Sofia

Something catches in the air - herbs and spices, wafting through the overcast, murky night. Scents of Easter cooking whisper out across the cobbled streets.

Roman ruins litter the squares and boulevards, recessed into craters, like fragments of ancient meteors crash-landed from another time and space. Walking up and down staircases from level to level, you rise and fall through layers of a kingdom's history.

White and pink blossoms flurry across the street, spring snow from the trees, and the grey mountain looms beyond the end of the street, the city's custodian, behind flapping white-green-red (like the ubiquitous salad) and gold-stars-on-blue flags.

~

"Bulgaria on three seas":
- the swaggering, chest-thumping throwback to the one-time kingdom stretching from the Adriatic, to the Black and to the White Seas. Some repeat this phrase, our country on three seas, to revive a former glory, short-lived and centuries ago, and for what? To dream of restoring themselves to a regional dominance their ancestors once tenuously held? Or to retreat under a safety blanket, safe from a nagging inferiority complex?

~

Trams glide along their grooves, ferrying calm holiday traffic from square to square. A classical statue holds up an unassuming first-floor balcony, someone's whole world, encapsulated there, supported by Atlas himself.

~

You eat little flat doughnuts, which remind you of the Sunday morning butteries of home, with a pot of cow-fresh yogurt. Rain falls heavily on the umbrella overhead and the stones of the monastery plaza, and clouds disguise the pure snow creating the towering peaks.

~

These gigantic boulders were tossed by the forces of time, colossal beyond our reckoning, down an ancient gully, a rock slide that could raze a city. They are called 'moraines'. Immense power hums from them, and you feel too the power of this land's culture and history, asserting itself upon you.

~

A yellow and black salamander revels in the deluge crashing upon the hillside, skin glistening. Your clothes are soaked through, not made for this like this little reptile is.

~

You walk past an abandoned structure, and stop at an outcrop, under the defunct cables that once carried a car up the slope of this mighty Vitosha mountain. The western flank of Sofia city unfolds below. Here also, like the bobsled runs in Sarajevo, is a forgotten and unused conveyance, and yet we continue to come - to travel up and down these mountainsides.

~

You sit in a little courtyard cafe, through a portal from a cobbled walking street. A group of friends are having cake and croissants across from you. Sardinian, French and Albanian, they discuss music together in English - how they compose and play it. They dip into German here and there, perhaps to describe something classical that English can't quite capture. The Sardinian's big hound yawns lazily.

After coffee, you walk through the Women's Market, today on Easter Sunday, alive with flower sales, customers buzzing from bud to bud like bees. And you keep walking, laden with your bags, to the train station - onwards, further into the heart of Bulgaria, deeper into the curls of the rose.Read more