WHERE IN BULGARIA ARE YOU?

by Stamen Manolov; photography by Anthony Georgieff

When the young Patrick Leigh Fermor – a man considered one of the 20th century great travel writers – visited this town in 1934, he stumbled upon an oddity

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The city was cosmopolitan and rather rundown, part Danubian and part post-Ottoman – a place where one could drink a huge Viennese coffee in a brightly lit coffee shop that served both Mitteleuropean cakes and pretzels, and Middle Eastern kataifi and baklava.

Today the town is again borderland – straddling not different cultures but historical periods. It mixes magnificent fin-de-siècle architecture of the time between the 1878 Liberation and the Second World War, when it was known as Little Vienna; Brutalist buildings and prefab concrete housing estates from the Communist period; and characterless new construction typical for the period of the transition to democracy and the 2000s. All this in various states of disrepair, yet amazingly vivacious and vibrant. 
 

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A bridge spanning over a turbulent whitewater river, which was constructed in such an incredible location that it was quick to gain notoriety for being otherworldly, a structure no human hand was able to accomplish without assistance from supernatural force