Any definition of a city rests upon the distinction between locals and aliens. The striking thing about Sofia is that these roles are confused. The city's population has grown to almost 200 times its size in the last 130 years, meaning that one third of Sofiotes today are first-generation migrants and another third second-generation. Half of the 20 000 inhabitants at the end of the Ottoman period were Turks who had fled the advancing Russian army in 1877. Nowadays, no one knows for sure how many people live in Sofia: officially, there are 1.2 million, although according to estimates, at least another half a million reside illegally.

As is the case with most Bulgarian cities, the authorities are remarkably inexact about the real number of residents. However, in other cities, official figures are usually higher than reality. On one hand, indefinite numbers of people work abroad for years without officially cancelling their registration; on the other hand, municipalities have an interest in maintaining higher figures when attracting funding from national and European projects. Sofia has the opposite problem: being by far the biggest city in the country (Plovdiv is second with under 400 000 inhabitants), it does not need to promote its size. On the contrary, the bigger the figure, the more evident the lack of urban policies in the management of the city, the central part of which is unsuitable for more than 250 000 inhabitants. How can the city council account for the fact that not a single underpass has been built in the centre in the last decade, despite the population, and the number of car owners, having risen so dramatically?

The growth of Sofia is due mainly to migration. Its speed is impressive. Three years after the ethnic cleansing in 1876,^[1] the population doubled to 20 000. In the census of 1892, it had doubled again, bringing Sofia ahead of urban centres with a traditionally important role in the empire, such as Plovdiv and Russe. Another great rush to the city occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, as forced industrialization was carried out in order to create a working class for the socialist capital. The ideological motivation for the development explains its economic absurdity: for example, the choice to construct the Kremikovzi steel plant – Romania's biggest – in the Sofia valley, rather than near a port where iron ore arrives. Finally, the collapse of agriculture and industry in the 1990s brought many thousands to the city in search of a livelihood in the growing service sector.

As a result, the status of locals has always been ambivalent. The new capital, chosen for geopolitical reasons by the Russian liberation forces after the Russo-Turkish War in 1877-78,^[2] was invaded by national elites from more prestigious parts of the country (where the national revolution had taken place and where its heroes were born). As a result, the autochthonous Bulgarian Shopi population quickly became synonymous with rudeness and backwardness. This situation was repeated in the late 1940s and 1950s, when communist ideology marginalized bourgeois (urban) elites and systematically promoted people with poor, peasant origins who were supposedly faithful to the cause. Sofia was invaded by ideological nomads – some coming, armed, straight from the woods – who evicted the rich from their flats or squeezed them into one room, accommodating themselves and their kin in the rest. For many years, it was preferable not to emphasize one's Sofia origins, and the "two grandfathers tactic", according to which a Bulgarian always has a grandfather on the good side of the vicissitudes of politics, became widespread.

Who qualifies as a native of Sofia? Must his or her ancestors have lived in the city before the Russian liberation? Or does it suffice that they settled there during the massive influx of refugees during and after the Balkan Wars (1912-13)? Would one define only pre-communist citizens as real Sofiotes, or would one include the pioneers of ideological urbanization?

There is one answer to this question that satisfies the entire country: a Sofiote is a privileged person. To consider urbanity as a status goes back to the Ottoman era, where cities, towns, and villages enjoyed special rights and paid different taxes. But even the establishment of a post-communist, liberal democratic state did not entirely abolish spatial differentiation, as is evidenced by the explosive growth of Sofia. In the last decade and a half, national institutions linked to well-paid jobs, as well as the lion's share of public investment, have all gone to the capital. To quote the author Konstantin Galabov: "We built a national theatre in Sofia at a time when Plovdiv didn't yet have a proper sewage system."^[3]

