Bulgaria: Surprise Package

Views on BG | November 25, 2007, Sunday // 00:00

By Ian Robert Smith
The Australian

My first view of Plovdiv, Bulgaria's second largest and some say most beautiful city, is the ring of communist-era high-rises that surrounds it. From a distance, the bland, featureless towers look almost futuristic as they loom across the Thracian Plain.

I press my face to the train window, trying to grasp what I'm seeing as, imperceptibly, the train slips between these ramparts and, with an inexplicable Balkan magic, pulls in at an elegant little station milling with people.

Small and unheralded, with a particularly bloody history dominated by 500 years of Ottoman Turkish occupation and almost a half century of standard-issue communism, Bulgaria is the sort of place people tend to overlook. I have come here on a whim, drawn by its obscurity and by the rumour of mountains and monasteries and medieval kingdoms that rivalled Byzantium.

Already the journey has yielded many pleasures. Dawn broke across the great plain of Thrace in a wash of magentas and yellows, revealing the minarets of Turkish Edirne, ancient Adrianople, shimmering in a pearly eastern distance. Trundling northward across the plain, we passed fields of maize and sunflowers, their golden heads waving in the breeze. I saw ragged villages and relics of communist industry that suddenly erupted, like glimpses of hell, on the landscape.

Now, walking in Plovdiv's streets, I feel alive to every sensation. Sunlight filtering through plane trees dapples the pavement. Bulgaria's arcane Cyrillic script, product of its early medieval conversion to Orthodox Christianity, hails me from shopfronts and street signs. I breathe deeply, inhaling the frontier-town ambience.

Plovdiv's location at the bottom of Europe, en route to Asia, has made it a fascinating blend of trade emporium and bastion against the barbarian east. The talented but argumentative Thracians were just the first in a long line of interlopers that included Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines and the overstaying Ottomans. Plovdiv was sacked by Huns and torched by Goths. It saw crusading armies stream past, bound for the Holy Land. Byzantine Plovdiv was a thicket of religious heresies, the pervasive Manicheanism foremost among them. Towards the end of the long Ottoman night, the city spawned a class of wealthy Christian merchants who built opulent townhouses that remain unrivalled in the Balkans for architectural splendour.

The merchants became wealthy supplying the Ottomans with items such as cloth and foodstuffs. Their wealth sponsored many of the developments that would lead to Bulgaria's 19th-century cultural revival, essentially a reaction to a half millennium of deadening occupation. Today old Plovdiv, as their former quarter is known, forms the picturesque and maze-like heart of the modern city.

My first impression on entering old Plovdiv is of a madman let loose with a box of paints. The houses are characterised by intricate facades painted bright pastel colours. More remarkable still are their tiers of upper-storey oriels: soaring box-like structures that, borne aloft by timber beams and graced by elegant bay windows, open like cantilevers above steeply tilted cobbled streets.

The original intention was to maximise ground space, though a desire to impress was obviously intended. The same entrepreneurial spirit informs the interiors, which boast carved timber ceilings, walls painted in trompe l'oeil, gilded mouldings and furniture, and objets d'art from numerous European periods.

One can (and I do) spend days in old Plovdiv, sans map, wandering aimlessly. It is surreal, enchanting and, owing to its complex layout, occasionally bewildering, a fantastic place not yet developed into a tourist cliche. Actually, tourists are refreshingly thin on the ground but there are bars galore and restaurants to which you can repair at the first hint of sensory overload.

The Ethnographic Museum is revivalist architecture at its best, a rambling charcoal-coloured edifice sketched with bold yellow tracery and featuring a dazzling array of windows and a grey timber pediment carved like a kobilitsa or carrying yoke. In the foyer, Hotel California is playing on the radio where the young attendant, fetchingly blonde, looks up from filing her nails to explain that I need not pay now, "afterwards is OK".

The collection is bewildering in its comprehensiveness. I gaze for hours at folk costumes, pottery, icons and amulets, woven rugs, farm and household implements, a primitive-looking device for distilling the rosewater for which Bulgaria is famous.

