CUCUMBER OF BURGAS

Londoners, especially, will be bemused to discover that decades before Norman Foster designed the world famous Gherkin in the City the workers in the oil refinery of Burgas got their own avant-garde housing project that in more than one way not only predated but also outshines one of Sir Norman's major achievements.

To appreciate the social, cultural and architectural significance of the Cucumber in Burgas, which now fervently aspires to become the European Capital of Culture in 2032, one needs to consider the historical background.

Unlike other Bulgarian major towns that boast centuries if not millennia of history (Plovdiv, Varna, Ruse, Sofia...), Burgas is relatively new. It was founded in the late 19th century in an area populated by a handful of local fishermen. Their main occupation, apart from catching fish, was to eschew the inevitable swarms of malaria-infected mosquitoes for whom the three large freshwater lakes around the fishing village were excellent breeding ground. Burgas began to resemble a larger settlement at the turn of the 20th century. Two events were seminal in its development. Firstly, US billionaire and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller donated large sums of money to eradicate malaria from the region, which was accomplished roughly in the 1910s. Secondly, Burgas became a destination for the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Bulgarian refugees who arrived from what is now North Macedonia, Aegean Thrace (in Greece) and the regions of Edirne and Kırklareli (now in Turkey) as a result of the notorious population exchanges around the time of the two Balkan Wars (1912-1914). Naturally, they mingled with the local Greeks, Turks, Russians, Czechs, Jews and Armenians to form a Brooklyn-style hodgepodge. All of them were poor and destitute. All of them had one thing in mind: to make money.

A cucumber in Burgas...

Suddenly, what was a backwater at the southern Bulgarian Black Sea Coast became a thriving commercial and industrial centre that surpassed even the much larger and older Varna as well as the new capital of the kingdom, Sofia. Capitalism was what counted in those days as the region saw rapid development of the kind southern Italy, for instance, would not witness until the 1950s.

Much of this was put to an end when the Communists arrived in 1944. Large industrial enterprises were stolen from their owners (the term being used at the time was "nationalisation"). The owners of the fine pre-war Italianate houses were kicked out and several families, sometimes new arrivals who had no links to pre-war Burgas, were billeted in their lodgings.

Events took a different turn in the 1960s when the central planners of the Communist economy decided to turn Burgas, which had already developed a major sea harbour, into an oil processing hub. The oil plant, as it was colloquially called in those days, was built using Soviet equipment, was in keeping with Soviet standards and processed Soviet oil which the Soviets delivered at incredible cut-down prices to its "Little Brother," Bulgaria. The oil refinery expended rapidly. It attracted thousands of workers, engineers, managers and support personnel from the hinterland. To ensure the new arrivals had somewhere to live, the government set off a series of housing projects that consisted mostly, but not exclusively, of the pre-fabricated concrete apartment blocks seen all over Bulgaria – and also all over the former East bloc.

...a gherkin in London

In Burgas, housing estates like Tolbuhin (named after the Soviet general who led the occupation Red Army forces into Bulgaria, in 1944), Izgrev, Slaveykov, and later Meden Rudnik epitomise both the dimensions of the housing situation in the 1970s and 1980s and the huge construction effort the government undertook to mitigate it.

There is nothing to write home about these housing estates, or what remain of them: projects, which look so monotonously similar to each other, are hardly the stuff visitors and expats will be interested in. Except for The Cucumber!

The Cucumber, which was erected along the "frontline" of the Tolbuhin housing estate in the 1970s was not only huge. It was avant-garde. A housing block of such dimensions had been unseen anywhere in Bulgaria at the time. It entailed novelties, such as duplexes, the people of Eastern Europe were unfamiliar with. Designed by local architects and engineers, The Cucumber was supposed to have a much more poetic name: Sea Wave (easy to understand as in those days the upper storeys of the building had direct line of sight to the Black Sea). The Communist-era clerks at the city council, however, had little flavour for poetry. To them, the new contraption was the unabashedly faceless Block 77. The citizens of Burgas did have the final say. Block 77 was instantly identifiable as The Cucumber.

It is historically unclear whether Norman Foster visited Burgas when he thought of his Gherkin. But in recent years Sir Norman, perhaps inadvertently, found himself in the midst of a scandal about the planned construction of a major holiday village along the northern Bulgarian Black Sea coast. Environmentalists protested against what they saw as the predetermined destruction of one of this country's last wild beaches, at Karadere.

When you are in Burgas, do visit The Cucumber. It is still officially Block 77, though the whole housing project is now called Lazur, or Azure, which the post-Communists found to be less charged than Tolbuhin. The thoroughfare in front used to be the Karl Marx Boulevard. Now it is called Democracy. The Cucumber still proudly stands and is still home to hundreds of families. Unlike similar developments in the West, the area has not become an urban nightmare. It has not been overrun by crime, drugs, prostitution and filth. In fact you would be advised to take a longish walk around the whole of The Cucumber and then repair to one of the street level cafes.