Osvoboditelite

Platform и - you need Platform и. The stands for източен ('northern'). Cool.

You walk up and down the underground concourse and buy a sandwich. Where is it? Oh, there.
A once-maroon set of carriages waits there, wrapped in a weathered coat of tags and marks. It looks like a kid scribbled all over their toy trains in colourful permanent markers, then left them out in the rain for twelve years. The door is open. You wobble onboard, your heavy tortoise shell threatening to tilt you back, sprawling, onto Platform и. You shuffle, bag-laden, along the corridor to an unoccupied compartment. Barely any passengers around - slow travel day, or ominous sign that a bus might have been wiser?

The stuffing of the seats is lumpy and the covers are stained. Even the weakest of ScotRail's offerings look better. Yet, in a win for Bulgaria here, this train leaves bang on time, under blue Sofia skies. It rattles away from the capital and the postcard-ready Vitosha mountain vista, through decaying industrial zones, overgrowing with new weeds to cover the past.

A mother and daughter pair slip into the compartment. Their grey shih-tzu hops onto the middle seat between them. They lift her up and place a mat over the already-rather-soiled seat. The countryside rolls by, at no great speed and in no great style. You eat your apple. Have to remember to eat at least a token piece of fruit now and then.

¬

In Plovdiv - you find yourself standing atop the ancient theater, from when this place was Philippopolis, taking a Turkish family's photo for them. The stunning architecture is nowhere in frame - there's too many of them, blocking it out. The grown-ups say 'thank you', and the little girl, practicing her English phrases, 'thank you, happy birthday'. Not quite my birthday, but today is actually St. George's Day, by the Gregorian calendar. He's the patron saint of the Bulgarian army, and kind of a big deal. The guy who checked me in to the hostel was also called George. Well, Джордж.

¬

The hostel's a house, cavernous, nineteenth-century, with dark wooden closets and panels receding into the gloom of the early morning bedroom. The stairs creak under the weight of another century of feet - no robber or interloper would make it far in this house. Only a ghost could pass undetected over these boards. History's specters are encased in these walls, and at night drift up and down the levels, in and out of the edges of your vision.

You eat breakfast alone in the breakfast room of the hostel. It's in a semi-basement room, where the depth of the house's history is laid bare. Crumbling Roman walls stand right there on the floor, remnants of a house placed here hundreds upon hundreds of years ago. How many others have sat here and eaten breakfast over the centuries? The morning sun is glowing out there above the high window.

¬

You step inside the monumental, and now largely defunct, Socialist-era post office. It is adorned inside with carved blonde wooden panels, depicting a sun (your overlords) and an eye (are always watching you).
You wonder if a child once carved some similar arcana into the wood of the house where you are sleeping.

¬

You realize that some kind of beauty, that you had never really considered, can lend itself to Brutalist monstrosities like this, the House of Science & Technology, now a cinema and movie-themed bar, where you sit now on a balcony drinking cocktails, and looking over into the swaying trees of the adjacent park. There's an interplay between the open terrace of the structure, and the branches hanging over it and rustling just out of earshot. You talk about literature, and pop music, and feel the cultures of the world running together through this town.

¬

You share a bottle of red wine on the patio behind the house. A black-and-white cat hops onto your new friend's lap to sleep. Then you three take an evening walk, just as the sun slips below the roofs.

The spotlight illuminations from below only come on as leave the ruins of the Roman forum. Up on the modern street level, shops and stalls still sell their wares, right where the ancients did, and you wonder if eventually they too will be buried with detritus, and another, futuristic, shopping esplanade will pave over this era, too.

Will another of Plovdiv's totemic hills be blown up for its stone - will the statue of Alyosha be lost in the rubble, his hand or nose discovered in some tip in the year 2724? The city will forever be getting pieced together, rebuilt and rediscovered.

¬

Rose bushes grow in fields, farms - the most emblematic of Bulgarian crops, here in the Thrace valley. Veliko Tarnovo, on a recommendation, is your next and final stop in this country.

They say there are four directions of movement possible in VT - left, right, up and down. Its abundance of Ottoman-era homes huddle on the steep hillsides, tumbling down to the winding river that snakes around the boundaries of the historical town. Screechy, slow trains rumble across a bridge, and right under the town's hill, to pop out on another bridge on the opposite side. A fortress just outside town, overlooking it, is an illusion - reconstructed by the Communists, as great and old as it looks, it was only built into this state a few decades ago. One day the Communist rulers of this country will be ancient history, too, and what they leave behind will be historical in a way it just can't be yet.

It rains most of your time in VT. It's just barely touristic - not without interest, just without many visitors. You are the only guest on your walking tour, and you agonize inside about having to provide 100% of the audience participation your excitable, wet-behind-the-ears guide needs to keep the momentum going. You indulge yourself in linguistic and food-related questions that you'd normally keep to yourself in a group. It's cool. She theorizes that 'Tarnovo' refers to a thorny bush endemic to the region. 'Veliko' means 'great'. And such. Solo travelling has never been much more solo than this, solo on the walking tour.

That night, you get talking to people sitting in the hostel. A Korean mother and daughter are floored when you reveal that you are not only Scottish (they're travelling to Scotland soon!) and that you lived in Korea before, and thus know expression and niche cultural references from their country. It's heartwarming to see mom's face light up when you recognize what she's saying. The host delivers some dyed eggs and sweet slices of bread leftover from the Easter celebrations just past. You snack upon them, and save some for your breakfast early next day. The Koreans leave just before you do, heading somewhere else. You have to take a taxi, the only way to reach your bus later this morning across the next border. You wonder quite how you ended up in this city, seemingly unable to easily get out and go anywhere you want to go. It wouldn't be the worst place to get stuck in for a while, though, you think, heading north, waving Bulgaria goodbye, for now.En savoir plus