Bulgaria Beyond the Roses

Bulgaria Beyond the Roses

An active living culture that is not just in the yoghurt

What does Bulgaria look like from the west? Is it just Sunny Beach, colourful folk costumes or acres of concrete apartment blocks? These images are hard to shake off, especially when the western media is happy to recycle the same old tropes and ignore the real vibes.

There are numberless shows on British TV where couples search for a cheap house abroad. It used to be Spain and Portugal but these days Bulgaria appears quite a lot. On shows like ‘A Place in the Sun’ or ‘Help! We bought a village,’ they search the Bulgarian countryside for old houses with big gardens and outbuildings. As the camera pans around the sunny, empty rooms it is more than just real estate at rock bottom prices. We are gazing at lost memory and scraps of forgotten history.

Programmes, like ‘New Life in the Sun’ show how an English family might buy a wreck in the Balkans, bring the garden to cultivation and provide themselves with food in the process. I have to admit, that this is exactly what my wife Claire and I did back in 2010 but that is another story. On screen, there is jeopardy in people daring to make a new start in a place they do not know. Viewers can share in the drama without taking any risks themselves.

Social media loves Bulgaria for its abandoned places. Urban Exploration (UrbX) has become a screen time phenomenon. The most famous, is Buzludzha the former communist party headquarters in central Bulgaria. Filled with grand socialist imagery, it is fabulously remote, sitting like a concrete flying saucer, on top of a mountain. The building has been empty since 1990 because nobody can agree, whether to destroy it or preserve it as a cultural asset. But there are many others. In fact there are entire Youtube channels devoted to exploring hotels, factories, train stations, even whole villages, all of them totally deserted and overgrown. It is eerie to see the retro style of the bakelite telephones and the creepers growing through the windows of electricity substations or abandoned airports. Bulgaria seems to have a lot of such places. The videos speak of a lost world being taken back into nature, almost like finding a Mayan temple in the jungles of Guatemala. The only difference is that these places come from the very recent past.

All three themes, ‘place in the sun’, ‘back to the land’ and ‘contemporary ruins’ speak to our sense of wilderness and a past which we do not fully understand. But the curious thing is that all three portrayals of Bulgaria rarely include any of its actual people. Where are they all? Is this country completely depopulated? It is presented as a place to be brought back from the wild, discovered, explored and purchased. This detached gaze ignores the real life, the contemporary life. What kind of false narrative for the country is being created here?

Back in the UK, the TV programmes change after 7pm. This is the time for documentaries. Bulgaria pops up again. We watch Bear Grylls in the Rila mountains, Bethany Hughes taking the rattling trains around the old Ottoman Empire or Alice Roberts amongst the golden grave goods of the Varna cemetery or in the locked museum vaults of the Thracian treasure houses. Again the contemporary world with all its people and culture, films, art and music is ignored, as if there isn’t any.

A mysterious past, the emptiness of nature and the opportunity for foreigners. These are the subjects that the western media reach for when it comes to Bulgaria. These tropes give viewers an incomplete idea of the country so that when new visitors go there, it is hard to make sense of real life. It will come as a huge surprise to any tourist who looks beyond the crowded seaside resorts to find the miles of wild beaches where you can camp for free in the wooded shore line. Nobody in Britain knows about July Morning, where thousands gather to watch the sunrise on the 1st of July, even though this tradition was inspired by a British rock band, Uriah Heap. So what is really going on?

Sofia International Film Festival is a showcase for global cinema but it also shines a light on local film making, past and present. Bulgarian cinema developed in the 1960s and 70s under state funded productions in Boyana studios and the style continues today. The films are often slow moving and poetic, intensely artistic and human, often tragic but rarely sentimental. They were inspired by France, Russia, the former Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia and also these days by Turkey and Iran. The style of this ‘poetic cinema’ is like a misty morning in a meadow, on the day that someone dies. Bulgarian cinema culture is only on the radar when it aligns with the west as when famous Bulgarian actors like Maria Bakalova or Angela Nedyalkova take part in ‘Trainspotting’ or ‘ Borat’ . Only then do they become well known. The Bulgarian films in which these two appear, are quirky delights like ‘Ave’ and ‘Triumph’ but these films are completely unknown outside of their home country.

Bulgaria’s arts and music festivals, like its cinema, do not try to imitate the western European models. Sofia Underground happens every year in the capital and presents performance art, from basement galleries and warehouse spaces, pushing the boundaries of the physicality of dance and performance. Music festivals like Meadows in the Mountains, Wake Up! and Beglika share a common connection to nature and the land, traditions of spirituality and celebration, an avant garde fusion of musical styles and a strict code against corporate sponsorship. The same can be said for cultural magazines like Vizh and the places for contemporary art in Sofia such as Toplotsentrala, where exhibitions and lectures show the mixed European and Asian influences by artists who are just as likely to have spent time in Istanbul as they are in Berlin or London. It is an arts space in a former heating plant for the 1980s NDK, a cultural centre which is itself, a relic of the socialist past but still thriving as Sofia’s equivalent to the Barbican.

The street culture of cities like Sofia, Plovdiv and Veliko Tarnovo should also be celebrated for being much more like Thessaloniki or Marseille than Paris. These are cat-prowling places where graffiti does not get washed off the walls, electric wires hang in clusters from lamp posts and the broken paving stones move beneath your feet.

On the music side this home-grown vein continues with producers like Ivan Shopov whose many DJ manifestations such as Balkansky and Cooh cross over from dubstep to jazz but whose music is always rooted in sounds from his own Bulgarian landscape. The same vibes are found in the folk-electronic fusion band Oratnitsa whose deep bass versions of old Bulgarian folk songs turn their live shows into something more akin to pagan fire festivals than rock concerts. The deep roots of Bulgarian folk seem to influence everyone who makes music here, and the melodic scales, harmonies and rhythms are unique and extremely old, having more in common with eastern traditions, than they do with anything imported from the west.

In literature, it is only really Georgi Gospodinov and Kapka Kassabova who are well known as Bulgarian authors outside of the country. The delicate and human style of much of Bulgarian literature may go back to ground breaking modernist poets like Geo Milev in the 1920s whose poems are only now being translated into English. Despite the best efforts of publishers like Janet 45, Open Letter and Istros Books, or organisations like the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation to translate Bulgarian literature into English it is still difficult for Bulgarian authors to be recognized in other countries. This will only continue to be so as long as the principal cultural outlets to the western media focus on their narrow range of subjects like communism and rose oil, cheap houses and abandoned places.

When we see the real vibes, the street level art, the beach culture, the films, the music and art, we can see this country for its true self. Somewhere between places, not a vanguard of the west, not some outpost on the frontline of Europe facing the east, but a place in between where influences come from both sides, from everywhere, like the trade routes that used to pass through here, connecting Europe with Anatolia and Asia and linking the northern steppe with the hot Mediterranean.

My book, ‘Waiting for the Goats’ is out on the 15th May. It is a hybrid memoir based in the Bulgarian village, featuring self-sufficiency, Bulgarian history, memory and landscape. Available to buy as paperback or Ebook from Amazon. Check it out!Write your text here...