Bulgaria 3: Plovdiv

The pensioners'  'gymnastics' class at the Jewish Community centre in Plovdiv, Bulgaria is a crowded affair.  Broom handles are laid out on chairs in a large high ceilinged room, and despite looking like they might be for tap dancing, I realise that massaging finger joints and reaching arms to the ceiling are more the order of the day.  The women are a youthful looking lot for their years.  Anna, in her late 60s, emigrated to Israel only to come back to Plovdiv.  Others, like Rivka looks 75 but is actually 90.  She used to run the class herself.  Rifka's husband is the cantor at the synagogue because, she says, he is the only one left who reads Hebrew well enough.  They rarely open the synagogue but still make a show of a minyan on important holidays.   In the adjoining room the chat buzzes along with plates of boicos (cheese pastries) and salad served to the pensioners.  Not everyone is officially Jewish (quite a few have Jewish fathers, or perhaps even more tenuous connections) but like elsewhere in Bulgaria, numbers make it an inclusive community.  The religious side of things seems to be expansive.

The same goes for Sofia.  The beautiful main synagogue, the third largest in Europe, stands towering over my hotel is a focus for community life.   At the succah meal after the shabbat service I chat to a few women as we sit on separate tables.  The Chabad House's director's wife, from Israel, who has been a number of people, mainly the older generation .  From visiting religious Israelis,  the religion is passed down via the mother But for the decayed stucco frontage and everyone nodding for no, and shaking their head for yes this could be Finchley Road on a Sunday outing for Jewish pensioners.

I hand them a pcture of my grandmother and mention my father's family name to see if anyone can remember them.  all the various staff who smile and help out.    But there can't be more than a few hundred jews here, 5000 in the whole of Bulgaria (it's an inclusive community - if your father was jewish, well that's good enough for most people).

I sometimes wonder whether staying flexible has been the watchword of the Bulgarian Jews who stayed in the country after 1947.  That was when (until the early 50s about) the vast majority of Bulgaria's 50,000 Jews were told - you're free to go.  Helped by American payments and a new state's gratitude for their salvation from the worst of Nazi extermination, the Bukos, the Meyers, the Lilyas, the Chanas of Sofia, Plovdiv, Bourgas, Kustendil and all the little towns where Jews had lived since Byzantine times got on trains like my mother and ships to Israel, or like my father boarded rickety old boats bound for Palestine, sometimes caught by the British and being interned in Cyprus before partition in 1947.

So here I am.  In Plovdiv, the second city, where my family lived in the centre of the old city.  In big compounds of houses, long ago split up into tiny flats by the communists.  The Jewish centre is a vibrant place.  Old men with serious faces sit playing Bellot (a french card game popular in Bulgaria, like an easier version of bridge) in the afternoon, and old women looking tremendously youthful chat over free snacks for gymnastics, sukkah and all sorts of other activities for the whole community.

Sofia Part 1 - Planes, crossings and the business of the Old School

When I'm met at Sofia airport by my mother's friend Andrei, dressed neatly in a grey suit, waistcoat and carrying an umbrella like he has walked off the set of a 1950s James Stewart film, I feel underdressed.  Jeans just are not appropriate for an airport meeting now.  This is my first lesson in cultural differences.   Hospitality.  What I had thought was the Bulgarian culture of my youth was in fact a dilution.  Something brought by a group of people who dragged their customs from Bulgaria, sheep dipped them in the Israeli way of life and then walked with them to England.  The grilled red peppers, tripe soup and arguments over card games came along but a whole lot more stayed behind.

demonstration outside ministerial building

Andreii, despite being a pensioner spirits away my suitcase and does not let me touch it again until he has heaved it up two flights or stairs in my hotel (the receptionist smiles alot, watches his heavy breathing and does nothing).   Lesson number two. Bulgarian hospitality: wonderful, warm, attentive but involves following you around in whatever you may be doing.  If you say you want to be alone, that means that you do not like them, and is considered a brush off.  This is lovely for someone with an command of the language that mostly stretches to saying national dishes and a few swearwords.  It is also very comforting to be fussed over but I do wonder the limits of this cultural attentiveness go?  A guard of honour outside my hotel room?  trying on lipstick for me?

As we walk out of the hotel, I am shown the great buildings of Sofia.  And they are great.  The parliament - which is opposite dictator Todor Z|hivkov's demolished mausoleum is a grand, but not imposing building.  When I was here in 1991 when people were filled with expectation before the first post communist  election, uniformed officers still paraded up and down here in Russian goose steps.   There is no trace of it now. As historian Vladimir Ratchinovski later tells me, when communism fell down, people wanted to get rid of a lot of things, even old historical artefacts.  Perhaps it was a feeling for brushing the slate clean and throwing it all away.   Outside the ministerial building down the road there is a small demonstration.  There are elections imminent again, and cuts, I imagine worse than the UK with an unemployment rate of 27% is a focus.

