Iron Curtain rises on beautiful, affordable Bulgaria

15.4.2007
PLOVDIV, Bulgaria - "We must inform the police about you," said the desk clerk at my hotel.
For a moment, I was gripped with long-dormant, behind-the-Iron-Curtain paranoia. Then I noticed the pleasant young woman was smiling and rolling her eyes.
"It's a stupid rule left over from the old days," she said as she jotted down information from my passport. "Nobody even reads these. We got rid of the socialists, but it's not so easy to get rid of the bureaucracy."
I had come to Bulgaria because there's a growing consensus among travel aficionados that the Balkan nation is poised to become the next big thing in European tourism - this year's Croatia. My verdict: It's still a little ways off - maybe the next big thing after the next big thing. For now, it's a compellingly fascinating, unspoiled, off-the-tourist-grid destination for slightly adventurous travelers.
Formerly one of the Soviet Union's more reliable allies, it hasn't been as quick as Slovenia or the Czech Republic to slough off its grim and stodgy Eastern Bloc reputation. To many in the West, it still brings to mind poisoned umbrellas, papal assassination conspiracies, and female Olympic weightlifters who looked like Ernest Borgnine in drag. But that image is rather outdated - sometimes spectacularly so.
Roughly the size of Ohio, the country is blessed with an abundance of the things that call us to Europe. During my week there, I gazed at haunting medieval frescoes in thousand-year-old churches, sipped surprisingly good wines in sidewalk cafes, poked around well-preserved Roman ruins, and passed through rural villages where horse-drawn carts still trundle down cobbled lanes. There was so much to see that I never made it to the sun-baked beaches on the Black Sea coast.
It took only a few minutes in a sidewalk cafe to puncture one stereotype. On the busy pedestrian boulevard that runs north from Stefan Stambolov Square, the young women of Bulgaria's second-largest city, who all seem to look like models, doll themselves up in skin-tight outfits that reveal a provocative amount of flesh and strut up and down the street as if it were a fashion-show runway.
The boulevard is officially known as Knyaz Aleksandar, but everyone calls it "Vanity Street."
Like its neighbors, Bulgaria continues to turn westward. It's already a member of NATO, joined the European Union this year and plans to adopt the euro. That's likely to give the sluggish economy a jolt, but Bulgaria is that rarest and most precious of things - a corner of Europe where the dollar still swaggers.
I'd just arrived from London, and never have I gone so rapidly from pauper to prince.
For the price of a windowless monk's cell in London, I got an enormous suite decorated in elegant Bulgarian Revival style. For what I paid to go two stops on the London Underground, I got a first-class seat on a train ride halfway across the country. A steak-and-fries lunch in a fashionable cafe cost the equivalent of $3.50; a bottle of local Cabernet Sauvignon in a white-tablecloth restaurant was $6; two big scoops of Bulgarian gelato (not quite as good as Italian) cost 80 cents.
While euros are frequently accepted at hotels, the official currency is the lev, about 1.5 to the dollar.
I was startled to learn that, even at these agreeably low prices, I was paying much more than a Bulgarian. At hotels, restaurants and tourist attractions, foreigners are charged three or four times the local price. Then again, white-collar workers earn only about $200 a month.
Almost immediately I discovered the challenge of traveling independently. In the dreary railway station in the capital, Sofia, everything was written in Cyrillic. Eventually, I happened upon the right ticket window, and by circling phrases in the back of my Lonely Planet guide, bought my ticket and found my way to the right platform.
Dining was a little easier. For some reason, none of the translations in my guidebook matched anything I found on menus. But a few waitresses spoke enough English to help me, and one restaurant had a Denny's-style menu with helpful pictures of the dishes. Mostly, though, I resorted to pointing at what I wanted on the plates of neighboring diners. It worked well enough, with one memorable exception - I think it was a sauteed spleen - that the waitress willingly took back to the kitchen.
Sightseeing was no trouble. A 10-minute walk from Vanity Street, I found another outdoor cafe with a view more to my wife's approval: It sits on the top row of a remarkably intact, 6,000-seat Roman amphitheater.
There's an amazing reason why it's so well preserved: Nobody knew it was there for 1,500 years. Built in A.D. 117, the amphitheater was sacked by Attila the Hun in the fifth century, then covered in dirt and forgotten until a landslide exposed it in 1972.
Mostly I spent my days ambling along the cobblestone lanes of the city's Old Town, passing beneath timbered houses with upper stories that leaned over both sides of the street, almost meeting in the middle. I stopped to listen to a grizzled organ grinder and poked around the hilltop ruins of Nebet Tepe, a Thracian village built in the third century B.C. and redeveloped by the Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines, Bulgars and Turks.
