lazy circuit of the downtown and emerged in front of TSUM. The goods in the darkened
windows looked to be distinctly more up to date than on my previous visit, but at least it was still in business.
This, I decided, would be my first port of call in the morning.
