KINSHIP AND CULTURE
In any language, Bulgaria is a cultural marvel
Family pilgrimage to Bulgaria
Plovdiv, a city built on six hills rising from the plains between the Balkan and Rhodope mountains, is Bulgaria’s first European Capital of Culture, an annual designation given by the European Commission to highlight the diversity of arts and culture. It is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities on the continent.
I am on a family trip that I never expected to happen: my dad, mom, brother and myself visiting the country where my father was born. He lived here until he was 14, when he and several family members fled as the Communist Party grew in influence.
Emotions follow me 200 km northeast of Plovdiv to Veliko Tarnovo. Here, over Bolyarka beers on a large terrace overlooking the imposing Asenevtsi Monument — four larger-than-life-size mounted horsemen around a 30-foot-tall sword — we agree this city should be Bulgaria’s next European Capital of Culture.
Veliko Tarnovo was the country’s capital for several hundred years and reigned as one of Europe’s centres of arts and culture in the Middle Ages. (It’s fine to just call it “Tarnovo,” which is what most locals do; veliko, which means “great” in Bulgarian, was only added to the city’s name in 1965.)
Growing up, there wasn’t much Bulgarian culture in our suburban house, but there was banitsa, a flaky, cheesy traditional Bulgarian pastry, and nightly Bulgarian lessons for my younger brother and myself from my dad. My mom, a Baltimorean whose sweet tooth crossed cultures, never stopped baking the former, but the latter ended one night in second grade when I told my dad, “This is your language, not mine.”
When he lived in Bulgaria, my dad never went to Plovdiv or Veliko Tarnovo. His family lived in Perilovets, a farming village in the country’s northwestern corner, near its borders with Romania and present-day Serbia.
In 2003, when I was in my mid20s, I spent two weeks in Bulgaria with my dad, but didn’t make it much farther from his village than he had as a kid. On that trip, my initial meeting with every second cousin, family friend and former neighbour who hadn’t fled the country started with them excitedly greeting me in Bulgarian. I smiled in what I hoped was an apologetic manner as my dad explained I had no idea what they had just said. Every introduction left me feeling I had let my dad down.
It wasn’t until after both my dad and I were several years out from brutal-but-successful treatment for cancer (melanoma for him; breast for me) and he was 82 that I decided I wanted to go back. My brother Rob and my mom, neither of whom had been to Bulgaria before, quickly announced they were coming too.
Since it is the Capital of Culture, Plovdiv is our first stop. Our first destination in the city is a gatehouse at the entrance to the city’s Old Town. Only local residents, business owners and guests at the several boutique hotels here are allowed to drive this UNESCO World Heritage site’s narrow, cobbled streets lined with 19th-century homes built in the top-heavy Bulgarian National Revival style. (At the time, taxes were assessed on a home’s footprint, so the ground level was made as small as possible.)
Checking into the Hotel Evmolpia, we’re offered local cheese and wine. Archaeological evidence shows grapes have been grown and wine made in this area for more than 3,000 years. Today, there are about 20 vineyards and wineries within an hour’s drive of Plovdiv.
Adjacent to the Old Town is the formerly derelict, now trendy, Kapana District, a maze of tight, winding streets. (Kapana means “the trap” in Bulgarian.) We quickly get lost, and that’s fine. Around one corner there’s the Hipster Hostel and an art gallery selling products made from felt. Around the next corner is a giant spray-painted mural of an alligator with a heart-shaped diamond in its toothy mouth being ridden by a bored-looking man wearing a turtleneck.
I smiled in what I hoped was an apologetic manner as my dad explained I had no idea what they had just said. Every introduction left me feeling I had let my dad down.
It is one of my mom’s life quests to try as many beers as possible. So when we turn yet another of Kapana’s corners and find Cat & Mouse (Kotka i Mishka in Bulgarian), a bar with more than 100 beers from around the world and three of its own brews, we stop. Tasting each of the latter, you’d never know the bar and brewery was founded to finance a website dedicated to independent journalism, Pod Tepeto (“Under the Hill”), and not only out of a love of beer.