The house is equally impressive, its splendour reaching near overkill proportions in the grand reception hall with its vast oak ceiling carved into sunbeams and rooftop views from the windows.
The upshot is that afterwards proves to be a good deal later, by which time another, altogether less accommodating guardian is manning the gate and inquires, gruffly, why I didn't pay earlier.

Inevitably, the merchants' houses are not the only attraction here. I regularly visit the little Church of Sts Constantine and Elena, lured by its frescoes and lovely garden setting. Interesting, too, is Plovdiv's fine Roman theatre, built during the reign of Marcus Aurelius and rediscovered in the 1970s during excavations for roadworks; the views from the cafe tables overhead, of the sweeping plain and purple Rhodope mountains, is well worth the (very reasonable) price of a glass of rich, dark-red Mavrud wine.

Outside old Plovdiv, I sample the locals' joie de vivre in the enthusiastic promenade that every evening sweeps up ulitsa Knyaz Aleksandur I, a bustling pedestrian thoroughfare where a preponderance of outdoor cafe tables provide constant temptation. I also climb the wooded Hill of the Liberators, where the views are similarly extensive but whose resident statue of a Soviet soldier, visible from all over the city, recalls the liberator from hell.

Standing beneath Alyosha, as the statue is known, I gaze out at the mountains and decide to visit Bachkovo Monastery, an easy daytrip from Plovdiv. I catch the train to Asenovgrad, gateway to the eastern Rhodopes, where fir and pine-clad slopes rear like walls from the plain and the remains of a medieval fortress, an eagle's eyrie, guards the entrance to the Chepelare Gorge.

The fortress, built by one of Bulgaria's more enterprising tsars, is in poor condition but worth the trip up for the crisp clear air and mountain views. The Rhodopes are perhaps Bulgaria's most evocative range, renowned as the home of the legendary poet Orpheus and the haunt, through the centuries, of guerillas and outlaws. When Bachkovo Monastery was founded in 1083, the remote location was meant to deter intruders and promote salutary thoughts. Nowadays, it's still off the beaten track.

The monastery lies well down the valley, on the banks of the Chepelare River. Its approach -- flanked by restaurants and lined by stalls selling everything from local yoghurt and honey to handicrafts and animal pelts -- has the colourful vigour of a medieval fair.

Within its stout walls, I find myself in an atmospheric courtyard surrounded by wooden galleries and adorned with trees and fountains and, prominent in the centre, a weathered stone church dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Mountains loom overhead. There is a perpetual sound of running water.

The cloistered ambience recalls the monastery's role, throughout the Ottoman period, as a bastion of Bulgarian traditions and culture. Most obviously this takes the form of magnificent art. Secreted in mountain fastnesses, Bulgaria's monasteries not only became storehouses for precious books and relics but a refuge for itinerant artists, who covered the walls with paintings.

The vaulted refectory building is ablaze with joyously coloured scenes depicting companies of levitating saints, hovering angels and repentant sinners who, in desperate times, might make tolerably good dinnertime company. I feel half-inclined to join them but, although I manage to secure myself a cell for the night, dinner unfortunately is not included in the price.

The gates close at nine, making a foray into town unlikely, and the preponderance of genuine pilgrims seems to preclude any riotous bonding. Seated outside my cell, I attempt to conjure the salutary thoughts that the surroundings are supposed to induce but, waylaid perhaps by too much red wine, a certain worldliness intrudes.

Stars wheel across the heavens in silvered procession. I fall asleep to the sound of running water, the soughing of wind in the trees and the eerie hooting of an overzealous owl outside my window.

The next morning, refreshed, I adjourn to a riverside restaurant where an elderly waiter in black bow tie and crisp white shirt brings me a strong espresso coffee and chicken soup flavoured with garlic, chilli and marjoram.

As I contemplate the mint-fresh day, I think of Bulgaria, now part of the European Union, a country at the crossroads.

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