WHAT'S IN A NUMBER PLATE?

C is for Sofia, A stands for Burgas and EH belongs to... Pleven. Confused at this early stage already? Welcome to the bizarre workings of the minds of Bulgarian officials in general and of Bulgaria's notorious traffic cops in particular. How could this EU member state manage to end up in so many and such big messes in such a short time?

In most European countries, licensing cars is a pretty straightforward business. Number plates usually reflect the year of the first registration, or the province where the car's owner resides, or sometimes they give out nothing at all except a unique combination of letters and numbers detectable by the traffic authorities and the police.

Theoretically, they should give out meaningful information in Bulgaria as well. But try to find out what an Y stand for on a local number plate and then think of the TX on another, and you are bound to see that not even number plates in this country are produced the way things are done elsewhere.

Let's start with the regional indicator. In Bulgaria, a number plate does hold information about the place of the vehicle's registration, marked by the first one or two letters on the plate. When you try to decipher them, however, you hit a wall. Some of the number plates begin with the first letter of the district, although they are pronounced differently in the Cyrillic and the Latin script: C signals Sofia, B is for Varna, X indicates Haskovo and P means Ruse. More bafflement ensues with number plates bearing H for Shumen, A for Burgas, E for Blagoevgrad and so on and so forth.

Until 1992, Bulgarians number plates were easy to read, if one was familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet. Burgas was Б, Pazardzhik was Пз, Sofia District was Cф. The system was abandoned in 1992  for a reason. At least hypothetically, with Communism gone Bulgarian cars could travel abroad freely and foreign administrations should be able to read their number plates without struggling with exotic letters like П, Л or Б. So, Bulgaria accepted to use in its number plates only letters shared by the Cyrillic and the Latin alphabets, in an attempt to make the best of two worlds, one being the Vienna Convention (by which number plates should consist only of Latin letters and Arabic numerals) and the Bulgarian Constitution (which mandates Bulgarian to be the official language in this country).

In the real world, however, the Traffic Police were left with a very limited choice of А, В, Е, К, М, Н, О, Р, С, Т, Х and У.

Б, Г, Д, Ж, З, И, Й, Л, П, Ф, Ц, Ч, Ш, Щ, Ю and Я were ditched.

For what the number plates say, the following principle was applied: the regional code should include a letter that corresponds with the Bulgarian name of the region, regardless of how that letter sounds in the two alphabets. This is why C is for Sofia (the letter C is an S in Bulgarian), P is for Ruse (the letter P is an R in Bulgarian) and X is for Haskovo (the X being an H in Bulgarian).

The only regional codes where the pronunciations in both alphabets coincide are K (for Kardzhali), M (for Montana) and T (for Targovishte).

It gets even more confusing when you reach the point when two regions share the same first letter, like Sofia, Shumen and Silistra; Burgas and Blagoevgrad; Ruse and Razgrad; Pleven and Plovdiv, and so on. In such cases, what the Traffic Police decided to do is pick up the first letter in the name of a town that corresponds to a letter in the Latin alphabet, provided of course it is not the first letter in the name of a town that has already been named in that convention. As the B is taken from Varna (see above why), Burgas was left  with an A, as in BurgAs. BlagoEvgrad became an E. Don't ask why Blagoevgrad's number plate does not begin with an O instead. Probably to avoid confusion with the number 0.

Following this logic, now you can see why Shumen's number plates have an H: both the C, the M and the E had already been taken by Sofia, Montana and Blagoevgrad respectively.  Shumen was happy with its H, though, as in the case where all the single letters have been taken, combinations are used. Thus you have EH for PlEveN, OB for LOVech, PB for PloVdiv, PP for RazgRad, KH for KyusteNdil, and so on.

The case with regional codes CA, CB, CC and CO needs additional explanation. The CAs and the CBs were introduced when the cars registered in Sofia outnumbered the numbers (pun intended) beginning with a C. The CC, however, doesn't mark the fourth generation of registration plates in the capital. Instead, it is the regional code of SiliStra. If the number plate is red with white letters, as are all diplomatic cars in Bulgaria, the message is quite different: a white CC on a red background marks the vehicle of a consul.

CO for its part stands for Sofia Oblast, or District. People from Samokov have those.

As in all matters where the Bulgarian Traffic Police are concerned, there are  exceptions to the exceptions.

There is the У, the regional code for Yambol. First of all, У is not exactly an Y, but OK, it does resemble it closely, so with a little imaginatioin it will go down your throat with ease. If you read the name of the city transliterated with Latin letters, you would be fine. Trouble comes if you look at the city's Cyrillic name: Ямбол. No Y's there. If we apply the rule, Yambol's code should have been MO. But it isn't. Escaping (probably with screams) from their own logic, the Traffic Police have chosen a letter that resembles the first letter of the transliterated name of the city.

The most arcane example is the regional code of Dobrich, or Добрич in the Cyrillic. The Traffic Police probably have serious issues with the O being mistaken for zero and vice versa, so they chose TX instead. What?? TX for Dobrich???

As with many other things Bulgarian, when you cannot understand the present-day reality you have to seek answers in... history. Under Communism, Dobrich was called Tolbuhin, ТолбуХин, named after the Soviet marshal in the Second World War who led the Soviet invasion of Bulgaria. Hence the TX in 2026.

It should be added that if you pay, you will be able to get yet more exceptions from the exceptions – or a number plate of your choice. For example, you might want to sport a "symmetrical" number plate like TX 4004 TX, or C 666666. The more symmetrical, the more expensive. One Vagabond hint: with the right amount of money you will be able to get a number plate with no numbers on it at all. Example: BBBBBBBB.