My weekend UK Arts supplement would have me believe that in the cinema world, Romania is the next Brazil. Three hard hitting films on life before and after the downfall of Communism have suddenly put Eastern Europe back on the must-see movie map.
Bulgaria's carefree environment provides expats like myself with a sense of freedom and safety rarely experienced in our home country. Especially in the countryside, life here is sometimes safer for children and teens, less complicated for adults, and harks back to Britain's admirable values of 50 years ago, where everyone “looked out” for each other. However, whilst life here is so much more straightforward and relaxed, Bulgaria trails way behind the rest of Europe in terms of health and safety.
Anyone who has spent time in Bulgaria – especially on a long-distance train ride – knows that complaining is a national pastime. As your fellow passengers gripe for hours on end about the miserable state of the country, interrupting their grumbling only to answer their state-of-the-art mobile phones and to take sips from their flasks of homemade rakiya, you may wonder: do they really have it so bad?
Crowds of nervous university applicants and anxious parents who have come from near and far, huddling together in front of faculty buildings; thousands of relatives tuning in to the national radio to hear the exam question or clutching their phones to learn whether their “boy” or “girl” has passed. Soon this is going to be a thing of the past.
Odiously for many Bulgarians, this country lags behind Turkey in terms of literacy, according to one of the most influential international surveys on the quality of education, the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA. It was conducted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.When I told a group of experts about these embarrassing results, one of them stood up and said it wasn't true. He said he was in touch with schoolchildren and they could all read and write. Besides, the United States was full of illiterates, he said.
The easiest way to drive Bulgarians crazy is to steal a piece of what they perceive as their cultural or historical heritage – even if they regard it as scrap iron.When military police arrested Germans Thomas Martin and Matheus Meier and Bulgarian army major Aleksey Petrov for smuggling a dismantled tank that had been lying half-buried along the Turkish border, Bulgarians were infuriated – especially when the media announced that this rarity was worth a million euros on the antiquities market.
Elen Koleva is young, but she's already won the National Film Centre's best female role award for her performance in Shivachki, or Seamstresses (see Vagabond No. 14). Despite her age, she has no illusions: Bulgaria won't see the likes of Hillary Clinton anytime soon, thanks to the simple fact that Bulgarian women are not treated as equal to men.
“The predicament faced by teachers here seemed outrageous to me from my very first days in Bulgaria. Apparently, the powers that be don't consider education an asset. For a country to be able to function well, it's essential to prioritise its education system. It's the young, well-educated and qualified people who can shape a country's future,” says Arnaud Joanny, a teacher at Sofia's Alphonse de Lamartine 9th French Language School. “In France, the situation is completely different.
In the summer Bulgaria became the latest EU country to introduce tougher legislation to curb what many pundits have dubbed the ongoing “War on the Roads”. Under new regulations, drivers who speed will have to pay heavy fines (up to 300 leva, or over £100) and risk having their driving licence suspended for up to three months.
Anyone who has sat behind a steering wheel in Bulgaria will supposedly heave a sigh of relief as – at least theoretically – the new measures might indeed make Bulgarian roads less dangerous. Yet many people have expressed doubts.
Changing street names might be an odd elections tactic, at least seen from a Western standpoint, but Bulgarian politicians won't stop at anything, not even digging up grandpa's grave, to discredit a political opponent. In October, the Sofia City Council, acting on a proposal by a councillor for the ruling BSP, or Bulgarian Socialist Party, passed a resolution to re-rename one of the few pieces of green in central Sofia – the square acre surrounding the Sofia Theatre.