Can you name a famous Bulgarian writer? Don’t be misled by the two obvious choices. Elias Canetti, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981, was born in Bulgaria’s Ruse on the Danube, but left the country when he was six and wrote in German. The best-selling Elizabeth Kostova is not a Bulgarian at all – she is Bulgarianmarried. As for reading a Bulgarian book in English? No?
It is not London or Berlin, nor even Athens – even when talking about such an eloquent expression of subculture as street art. Explore Sofia's streets and you will discover that even in the outer suburbs the images are more notable for their size and colours than for their ideas. As an expression of art – as well as of everything else – during the 20 years that have elapsed since the fall of Communism, Bulgarian street artists preferred visually attractive paintings to those that might be provocative.
Often compared to Alison Krauss, Lilly Drumeva, who is one of the few bluegrass singers in this part of the world, discovered American music as a student in Vienna in 1996. A year later, in Bulgaria, she started Lilly of the West, the only bluegrass band in this country. They recorded three albums, toured Europe and won the award at the European World of Bluegrass (EWOB) Festival in the Netherlands in 1998.
From morning until evening he was walking up and down between the tables with some old rubber galoshes that he had from his village, he was cursing reedily and he was always finding something about which to argue with Elvis Presley. However Elvis Presley did not pay any attention to him, at every brickbat he replied: "That ain'ta word!" and most of the time he was playing backgammon with a guy from Yambol. The man also cursed, but in another manner.
We decided after some searching to use a recruiting agency specialising in nannies, and found one which had an English language web page.
Sitting with friends in a slick Ego pizzeria, it suddenly occurred to me that it was almost 10 years to the day since a Balkan Airlines plane made up of different coloured bits of metal first deposited me on the melting tarmac of Sofia airport to the wild applause of the passengers. In celebrating the sight of Bulgaria’s once-crumbling infrastructure, I am of course perfectly aware that this kind of "shittiness chic" so beloved of my generation of Western European travellers annoys many Bulgarians. Would I have noticed the colour of the wing metal on a British Airways flight? Probably not.