Sofia - The Edge of Europe

Me at Alexander Nevski Cathedral

They call Sofia the "edge of Europe," the last European city before reaching the distinctly oriental villages and towns of Turkey and the Middle East.  Once in Sofia, we stopped in the hostel to try to take a quick nap, but it didn't work.  Then we went out to catch a free 2-hour walking tour of the city.  The free walking tours here are an effort by residents to promote a better image of Sofia and Bulgaria, intrigue people with its history, and dispel misconceptions about the country in the hopes that it will increase tourism and the country's international reputation.

The tour itself was fantastic.  We saw all of the major sights in the city and our tour guide was the most knowledgeable, albeit idiosyncratic, tour guide I've ever had.  He showed us the Holy Sunday Church, where the largest terrorist attack in the world pre-Oklahoma City occurred.  The Communists assassinated a beloved general and then rigged explosives on the dome of the church during his funeral.  We also saw the Banya Bashi Mosque, the oldest mosque in Bulgaria, built by the same architect who created Istanbul's Blue Mosque.  Along the tour our guide told us about all of the ancient ruins that have been discovered in the city.  Sofia has a problem building anything because, no matter where they build in the city, during excavation they uncover ruins they didn't previously know about.  The coolest of these ruins was the only surviving section of the major road that connected the Eastern and Western Roman Empires.

While the tour was fantastic, it was too long.  It started at 11:00 and was supposed to take 2 hours.  At 2:00 we looked at the map and were only half finished.  Kati and I were both exhausted, so we decided to ditch the rest of the tour.  We stopped a few more places on the way back.  Most notable was the Alexander Nevski Cathedral, the giant Orthodox church that Sofia is known for.  It was incredibly beautiful but surprisingly dark inside.  We also saw the Russian Church, which looks very similar to St. Basil's in Moscow. The other church of note that we saw was the Catholic Church.  There is only one in the city and it's hideous. The outside looks alright, just very modern, but the inside doesn't look like a Catholic church at all.  The windows all looked like cheap stained-glass imitations that depicted trees and lakes instead of saints and religious scenes.  The most interesting thing about the church is that Pope John Paul II laid the first brick.  The former Pope's involvement is significant because it was a Bulgarian Turk that attempted to assassinate him in the 80's.

One more final interesting sight in Sofia: there's a giant office building with a balcony uncharacteristically jutting out of the top floor.  As our tour guide explained, apparently after the fall of communism there was a very large banking bubble the burst and most people lost everything.  The building in question was built after that crisis for a new bank coming into the city and the architect purposely put the balcony on the President's office so that if they ever screwed up again he would have the very clear option to jump.  This story brings up an interesting political point that I feel required to mention, but won't labor on.  It's amazing to me how many similarities there are between the fall of communism and the current state of the US.  From starting an impossible war in Afghanistan (like Gorbachev) to having an excessively high national debt (the adjusted US per capita debt now exceeds that of Romania when communism fell, the highest of all of the Eastern Bloc countries), the parallels are stark and cannot be ignored.  What amazes me most is that we watched the USSR make the same mistakes 30 years ago and we're still making them, despite the fact that many of the same people are still involved in our government!

Anyway, back to Sofia.  After the tour we stopped in at the hostel for a little nap before heading out for dinner.  Dinner was an experience.  We went to a place recommended by the owner of our hostel.  It was called "beloved" and we were told would give us an authentic Bulgarian dining experience.  It was definitely authentic.  We showed up and there was no English on the menu at all; there wasn't even a Latin alphabet translation of the Bulgarian on the menu, only Cyrillic.  On top of that, our waitress spoke very little English.  Despite the massive language barrier, we managed to order two beers and told the waitress what kind of meat we wanted, leaving the choice up to her.  I had pork, covered with pancetta, peppers, and cheese, and potatoes.  Kati got a chicken and potatoes dish and a chicken salad with pineapple and candied walnuts.  Save Kati's chicken and potatoes, which were mediocre, everything was really good.  The waitress kept laughing at us because we couldn't finish that gigantic Bulgarian portions.  After dinner we stopped in a bar for a glass of wine and then headed back to the hostel, still exhausted from the night before.