Sofia

Bulgaria’s capital is underrated and overlooked in European tourism. We arrived on the train, emerging from the mists into a station straight out of 1984. In fact, much of Sofia feels frozen in time, from the retro trams to the currency to the communist apartment blocks. Our Airbnb had an old wooden lift, big enough for maybe 1.5 people, with no lights inside—we used it once and then took the stairs the rest of the time.

The Red Flat is another reminder of Sofia’s past, an apartment-as-museum preserving the entire contents of a communist-era home, including furniture, illicit Western records, clothes, cube TV, VEF radio, school books, toys, and family photo albums. It only has four rooms, so the audio tour requires you to sit still in the same spot quite a lot. This leads to the amusing sight of 30 tourists sitting silently with headphones and occasionally shuffling between the dining room and kitchen.

We enjoyed four days of rattling around the city on the renovated ‘80s-style trams, eating hot banitsa (cheese & sauerkraut pastry) and admiring the architecture. The St Alexander Nevsky cathedral is particularly beautiful, and richly painted inside... no photos permitted though, so you'll just have to visit Sofia yourselves. Apart from churches though, most of Sofia comprises blocks of grungy, communist-era architecture. It's full of tucked away bars, foodie finds, thrift stores, cafes and great street art. We enjoyed wandering around the central neighbourhoods spotting murals, and trying not to think too much about the unimaginative graffiti from Levski Sofia's neo-Nazi SW99 hooligans 😬

Like most European capitals, Sofia has jumped on the Christmas market train. There is money to be made in vats of mulled wine and kilometers of twinkle lights. We visited both the smaller ‘German Christmas Market’ and the larger ‘Sofia Fest’. Neither was too busy, although they look ready to pick up over the next few weeks. We also went on a Balkan Bites food tour organised, much to our amusement, by a woman from Joburg (though of Bulgarian heritage). She was one of many mildly insane people working in tourism in Sofia, along with the barista with a cutesy voice three octaves outside normal human range, and the lady working in the board game cafe who served us with all the manic anxiety of a sitcom character who has a dead body hidden in the back room.

On our last night in the city, our tram home from the Christmas market got stuck in a 40,000-strong anti-government protest. Bulgaria is joining the Euro in January, but it's one of Europe's poorest countries, with rising cost of living, and has had a series of short-term, unstable governments since 2020. Chelsea insisted we did not need to add ‘riots in the Balkans’ to our list of narrow escapes for the year, so we abandoned the tram and walked home the long way round, encountering a lot of heavily armed police on the way.

Setting aside the protest though, Sofia is grungy and edgy, with interesting heritage and excellent public transport. It would be a brilliant long weekend trip from the UK, with minimal crowds and cheap flights. Highly recommend!

We have a few more days in Bulgaria, with both of us scheduling in job interviews between sightseeing adventures. It’s much much colder now, so Dan bought a moulting scarf that litters his increasingly voluminous beard with blue fluff, while Chelsea has invested the vast sum of £20 in a deeply ridiculous thrift store coat. We may look silly but we are warm.もっと詳しく