Jan 30, 2021
How I became Bulgarian
A walk around my new home in Sofia showed me it’s not just the British who like a pint and a fight
It turned out that I’d just danced to a song in praise of Stalin, a move which prompted uproarious laugher to my new Bulgarian friends. But the major, a slender retired police officer, wanted an even greater show of allegiance to my new — temporary — home. So with beer fuelled gusto I’d led the bar in a sweary chant about one of my country’s biggest heroes.
Fuck Churchill!
Fuck Churchill!”
The crowed went wild. At this point I should probably include a paragraph about the post WWII partition of Europe, and how the Cold War isn’t remembered uniformly across the former Warsaw Pact countries. But to be honest I was too pissed at that stage to remember anything people said to me.
Once more, this time with even more feeling: “Fuck Churchill!!!”.
The bar erupted again.
It was only after I’d given a lusty rendition of God Save the Queen ( the Sex Pistols version, of course), with the boozed-up locals particularly happy to hear me sing that Liz had “no future”, that I could sit back down.
Welcome to Bulgaria
It was a heady introduction to the local culture. And, as with all good nights, I’d only gone out for a quiet pint.
The bright fall sunshine had beckoned me out of my Sofia apartment so I went to explore the area I’d moved in a few days earlier: Nadezhda, a gritty working class area a few metro stops north of Sofia’s central district.
My afternoon stroll was a few weeks before the country’s second lockdown, which shuttered everything bar takeaways and grocery stores, but the streets were already empty of life.
The first stages of COVID had knocked the heart out of the economy, Bulgaria was the poorest country in the EU before corona and the country was now on its economic uppers with one third of the shops already shut. I decided to check out the local bars.
Or at least what passed for bars in this part of Sofia. Most were just normal grocery shops with a few plastic chairs scattered outside occupied by a mixture of mostly older men and women.
Bargain booze
The booze they were drinking was cheap. A 500ml bottle of local beer costs 1.2 lev (roughly 75 cents), a plastic cup of surprisingly drinkable Bulgarian wine a mere 50 stotinki. But mostly people drank vodka, whiskey or rakia, the fiery local brandy. And they drank it everywhere, huddled together on the streets, outside kiosks or in the makeshift bars.
It reminded me of a conversation I’d had with a wizened expat in a Vientiane bar 12 months earlier. He’d told me that everything had gone up in price over the 20 years he’d lived in Laos, except for the beer.
His conspiratorial explanation was that the country’s communist government kept its grip on power by keeping the population drunk. A plausible argument, and if true it was a policy that appeared to have been implemented by successive Bulgarian governments.
I wandered into the cafe, after hearing loud music, and signs of life that absent from the first few places I’d stepped into. The interior was full of the same plastic chairs, and tables I’d seen elsewhere, the surfaces pockmarked with plastic drinking cups, half-full of cigarette butts.
I’d been to fancier bars but few as friendly —novelty value went a long way in these parts, and apart from the Syrians running the nearby kebab store, and a smattering of Chinese running an import/export business, I was the only foreigner about. And the other interlopers didn’t drink.
Making friends
I plonked myself down at the nearest table. The men sat there had no English, but they made me welcome after I’d put a few beers down to share. Shortly after Pawel approached.
He’d lived in England and told me he liked the English because they had helped him when he got sent to prison in the UK. His Bulgarian friends had apparently shunned him after his arrest.
It was an unconventional start but we quickly became friends. He drank vodka, I smashed down pilsner and we started to reminisce about life in England. We had both been forced out, but for different reasons. His legal, mine — well, that’s another story.
The conversation soon turned melancholy and we exchanged pictures of former girlfriends who were no longer with us. Pawel showed me a photo of a beautiful Zambian woman who had sadly succumbed to cancer and I responded with a picture of a vibrant Californian ex who had decided to take her own life.
And I’ll never find out why.
Fight! Fight! Fight!
The hours passed in a series of toasts and Bulgarian drinking songs but then the atmosphere changed. A shout went up and a pair of drinkers started exchanging vicious blows. A Roma guy I’d bought a beer earlier for had insulted another drinker’s mother and now it was fighting time. Foolishly I stepped in to try and break the fight-up.
A heavy hit of booze, cut with my own stupidity told me the two scrapper’s small stature meant I could sort the issue out. I gripped the shoulders of the older pugilist in an attempt to drag him away, but while he was in his sixties, his near three-score years of hard manual graft meant he strong. He easily brushed me away.
I came to my senses and retreated to the side of the bar to watch the fight pan-out, escaping with just bruised pride.
After it was over the Roma guy came over and shook my hands, too late I saw he had sustained a big cut, bright red blood was oozing out, and as I pulled my fist away a huge splodge of it fell onto my newly laundered trousers. My first night in a Bulgarian bar and I had blood on my clothes.
A few seconds later Pawel came up to me and gripped me in a crushing bear hug: “My friend, you have been in a fight — you are Bulgarian now.”