This system of urban privileges had been made official and perfected during communism. The establishment of the residence permits (equivalent to the Soviet propiska or the Chinese hukou) created what I would call "conditional mobility", in which authorities decided whether one was allowed to move from village to city. Sofia was the most difficult city to get into, where not only were there many more opportunities for employment and recreation, but where there was also a considerably higher level of supply of goods. In fact, the territorial dispositif of communist Bulgaria resembled what capitalism has created on a worldwide scale, where migrants from the Third World are subjected to the same restrictions on entering the affluent West. The parallel with the postcolonial West goes further. Originally established to allow entry only to the workforce required by the capital, the system soon became dominated by nepotism, with residence permits acquired for family reasons and marriages (often fake) accounting for half of all resettlements. Like marriage between a German and a Filipina, being from Sofia made the potential partner more desirable. It is no wonder, then, that Sofiotes are hated by their fellow citizens: "There are two countries," one often hears. "Sofia and the rest." It might seem paradoxical that a city with such a low sense of local identity maintained such a high degree of privilege. But perhaps this is only logical, since privilege compensates for lack of cultural cohesion and civic ethos.

Home ownership and immobility

As in the rest of the country, nine out of ten people in Sofia own the home they live in (unlike in the former GDR, for example, home ownership in Bulgaria was as high during communism as it is today). A similar proportion consider it self-evident to keep the same flat for life and see their children inherit it; to sell property is considered somehow to be an evil. The real-estate market, abolished under communism in 1948, has been slow to come into motion. People find excuses not to sell: they waited for prices to go up first with Nato accession (2004), then with EU accession (2007). Well, prices did go up, but there was no property boom. Typically, elderly persons would live in extreme poverty, turning off the central heating in all but the bedroom, and obstinately refusing to sell their bigger flat and buy a smaller one.

This means that even after 15 years of "transition", the spatial expression of new social inequalities has been slow to take shape. In the same block of flats, one finds growing differences in income, culture, and expectations; rarely is it possible to convince all owners to pay for the re-plastering of the façade (making much of the city look as if it had been subject to air raids). From the outside, it is possible to single out the rich owner who has covered his floor with a strip of brand-new stucco; it is said that burglars identify their targets according to the estimated price of the window frames.



For many people, home ownership is the last resort against the degradation inflicted by the social upheaval of the 1990s – as research conducted by the Social Democratic Institute in 2001 concluded. Even when they cannot afford to maintain it, their own lodging maintains the illusion that the effects of "transition" could still be reversed and their status retrieved. Moreover, legislation takes into account this identitarian aspect of property, making it extremely cheap to possess crumbling real estate, untended wasteland, or rusty cars.

One might say, then, that urbanity as status, along with status-conferring property, creates the unsettled, fluid social identities of Sofia's inhabitants. Even the national intelligentsia has failed to create its own standards or hierarchies and has always depended on foreign legitimation. The aristocracy was slaughtered in the fourteenth century, while the bourgeoisie, destroyed by communists, was re-engineered in the 1990s by the conflicting processes of restitution and privatization. If social position is unstable then only one thing remains: spatial location. It is as if places, not people, have rights, culture, even political will.

Family relations would also account for this strange mixture of demographic mobility with the patriarchal ideal of sedentarism. Children are expected to live near their parents. In the countryside, the son would normally build a storey over his parents' house or an extension beside it. In Sofia this is not so easy: families often try to find flats in the same block or at least in the same neighbourhood. The point is to be able see the parents several times a week, to leave the child with them, to bring pots of warm food and tinned winter supplies, to return empty bottles – in short, to maintain an intensive exchange. The energy needed to break this type of relationship is considerable. Parents will hardly understand why their child wants go to the other side of the city. To emancipate themselves, younger generations need to do more, to leave the country altogether. Moving to Canada can seem easier than moving flat.

One might see the fixation on property from the perspective of frontier-style urbanization. When the Turks were expelled, their houses were destroyed to prevent them returning and the plots were occupied by Bulgarians. It seemed as if real-estate relations would be regulated at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the influx of refugees from Thrace and Macedonia again created a pioneer spirit of settlement. An entire district (Koniovitza) was occupied by settlers in the early 1920s. They are said to have tossed a coin for plots, and even designed streets and squares on their own, keeping out the police with barricades. The law stated that no house that had a roof could be destroyed, so the settlers would work all night, starting at the top, and the next morning confront the authorities with a fait accompli.

