VIBRANT COMMUNITIES

Visiting monasteries in Bulgaria is one of this country's greatest delights. It is hard not to fall for their splendid scenery, beautiful old churches, naivist murals of saints and devils, smell of old wood, supposedly healing icons and sacred springs, atmosphere of bygone times and stories of medieval monks and Revival Period revolutionaries. The Rila and the Bachkovo monasteries are, understandably, inevitable, but once you have checked them out, there are scores of other places worth exploring. Here is a brief list.

From the social media uproar caused by the Paris summer olympics to the unfounded claims that a stabbing attack in England was perpetrated by a Muslim, and from the Covid-19 infodemic to former US President Donald Trump's vitriolic assails against Vice President Kamala Harris fake news rules the world. In many cases it has real consequences in real life. In fact the more heated the debate, the more facts are vulnerable to manipulation.

Juicy, aromatic and bursting with the tender sweetness that comes only after ripening under the strong Balkan sun: the tomatoes that you can find on a Bulgarian plate taste like nothing else. From salad and stews to the emblematic lyutenitsa paste, they are a staple of local cuisine and a source of pride for their supposedly unique deliciousness. The fake news that the EU was planning to ban local tomatoes enraged hundreds of thousands of Bulgarians in the 2010s and 2020s.

How long does it take to cover 125 km? In a mountain range such as the Rhodope this is a difficult question. Even Bulgarian drivers who like to fly along roads as if they were exempt from the laws of physics have to slow down a bit along the winding roads of the Rhodope.

The Septemvri-Dobrinishte narrow gauge railway redefines the concept of slow travel. It takes the 125 kilometre long route in... 5 hours.

Heroic monuments, usually to Communist guerrilla fighters, are rather a common sight in towns and villages across Bulgaria. The heroic monument in the centre of Sennik, a village in the hills near Sevlievo, depicts neither a partizanin, nor a 19th century revolutionary. The wide-chested man of bronze who stands defiantly on his trunk-like legs was a... wrestler.

Until the 1950s-1960s, Bulgaria was a rural country. The majority of Bulgarians lived in villages, as had their forefathers for centuries before. Rapid industrialisation and urbanisation under Communism sucked the life from Bulgarian rural communities. The hardships of the transition to democracy and the free economy post 1989 worsened what many see as rural depopulation.

Some wars and rebellions, like the First Sioux Wars of 1854 and the 1903 Transfiguration Uprising in Eastern Thrace, and some seemingly small events that had significant repercussions, like the results of a German referendum that approved Hitler as the Führer – 19 August as a date is not without interesting history. However, for the thousands of people who on 19 August gather, dressed in white, above Babreka Lake in the Rila mountains, the date holds special importance.

When she saw Bulgaria's "Flying Saucer," the bizarre-looking monument on top of the summit of Buzludzha in the Stara Planina mountain range, Dora Ivanova was 12. A native of Montana, formerly named Mihaylovgrad (after a local Communist functionary), she was taken to the nearby Freedom Monument at Shipka Pass and the set of monuments commemorating the 1877-1878 Russo-Turkish War by her parents. She saw the oddly-shaped Memorial House of the Bulgarian Communist Party, as its official name was, from a far distance. Her parents never bothered to do the steep drive up the mountain.

Squirrels and small children frequent unkempt alleys under towering oak and beech trees; а romantic wooden gazebo is often decorated with balloons forgotten after some openair birthday party; melancholic weeping willows hang over an empty artificial lake: it is hard to believe that one of Sofia's quietest and most delightful parks belongs to an institution inherently connected to state-sanctioned... violence. Welcome to the Military Academy.

In 1965, Dimitar Kovachev, a biology teacher from the town of Asenovgrad, was on a field trip to Ezerovo village. A previous find of a mammoth tooth from a sandy area near the village had ignited Kovachev's imagination – palaeontology was a passion of his and the region was known for its fossils from the Miocene and the Pliocene, geological periods that lasted roughly between 10 and 2.6 million years ago. So he was there, with a group of students, on a hunt for more fossils.

How often do you hum, while driving or doing chores, Uriah Heep's song July Morning? Is it on your Spotify? The answers are probably "never" and "no." Uriah Heep was an English rock band that was formed in 1969, named after Charles Dickens's infamous character. It did make a name for itself in the 1970s, but remained largely unknown.

Bulgaria has its fair share of intriguing caves, from the Devil's Throat underground waterfall to Prohodna's eyes-like openings and the Magura's prehistoric rock art. One of the most interesting of these, however, would not be of much interest to a caver as it is neither large, nor deep or covered in stalactites. This cave is interesting for its role as a sacred place in the lives of generations of people, as well as its remoteness on the Bulgarian-Turkish border.

Owing to its geological history, the Rhodope mountain range – in contrast to the nearby Rila and Pirin – lacks any impressive Alpine-style lakes. However, where nature erred, man stepped in. In this case the Rhodope man-made lakes, or reservoirs, are worthy of attention as some have even become tourist and holiday spots.

"We are fascists, we burn Arabs": the youngsters start chanting as soon as they emerge from the metro station and leave the perimeter of its security cameras. Their voices grow stronger with each step in the dark streets of the relatively central Sofia neighbourhood. Then they gradually disperse, still ecstatic after a protest provoked by an alleged attack by a group of Arab migrants on Bulgarian teens on Vitosha Boulevard.

The names of foreigners, mainly Russians, are common across the map of Sofia – from Alexandr Dondukov and Count Ignatieff to Alexey Tolstoy (a Communist-era Soviet writer not to be confused with Leo Tolstoy) who has a whole housing estate named after him. An understandable situation. After Bulgaria's Liberation as a result of the 1877-1878 Russo-Turkish War, the new nation was eager to express its gratitude to the Russian Empire, its diplomats and administrators who had laid the foundations of the modern Bulgarian state.

Picturesque old houses lining a narrow river and tiny shops selling hand-made sweets, knives and fabrics: The Etara open air museum recreates a charming, idealised version of mid-19th century Bulgaria.

Christ was an alien. Or if He was not, then four centuries ago there were UFOs hovering over what is now southwestern Bulgaria.

If you believe the hype, evidence that aliens visited us in the past, probably inspiring Christianity, exists hidden in plain sight. In a church. In Bulgaria. A fresco in a 17th century church in the Dobarsko village is said to represent Christ in a space rocket, in the Transfiguration scene.

Unlike other countries in Central and Eastern Europe, which removed, stashed away or demolished most remnants of their Communist past as early as the 1990s, Bulgaria is a curiosity. It continues to maintain at least a dozen monuments to the Red Army. Some are gargantuan and placed in various top locations in bigger cities, some are small and unobtrusive. Urbexers and lovers of quaint and bizarre trivia will be bemused to discover that none of these remnants of the Communist past in actual fact commemorate any... real-life story.

Agroup of friends meet each summer at the seaside, a small community who know one another so well that boredom becomes inevitable, and so do internal conflicts. And death. The script of The Big Night Swim, a movie that premiered in 1980, sums up what existential angst and ennui looked like in Communist Bulgaria, or at least in Communist Bulgaria's "intellectual elite." Significantly, the movie was shot at a relatively remote location the village of Varvara.

Descendants of millennia-old rites, the scary kukeri, or mummers, are the best known face of Bulgarian carnival tradition. Gabrovo's carnival is its modern face: fun, critical, and colourful.

It usually takes place in the third weekend of May and is a part of an international festival organised by the Gabrovo city council and the town's House of Humour and Satire, probably the only museum in the world dedicated to... fun.