We settle in with our drinks at an outside table from which we can see three different spray-painted murals, two boutiques selling a mix of locally made clothing and home accessories and three or four art galleries/studios. The businesses are on the ground levels of colourful, two-storey buildings with pennant flags strung between them. The building next to Cat & Mouse is a café named Central Perk, styled to look like the café of that name from the TV show Friends. Latte- and espresso-sipping customers speaking French, German, English and Bulgarian relax here in sofas and armchairs.
Bulgarians have a word for this scene: “aylyak.” Aylyak is a word taken from Turkish; in that language it means doing nothing or being idle. In Bulgaria, aylyak is slightly different; here it refers to a lifestyle that cultivates and celebrates an easygoing, unhurried attitude (as in, the opposite of farm life). Within Bulgaria, it is generally held that Plovdivians do aylyak best. Beneath almost the entire onemile length of the shopping and pedestrian street Knyaz Alexander I in the centre of the city is a Roman stadium built at the beginning of the 2nd century when the city was known as Trimontium. Several sections of it have been excavated, including a seating area you can see in the basement of the clothing store H&M and, in the middle of Dzhumaya Square, colonnades and the stadium’s northern end. Here you can sit in the same seats where, 2,000 years ago, 30,000 people gathered to watch chariot races.
Uphill from our hotel is the Ancient Theatre of Philippopolis. Built at the end of the 1st century, it was used for performances for several hundred years, abandoned after a fire and forgotten until a landslide in the 1970s revealed a section of it. The Bulgarian Conservation School spent 10 years restoring it and in 1981 it reopened as a performance space.
On our last evening in Plovdiv, my mom, Rob and I walk up to the broad, flat summit of our hill, called Nebet Tepe, to watch the sunset. We also find ruins of dwellings and fortifications that predate the birth of Christ.
My dad knows more about Veliko Tarnovo’s history than Plovdiv’s. Most of the latter’s ruins were discovered and studied after he fled the country. The former’s history is the Bulgarian history he learned in the one-room Perilovets schoolhouse. Tarnovo was the country’s capital during the Second Bulgarian Empire (1185-1396) and also at the beginning of the Third Bulgarian Empire in 1878 when Bulgaria won its freedom after almost 500 years of Ottoman rule.
My dad knows the names of some of the 19th-century rebels that Tarnovo’s Monument to Hanged Rebels honours for advocating (and fighting for) Bulgarian independence from the Ottoman Empire. The constitution that governed the country when he was born was drafted and signed in the white, cross-shaped building down the street from our hotel. (Today, this building is the Museum of the Bulgarian Revival and Constituent Assembly.) He tells us about Russian Gen. Iosif Gurko, for whom our hotel is named. (Gurko’s army liberated Veliko Tarnovo from the Ottoman Empire on July 7, 1877.) He tells us the four Asenevtsi Monument horsemen liberated Bulgaria from the Byzantine Empire in the 12th century, then ruled it as czars for most of the next century.
Even without my dad’s details about the Bulgarian czars who lived in grand palaces on Tsarevets hill, the view of it from the sky walk, a glass-bottomed viewing platform that stretches out between buildings above the Yantra River, are impressive.
Walking down Samovodska Charshiya street, which is home to the studios and galleries of many local artisans, we hear about my dad’s favourite cow, Mininkata (“little one”). He says she was famous because she was an award-winning milk producer, and that, because of her, his father, whom my brother and I called “Dedo,” went to jail. “The Soviets came for her and Dedo refused to let her go, so they put Dedo in jail and the family had to pay a huge ransom to have him freed,” my dad says.
Over our drinks at the Asenevtsi Monument, after we’ve finished making the case for Tarnovo as Bulgaria’s next European Capital of Culture, I thank my dad for sharing his history with us and tell him I’m sorry I was such a punk back in second grade.
Thankfully, when it’s time to get another round of drinks, the bartender speaks English.
The Washington Post