The communist nationalization of big urban property carried out in the late 1940s in the guise of revolutionary fervour concealed the desire of the new upwardly mobile class to elbow its way onto the urban scene. During those four decades, the main concern was to keep what you have and if possible acquire more, not for yourself but for your children: by law, one family could have one flat of a maximum of 120 square meters (the communist middle class put their children on the waiting list at the moment they were born). It seemed completely irrational to sell property, since the function of money was limited and there was no guarantee one would be allowed to reinvest in real estate. In fact, selling was seen as pure loss and the only transactions done willingly were barters.

Property markets in "lumpencapitalism"

After 1989, new property passions shook Sofia. Restitution acted like a lottery in which distant relatives became rich overnight, others engaged in Punic wars to get back their due, and shiny jeeps turned up outside shabby blocks. The procedure was intentionally complicated, allowing lawyers to charge up to 20 per cent of the price of the restored property; quarrels between heirs lasting years let expensive downtown properties fall into decay. These heirs were neither necessarily active nor suited to business; they tended to be elderly persons, marginalized by the regime for their bourgeois origins, with little experience in public life. As a result, in the 1990s, Sofia was covered with flower shops, boutiques, and art galleries supposed to fulfil the promise of a humane, neighbourly capitalism. Privatization shook the city even stronger. For money-laundering purposes, visible signs of economic activity had to be put up: meaning more flower shops, boutiques, and art galleries popped up around the city.

An immediate result of the change was the spontaneous adaptation of socialist planned space to the emerging jungle of "lumpencapitalism". Take the common case of the garage cum shop. It necessarily has no warehouse and thus offers an extremely limited choice of articles. The salesperson will often ask you to wait while they hop over the street to fetch what you want. This became a style; even today, it is impossible to find a shop in Sofia that has its entire stock in all sizes – one usually buys whatever is displayed in the shop window, which acts as a warehouse.

Everywhere one sees signs of "architectural folklore", where someone will transform the ground floor into an office or café, open doors and windows in the block, re-design the façade, add a separate staircase, surround it with a small private garden fenced off from the communal one. On top of this is the spontaneous privatization of sidewalks by restaurants using flowerpots, or the encircling of parking lots by chains. Wild markets appear, are tolerated for a few years, and are finally regulated when some tax and control is imposed on the traders. Some stay on, the more adventurous move on, pushing back the frontiers of the marketplace yet further.

Such a radical market is now to be seen on the bed of the river Perlovetz (a sewage channel, in fact), where second-hand or stolen goods, fake brands, or copied discs are sold outside of the normal territory of the city – the cement bed of Perlovetz is designed to be under the water in times of flood. The most exotic commercial installations are the so-called "crouch-shops", where a cellar is used to ply a trade (usually in cigarettes, alcohol, and food), and where one needs to crouch down in order to interact with the salesperson. An American visitor was fascinated by the way the buyer bows down before the seller. Is this the remnant of real socialism, where the customer was at the mercy of the supplier?





The laissez-faire ideology behind all this activity is linked to the need to legitimate the primitive accumulation of capital, which supposedly needs less regulation (though curiously enough, regulation proved to be fairly long-lived). Obviously, this process is perceived as a sign of corruption: the municipality of Sofia is known to be the most corrupt place in the country. And if neighbourhood appropriations of space create irritation, it is the bigger appropriations that enrage public opinion. Ugly commercial high-rises turn up on heritage sites; the biggest scandal was over the so-called Millennium Centre, for which the city library had to make way. Petrol stations have been built in parks, making Sofia drivers the best supplied in the country. A common practice in the new construction business is building "rooftop architecture", in other words, adding up to five storeys hidden under the roof to evade various regulations. With the approach of the EU accession, the city came to resemble a construction site, with entrepreneurial spirit being fuelled by the swelling real-estate bubble. Permanent construction activity had been one of the leitmotifs of communism; piles of sand on the pavements, the drone of cement mixers, and workers sitting around with beers constantly accompanied urban life. Now the sites are screened off and workers drink their beers at home; still, it is rare to find a street where something is not about to be constructed.

