The air temperature was well below freezing, but my body started to warm up after a few miles of walking. I started to ease into the rhythm of the streets. I passed dozens of coffee shops and bars which were of course closed, but they comforted me with their mere presence, telling me Bulgarians are just like everyone else, they like to hang out together and drink and eat and gossip. Paranoia began to relax its grip on my mind and I realized the streets weren’t empty because Bulgarians were a cold and inhospitable people, the streets were just empty because it was dark and early on a January morning.
I reached one of the main downtown squares about 7:00 am. The sky was getting light and the city was beginning to wake up. I was relieved to see people appearing on the streets, commuters going to work just like they do in cities around the world.
Around 8:00 am I started to think of crashing at my hostel, but then I remembered it was just 8:00 am. The hostel owners were probably just getting out of bed, and the current occupants of my future room were probably still sleeping. It was definitely too early to show up at the front desk saying, “Wow, long day, I sure could use a hot shower, a nice dinner, and a comfy bed.”
So I kept walking, heading east away from the hostel but towards the blinding light of the rising sun. That’s when the beauty of Sofia, the texture of Sofia, started to reveal itself to me. Sofia is practically littered with monuments. Some of those monuments are towering Soviet monsters left over from the communist era, huge bronze dioramas of soldiers and workers courageously leading society forward into the future.
But Sofia has another type of monument, smaller monuments that have been plopped down in the middle of traffic circles or tucked away into tiny parks. These monuments are often just plaques or small busts. They honor Bulgarian freedom fighters who fought against the Ottoman Empire in the 1860s and the 1870s.
These monuments were allowed to stand through the Cold War years because the Russians had supported the Balkan independence movements when the region’s countries were struggling to break free of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. Russia was not backing these independence movements out of the goodness of its own heart. Russia was backing them because it and Turkey had been rivals for hundreds of years, and the enemy of your enemy is your friend.
They are monuments to men like Vasil Levski, a national hero in Bulgaria who sought to organize the Bulgarian independence movement and establish a Bulgarian nation free of the Ottoman Empire. Levski was captured by the Ottoman authorities and executed in Sofia in 1873, but he became a source of inspiration for Bulgarian separatists.
In Turkey I had heard no end of the Turkish side of the empire story, which goes something like this: the Ottoman Empire was one of peace, love, and tolerance. Everyone was happy to be part of the Ottoman Empire, because they were free to practice their own religion and live their own way of life. Life under the Ottoman Empire was exactly like life before it, except sunnier.
…
[This is an excerpt from the chapter “Escape to Bulgaria” in A Tight Wide-open Space.]