Alaskan Bulgarian

Your Standard Bulgarian Town

When I was bouncing around the south back in June, I wrote a few entries on the road and had to jot off some lazy stuff about the things I saw. Since it's gotten to me that a temporary resident of Stamboliiski had a problem with my description of it as a "standard Bulgarian town," and since I have nothing else really to write, let me amend the brief and then describe what my idea of a standard Bulgarian town might be.

Stamboliiski is a smallish, homey 'burb a little bit outside of Plovdiv in Southern Bulgaria. Interestingly, it's divided right down the middle by train tracks, causing most of the population to cross the tracks through holes in the fence or take a grafitti-filled tunnel under the train station. Its central plaza has a mid-sized fountain, drained while I was there, and a good number of benches a person could actually sit on going around the edge. There were also, if I remember correctly, a couple of flagpoles.

Dominating one side of the central plaza is the town's chitalishte, or children's center. It's a two-level maroonish building with a columned facade and a mostly green, dark interior with pretty nice bathrooms for a public building in Bulgaria, and a room very suitable for studying Bulgarian. Outside of the plaza are a couple of shops, large grassy fields, and two-level houses wherever there aren't immense, gray apartment blocks.

On the side of the tracks opposite the plaza and chitalishte, there's a small market and a pretty nice internet club for a town of Stamboliiski's size. My time on the other side of the tracks was pretty short, so I didn't get to see too much.

Finally, Stamboliiski is said to have a city-wide cabbagey funk whenever the town's factory puts off a puff or two of chemicals. I never smelled it, fortunately.

So there you go: Stamboliiski, in my experience. If someone who has lived there wants to comment a bit more, they're more than welcome.

Now, the standard town in Bulgaria (STB) runs a bit like this:

In the center of the STB is a plaza. It could be square, trapezoidal, a rhombus, but it's always there. Sometimes there's a fountain, sometimes there's a statue, usually there's both. Somewhere along the center's lines there is always at least one governmental building. In the case of Stamboliiski, it's the chitalishte. In other cases it's the municipality, post office, or other gray, imposing communist monstrosity. In the case of Ruse, it's a giant gray obshtina in the shape of a battleship.

Expanding out from the central plaza, we usually come face to face with the STB's "historical section" where, depending on the town's age, you can find building's from the town's glory age(s). Silistra's historical section is dominated by buildings from the Romanian occupation and ruins from the Roman Empire. Stamboliiski has, again from what I saw, a collection of the gray stucco, two-level houses from the post-communist era.

Extending along, through, or around the STB's center is one of the STB's main streets. It's always the commercial street if there are multiple main streets. Along the main street, you can find most of the clothing, cell phone, and bakery shops the STB has to offer. There's usually a restaurant nearby if you look carefully. Somewhere along that street you'll often find the STB's market.

Expanding out of this main street are the smaller streets holding the STB's cafes, general goods stores, pet shops, and internet clubs. If the STB has a landmark that makes it a tourist attraction (eg. the Danube in Silistra), the street along that landmark will usually be one of the nicer streets in the city. Between the nicer streets and the main streets are the small byways and alleyways that make up the STB's apartment block complexes which inevitably make up the STB's heart.

Once you get into these block cities, everything about Bulgaria tends to look the same. The pattern on ground level is always grocery store, some kind of service shop, block entrance, repeat. People get attached to these blocks in that they know the people that live and work there, and that gives each block a unique, familial click. But to the outside observer, there isn't much there to see that's ever new.

The fascinating thing about STBs is that they each have one or two unique characteristics that set them apart from other STBs. And of course, the people living in each STB make them different. But to a guy passing through, once you know that, say, the tracks run right through the middle of town and that there's a cabbagey smell, the label gets slapped on pretty quickly.

Posted by Rob at August 9, 2004 08:31 PM