After breakfast we go for a walk, past a newspaper stand. I’m surprised at the number of different newspapers compared to the poverty of the media landscape in Austria, I wonder about the concentration or otherwise of ownership, then we go diagonally through a small park and then across the square in front of Parliament. L is still considering buying the ‘Olympic Leica’ because the very fact that it is inauthentic might allow its superficial meanings to be countered or subverted. At the very least it could open up a discursive field.
On the other side of the square there is an equestrian statue. ‘Tsar Alexander II’, says L, ‘he was the main force behind pushing the Ottoman Turks out of Bulgaria in 1878.’
We go by the EVN office and the newly re-furbished Grand Hotel Bulgaria. ‘I stayed there in 2002 when it was still typically East Bloc. A huge dining room with this staircase straight out of a 1930’s Hollywood musical. In the communist era it was off-limits for Bulgarian men. I've just read about it in Angelika Schrobsdorff’s Grandhotel Bulgaria.’
Later L reads me the passage: ‘…a restaurant to seat a hundred and twenty people; grill no. 1 with space for sixty and grill no. 2 with seating for one hundred and fifty; a red salon for sixty; a beer hall seating a hundred and eighty; a café for a hundred and fifty; a beige saloon with a bar for sixty and a saloon for eighty; a hotel bar for forty. I added it up on my pocket calculator, there was space for 895 people. That confused me somewhat. It would be best for me to go into the beige saloon, to drink a vodka in the bar for fifty and then get something eat in the restaurant with seating for a hundred and fifty. That must be the restaurant where I got my first proposal of marriage’.
Just past that there is another park containing a very strange piece of winged white marble. The base has a quotation by Ronald Regan. We slip into the shadow of some trees and sit in front of a fountain set in a square pool laid out to reflect the Ivan Vasov National Theatre. We pause for a while, talking, watching and listening. It’s different to the public parks and gardens in central Vienna. For one thing there is a group of older men—all over 50—sitting on a bench discussing something in a newspaper and since it is being waved about and gesticulations made at the front page, I don’t think it’s all about Sofia’s football team. |
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‘What did you find out about the Emerald City?’ I ask L, referring to her net cruise of last night. ‘Two new things,’ she says, ‘the first is that people saw the city as green and valuable because they were wearing green spectacles—the dollar version of rose-tinted glasses—and secondly it was probably based on the Great White City built for the Chicago Fair in 1893. It was on of the first shows of its kind to be illuminated by electricity, so it was bright white at night too.’
Coincidentally the Chicago World’s Fair was the first international event of its kind that Bulgaria took part in (a small stand with rose oil, tobacco and other products) and it also generated one of the country’s most enduring literary figures – Bai Banio, ‘hero’ of Aleko Konstantinov’s novel To Chicago and Back. After a while we wander up towards the flea market again, check the price of the Leica again, don’t get past making an opening offer and go on to discover a box with old photos. We buy some. It’s a way of meeting the family…
Then we notice a wedding party outside St. Sophia’s across the road. The bride looks Bulgarian and the groom Korean, perhaps, or Vietnamese. After watching the formal photographs being made we go into the church the wedding party has just left and find a baptism already going on. |