In Western Europe I'd have to share these sites with milling hordes following their tour guides, but here I had them nearly to myself.
Five hours away by train, Veliko Tarnovo, the ancient capital, may be the most spectacular and romantic setting in Eastern Europe.
At the Hotel Gurko, the manager led me through the establishment's mehana - a wood-paneled tavern - and up four flights of stairs to my top-floor room. With a flourish, he threw open the door to the balcony, and I gasped.
Above a horseshoe bend in the meandering gorge of the Yantra River, the colorful tile-roofed houses spilled down steep cliffs to the river bank. The Romanesque facade of the State Art Museum shined on the opposite bank. Rarely have I had such an enchanting view from a hotel balcony - certainly never from a room that cost only $48.
In backpacker circles, Veliko Tarnovo is getting a "next Prague" buzz. There's not much of a cafe scene, and the bookstore I came across was devoid of customers. But Stefan Stambolov Street - every town seems to have a thoroughfare named after the man called "the Bulgarian Bismarck" - was lined with clubs including "Mosquito" and "Scream Club" pumping throbbing Euro-disco music into the night.
At the far end of town, the imposing remains of the Tsarevets Fortress cover a hilltop above another horseshoe bend in the river. The home of 22 successive kings during the Second Bulgarian Empire in the 12th and 13th centuries, it once held 400 houses, 18 churches and monasteries, and a 48,000-square-foot palace. A lot of what was left was foundations and toppled stone walls.
Traveling around the country, I kept coming across the two faces of Bulgaria. For example, I was thrilled to pay only $7.50 for a first-class seat on a five-hour train ride - until I discovered I was going only 150 miles, a distance a French TGV train can cover in less than an hour.
In Sofia, a couple of blocks separated the country's socialist past from its capitalist present.
On Maria Luisa Street, the former five-story TSUM department store is a glitzy, high-end mall filled with all the usual labels: Lancôme, Givenchy, Dior, Bulgari, Timberland and Nautica. Shelves are filled with 60-inch Sony plasma screens. Fashionably dressed men and women in their 20s and early 30s gabbed on mobile phones as they rode the escalators.
Two blocks away, the Zhenski Pazar - "the ladies' market" - covers several blocks, with rattling streetcars passing by. Walking there from the mall feels like crossing Checkpoint Charlie in Cold War-era Berlin: On the other side, it was still 1970, with old men in ill-fitting brown suits and women wearing scarves.
The concrete buildings lining the street were dark and dreary. But the produce and meat for sale in the stalls were fresh and abundant, and, judging by the bulging plastic bags these retired socialists toted, they could afford plenty of it.
I saved for last Bulgaria's most revered and iconic site: the Rila Monastery in the craggy mountains above Sofia. It dates to 927, when a Bulgarian Orthodox saint named Ivan Rilski (St. John of Rila) chose a hermit's life in a dank cave. His students built a complex nearby that grew into the fortresslike monastery, a UNESCO World Heritage site and Bulgaria's most-visited tourist attraction.
I hired an English-speaking guide and a driver and got there early, before the crush of tour buses arrived.
The four-story cloistered walls that surround a granite-slab courtyard hold quarters for 300 monks and a kitchen to feed pilgrims - with a cauldron large enough to hold a cow.
In the courtyard stands the striped, triple-domed Church of the Nativity. Its outer arcades are covered with spooky murals depicting demons torturing naked wrongdoers, mostly dishonest shopkeepers and adulterous women.
Inside the church, the scent of frankincense filled the air, and candlelight flickered on gilded icons and paintings of gaunt and haunting Orthodox saints. Somewhere, I was told, are the mummified remains of St. John, but I never saw them.
As I was leaving, a convoy of buses filled the parking lot, and noisy throngs of tourists assembled around their tour guides. I was thankful I'd gotten a step on everyone else and enjoyed the monastery - as I did all of Bulgaria - before the crowds showed up.
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Discovering Bulgaria

You can fly to Sofia, Bulgaria's capital, from Philadelphia International Airport, with one stop, on British Airways, Lufthansa and US Airways. The lowest recent round-trip airfare was about $1,700.

Getting around

Bulgaria has a good rail network, with fares that are eye-openingly cheap. Upgrading to first class usually costs less than $1. Trains are in fairly good condition and usually depart on time, although they don't always arrive punctually. And they tend to be slow. Buses are faster and about the same price, but less comfortable and scenic.

Things to do

Any hotel or tour operator in Sofia can arrange a day tour to Rila Monastery, which takes six to seven hours. I paid $115 for a private tour.

For information

BulgariaTravel.org, www.bulgariatravel.org.
The Lonely Planet guide was indispensable, especially with transliterations of city names and menu items in Cyrillic.

- John Flinn - SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
http://www.philly.com/