Sofia. During the Liberation, 12,000 people lived in Sofia, while today the city has over 1.3 million residents. This is what Assoc. Prof. Veneta Handzhiyska, Director of the Regional Museum of History - Sofia, said in an interview with Focus News Agency about the oldest buildings in the capital city preserving the spirit of Old Sofia, about the number of the population immediately after the Russian-Turkish war of liberation, and about what happened after the great urbanisation and how the capital transformed from an oriental into a modern European centre of the country. “At the time of the Liberation of Bulgaria in 1878, about 12,000 people of diverse ethnicity lived in Sofia. At the time of the first official census only two years later, the population already exceeded 20,000 inhabitants,” said Assoc. Prof. Handzhiyska. In her words, in the following decades the city was an administrative, public and economic centre, which is why it grew very fast, largely due to internal migration. “After the Unification and after the Balkan Wars many refugees came to the capital and its population increased considerably. This happened again after the First World War, when thousands of Bulgarians came to the capital. They left their home places, which became part of neighbour countries. All of this led to the creation of 20 new neighbourhoods around the city centre,” she said. The population continued growing after the Second World War, especially in connection with industrialisation at that time. That trend continued over the years despite the attempts to curb it and the difficulty to obtain residence in Sofia, and today the city officially has over 1.3 million people, said Assoc. Prof. Handzhiyska.

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