Opposition to planning

There have been various attempts to impose a plan on Sofia. The most comprehensive of them, designed by the German architect Adolf Mussmann in 1938, was invalidated by the war and later declared fascist. Plans from communist times are often remembered negatively: how fortunate that they didn't construct the monumental Palace of Soviets opposite the House of the Party; thank heavens they didn't enlarge the central square and destroy the Palace... During the transition period, plans were regularly blocked by interest groups; when the city council finally did adopt one, it was rather vague, and by then, the important choices had already been made.

The city resists planning not unlike other Balkan cities, such as Athens or Istanbul. The traveller feels this immediately when faced with the urban mess, the cars on the pavements, the ads covering every possible inch of space, the do-it-yourself architecture. The oriental element, cleansed by communism, is slowly creeping back through restaurants, music, and seductive bodies; gypsies, chased away here, reappear there, and even the horse-driven carts I knew in my childhood can be seen on the streets again.

But it would be wrong to think that the fashioning of reality has been given up altogether. The natural state of Sofia is not rest, but permanent change, be it in aspiring towards planned order or fighting back against it. The psychological gain inherent in such a state of continual transition is that one never accepts one's fate, thus removing the need to grow up. To stop building flats for oneself and one's children, to stop converting the toilet into a closet and the balcony into a kitchen, to stop nationalizing, then privatizing, means to have to face one's place in the world and start living.

There is no memory and all signs of the immediate past are carefully erased – democrats dynamited Dimitrov's mausoleum as the authorities did with the last of the mosques after the liberation in 1877; tourist guides replace the communist past with references to Roman ruins. Why should memory block the freedom of the present to move, reinvent itself? Foreign friends often tell us that the charm of the city is in its disorder, its dirt, its chaos, in the liberty it allows to paint one's house or not to paint it, to plant roses in the yard or tomatoes. The ethos of modernization is probably the reason why we locals resist such a vision and refuse to accept that what surrounds us could be real.

Sofia is growing – who knows whether it won't soon reach the three-million mark? It flows elusively in a southeasterly direction and up the mountain, producing pleasant towered mansions and postmodern office blocks, leaving behind the ugly northern part of the city, with the one-storey houses, the misery, abandoning even its cemeteries. The city is flowing, fleeing itself. If its inhabitants have become fluid, working part time in Spain or Greece and part time at home, if they are half-way between village and city, between capitalism and state socialism, then what else could one expect than a fluid city?


This text was first published in Leap into the City. Chisinau, Sofia, Pristina, Sarajevo, Warsaw, Zagreb, Ljubljana. Cultural Positions, Political Conditions. Seven Scenes from Europe, edited by relations - a project initiated by the German Federal Cultural Foundation. www.projekt-relations.de

• ^[1] In 1876, Ottoman troops killed some 30 000 Christian inhabitants of the town of Batak. The memory of this event has become the subject of a major controversy in Bulgaria. See Ivaylo Ditchev in taz 30.04.2007 (in German): www.taz.de/dx/2007/04/30/a0173.1/text
• ^[2] Situated south of the Balkan range, Sofia was geographically part of southern Bulgaria, the major part of which was given back to the Ottomans at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. The Russians' choice to make Sofia the capital city, far from having historical or cultural justifications, was a sign that the southern parts and Macedonia would some day become part of the new Slav state.
• ^[3] Konstantin Galabov, "Psychology of the Bulgarian", in: Roumen Daskalov/Ivan Elenkov (eds.), Why Are We What We Are?, Sofia 1994, 218.

Published 2007-05-25

Original in English
Contributed by dérive
© Ivaylo Ditchev
© Eurozine