We were walking around the town and came across a small flea market. There was an old man with a tiny stall under a tree. After I’d had looked at what he had on offer I turned away, and as I did so he asked me something. I shook my head. He showed me some more things, but there was nothing I was interested in. I started to leave again. Again the question. I shake my head, he shakes the tree, some bags tumble down. It was some time and a number of bags later when I finally realised that shaking your head in Bulgaria means yes. And nodding, no, and that his entire stall was located in the crown of the tree…’

A few minutes later we are in front of the cathedral—the St. Alexander Nevski Memorial Cathedral, built to commemorate the 200,000 Russian dead in the Turkish-Russian war. The conflict resulted in Bulgarian independence from the Ottoman Empire, L reads from her guidebook. The building is circled by yellow brick roads which stretch off in all directions and turbo-capitalism is present literally in the form of a dark-windowed Mercedes shadowed by a black Hummer moving rapidly around the cathedral. Next to it is the Church of St. Sophia and the Monument to the Unknown Soldier. We don’t go in because we are drawn by a flea market across the street.

All the stands seems to be occupied by full-time dealers. Lots of communist nostalgia: uniforms, medals and decorated hip flasks. Red stars as far as the eye can see like fireworks frozen in metal. And World War II souvenirs along with old photographs, postcards and Bulgarian ‘handcrafted’ mementos. We discover that there are a remarkable number of old Leicas for sale – often “special editions”, engravings claiming that they were made for the German Luftwaffe or Wehrmacht and one which makes L’s eyes light up. It bears an inscription alleging the camera was made to commemorate the Olympic games in Berlin in 1936. Contextually this connects up with her Leni Riefenstahl photo diptych. The man behind the table says he’s selling the cameras—one in brass, one in chrome—for a friend who needs the money, which may well be true but the items themselves don’t feel authentic even though the shutter sounds about right. It’s a selling ploy in a time warp, a modern ‘special edition’ marketing concept allegedly cast back into the past, like a net for unwary customers in the present. But we’re not sure, and the price he’s asking is not so low as to make it worthwhile buying whatever the (hi)story. We decide to find out more, and go in search of dinner instead.

Later, back in the hotel, L feeds our questions about Leicas into the web and gets back a rich diversity of information about cameras and people; from those who thought they were buying a classic Leica at a ridiculously cheap price and felt cheated, to those who knew they were buying inauthentic, refurbished copies but are collecting the mail order, ‘souvenir’ cameras purporting to have historical significance as a hobby. In time they might even become ‘early versions of authentic Leica fakes, probably from last century’ in some auction catalogue of the future.

Apparently the Leica fakes are Soviet-made and have a long history. After World War I and the Russian Revolution the educationalist Anton Makarenko developed (in theory and practice) his ideas about the up-bringing of war orphans in collective institutions. By giving a group of 150 boys a technical education he was able to open a camera factory that, by 1932, was producing exact Leica II copies. These were FEDs, named after Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky who was the founder of the NKVD, the organisation that was to become the KGB. The NKVD took over control of the factory  in 1934. The cameras continued to be produced well into the 1950s. Thus it is probably these models that are refurbished,  made into Leica special edition fakes with Olympic aspirations or military intentions. There is another candidate for the honours though – the Zorki 1, produced just outside Moscow, is also a Leica II copy.