As we walk in the streets, it feels strange to hear young people speaking Bulgarian.  I've only ever heard it from the mouths of the older generation, often sprinkled with Hebrew.  It's like the two languages have played a double act together.  Both hot, vibrant and full of Bulgarian white cheese (sirineh), interspersed with watermelon and dates.

Andrei tells me about his skype chats to his son in New Jersey, and how his sons familly prefer to vacation in the Carribean rather than to come back to Sofia for Christmas.  As another bulgarian friend tells me later 'all the smart people are out'.  That is only one point of view of course, but it begins to become clear over the next week that there are an awful lot of older generation who have sons and daughters working abroad.  Some make money and then come back.  Others like Hristo and Mila, a handsome young couple who came from the same small town only to meet, incredibly, in the UK, never want to return.  'I hate the politicians - they are all corrupt I'm never going back' .    People like Nelly a bubbly 65 year old, still working hard who looks 10 years younger have formed little support groups - parents who vow to look after each other in the place of sons and daughters who are abroad.

When I get back to the hotel, the woman at the desk says wait a minute, and then hangs out of the window to smoke a cigarette.   She must be related to the woman in the shoe shop who, after my poor attempts at saying excuse me, shouts 'I can't understand anything you're saying, go away'.  In 1991 I remember going into a shop that looked a bit like a classroom with a few boxes and coat rails.  The only thing they sold were blue coats, in one size only.  They were quite good blue coats actually. Since they were my size and the coat cost the equivalent of 50p I was delighted.  Now I'm beginning to think that old habits die hard.  This is despite the hoardings by the tram sponsored by the Be Happy sushi chain and the zebra crossing sporting a sign reading 'Volvo believes life is precious' .  

apartment block in Sofia suburb Krasno Selo, Mt Vitosha in the background

The other side of the coin are people like Gregor and his family, who work 10 hour days as standard, are immersed in business culture and aspire to making bulgaria a contender in the European Union.  They tell me about pollution, recycling, but don't talk about unemployment.  They tell me of skiing, take out their iphones to play with apps, and almost have emblazoned on their foreheads 'focus'.  These are the same people who put their children in schools like the one I saw in Plovdiv, where parents pay for a better education, and the steps leading up to classrooms are painted with sentences in English, like 'how much does it cost' and 'where is the library?'.

Behind it all, somewhere, is big business, like the placard on the zebra crossing that says 'Volvo supports a safe life'

Focus, freedom vs poverty and absence.  This is a land, like so many others, of contrasts, and I know I'm only beginning to skim on the surface. 

Prologue: Finding Vitosha?

On 8 June, along with a stag party, some Brits with properties in Varna and plenty of Bulgarian nationals living in the UK, I booked an easy jet flight to Sofia, capital of Bulgaria.


My mission which I chose to accept: to find my roots; to publicise the little known story of the salvation of most of the Bulgarian Jews from the Nazis.  My expectation: to walk through a romantic little story I'd heard as a child.  In this tableau Orlando Bloom lookalike jews like my grandfather run through bombed out train stations looking for my grandmother (aka Salma Hayek) and end up in each other's arms.  Orlando Bloom gets malaria in a labour (but not death) camp but after some tough negotiation in 1943 by politician Christian Bale, Bishop Liam Neeson and King John Hurt they save the jews from the Nazis, supported by a brave and kind populace.  In the epilogue they all stand on the quayside in 1948 waving the jews goodbye as they board rickety old boats leaving for Palestine to build a new land.  

Ok, there is some truth in the story.  In fact quite a lot but Hollywood hasn't come to the Balkans just yet.  Despite finding a relative who looks a lot like Angelina Jolie this is a living breathing country.  It is full of cracked pavements, dilapidated facades, heroic old women, professionals working standard 10 hour days and surly shop assistants. Underneath it all, sometimes, there still lives a famous Bulgarian smile, a nod for no, and a shake of the head for yes (really).


And Vitosha?  it is the blue black mountain that stands majestically overlooking Sofia.  It is where there was a meter of snow one day and warm autumn sunshine the next.  Where there is also a nouveau cuisine restaurant called 'Lazy' at the foot of a ski lift which was closed on the day there was Autumn snowfall.  


Come join the journey..