EXPLORE PLOVDIV
Bulgaria's second-largest city is characterized by tranquility and a sense of hospitality that dates back to city as a crossroads of cultures,
I was getting into bed after a long day of travelling when I heard the bells: two tones clanging out an urgent rhythm that filled the night. I peeked out my window, but couldn’t see where the sound was coming from. Despite my fatigue, curiosity got the best of me. I grabbed my shoes and jacket and followed the sounds to the nearest church, where scores of people were holding candles and walking solemnly around the building.
The frenetic pace of the 52 Places trip means that I often lose track of the date. Turns out, I had arrived in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, just in time for Orthodox Easter Sunday. With the bells signalling midnight, the faithful — families, couples, older people helped along by young neighbours — were marking the occasion. The glow of candlelight illuminated the faces of those who circled the church three times before dispersing into the night.
The next morning, the city was quiet except for a chorus of birdsong that made me feel like I had stepped into a fairy tale. I walked up steep cobblestone streets into the Old Town, exploring the preserved remnants of those who have passed through it, making Plovdiv one of the longest continuously inhabited settlements in Europe.
I sat in the Roman amphitheatre, which dates from the second century A.D., when the city was known as Philippopolis. I passed under a medieval gate marking one of the entrances into the Old Town, and marvelled at the Bulgarian Revival architecture from the dying days of Ottoman rule in the 19th century: pastel facades with second floors supported by wooden beams; intricately painted ceilings; windows that could be thrown open on crisp, spring days like this one. Following the winding stone roads, I came to the crumbled site of a fortress, believed to have roots in an ancient Thracian settlement, and made my way to Knyaz Alexander I, a pedestrian-only street lined with shops and restaurants and doner kebab stands. Then I passed through a Roman stadium and gate, and crossed an underpass paved with ancient flagstones beneath a busy thoroughfare.
Plovdiv was on the 52 Places list because it is one of the 2019 European Capitals of Culture, an annual designation given out by the European Commission that’s meant to boost the arts across the continent. As such, there’s a lot going on this year: hundreds of events spanning every art form you can think of. More a coincidence of timing than a concerted effort, the Bishop’s Basilica, which will house some 2,000 square metres of Roman mosaics, opens this fall.
The energy inspired by the Capital of Culture designation pervades everything. But in Plovdiv, the title is actually more recognition for a longstanding creative vision than it is a jump-start to new programs.
More than a tourist town
It is easy to view towns like Plovdiv — with their quaint streets and carefully preserved, achingly charming architecture — as one-dimensional in their beauty. It took me a few days to realize that Plovdiv is not a place built around tourism, but rather a booming city whose appeal to travellers can and should extend beyond the historical allure that attracts so many.
Bulgaria’s second city is a place of layers, where a new breed of artists, entrepreneurs and community leaders are just as concerned with the city’s future as they are with its past.
Sariev Contemporary is a gallery just off Plovdiv’s main street, past the office of the Open Arts Foundation and the bohemian hangout, Artnewscafe. A 17-square-metre white box, it is easy to miss. But the gallery is the heartbeat of Plovdiv’s contemporary art scene and over the last decade its proprietors — Katrin Sarieva and her daughter, Vesselina, who also run the cafe and the foundation — have created an ecosystem that combines the arts, community organizing and historical preservation. More than one person I met credited them with bringing contemporary art to the fore, not just in Plovdiv, but in Bulgaria and Eastern Europe as a whole.
Vesselina has taken Bulgarian exhibitions to art shows all over the world, and works with young up-and-coming artists and big name collectors alike. The event the Sarievas are best known for, though, is Night/ Plovdiv, held every September for the past 10 years, when the city’s galleries, museums, bars and historical sites stay open after hours and host events that span the artistic spectrum.
“Before we started the Night, the idea of culture here was very narrow,” Vesselina said. “You had high culture — the museums, the opera — and then everything else was ‘low culture.’ People thought galleries were just shops for art.”
Without the work of the Sarievas, it is hard to say whether the conditions for a “capital of culture” would have been realized at all.
On a sunny day, Vesselina took me for a long walk to hit some of the destinations on the Alternative Map of Plovdiv, a project started by Katrin Sarieva, who doubles as the city’s unofficial historian. A concerted effort to show tourists and residents the attractions that exist outside of the usual tourist routes, the map offers a fascinating look at a city with many facets and a story of survival.
We walked through the Hadji Hassan Quarter, tucked next to the Old Town, where many of the city’s Romani residents, sometimes referred to as Gypsies, live. There, in hastily built homes with the occasional horse cart parked out front, they’ve preserved their language and customs even after decades of tradition-crushing communism. One woman smiled at us as she washed clothes using an ibrik, a Turkish pitcher which, as Vesselina described it, is “the kind of thing you usually see in the Ethnographic Museum.”
We passed the remnants of Bulgaria’s Communist years, the Brutalist Central Post Office and National Library. On this part of my tour, too, there were stories of perseverance. One building, the Cosmos Cinema, is an abandoned movie theatre built in the 1960s. About 10 years ago, it was almost destroyed to make way for a shopping mall. It was Vesselina and others in the artistic community who rallied around the cause to stop the city from doing it. Its future is still uncertain, but it won’t be turned into a pile of rubble. Seven hills, or six? Plovdiv, like Rome, is known as the “City of Seven Hills.” But, in fact, there are only six. One was torn apart decades ago to make pavement — in its place is a shopping mall and parking lot. But there, too, artists reacted. Eight years ago, Atanas Hranov, one of Plovdiv’s most prominent artists, took stones from the torn down hill, inscribed them with quotes from the city’s poets and, in the shadow of the city’s 14th-century Dzhumaya Mosque, built a seventh “hill,” a mound that serves as a tribute to the resilience of art.
“We have seven hills in our city’s coat of arms,” Hranov said. “Now, it’s true again.”
The people shaping Plovdiv into a centre for unbridled creativity aren’t limited to its artists. The neighbourhood of Kapana (“The Trap”) is named for its confusing layout, but it would be just as appropriate a name for the way its residents and small business owners draw you in. A short walk from the main street, the neighbourhood’s stone streets are lined with bars, cafes and boutiques. It’s familiar by now — the hip, gentrified neighbourhood where young people smoke hand-rolled cigarettes and trade stories over craft beers or overpriced coffee — but there’s something different about Kapana, something that makes it feel unlike all the Williamsburg carbon copies. I found an overwhelming sense of calm here — you could nurse a beer for a full hour at a neighbourhood bar without getting dirty looks. Adose of motivation “Aylyak” is one of those untranslatable concepts you find in many languages: a distillation of a way of life, which, in Plovdiv’s case, is a carefree attitude characterized by an easygoing approach to daily routine and a sense of hospitality that dates back to the city as a crossroads of cultures.
Spending an afternoon climbing one of Plovdiv’s hills, Sahat Tepe, and marvelling at how a nature reserve could exist in the middle of the second-largest city in Bulgaria, I got it. At the top, I sat on a rock for a full 45 minutes. Birdsong was everywhere. The call to prayer rang out from the mosque, whose minaret I could see towering over Kapana.
But I also thought about how the city was selling itself short. Aylyak? Sure. Alongside that sense of tranquility, though, I felt an urge to create that I haven’t felt anywhere else on this trip so far. After the hangover of Georgia and the exhaustion of Israel during Passover, it was just the dose of motivation I needed. I walked down Sahat Tepe, across the city and up another of Plovdiv’s seven — no, six — hills.