NOW OPEN: BULGARIA

SOFIA, Bulgaria — Vitosha Boulevard, Sofia’s cozy version of Rodeo Drive, was bubbling with post-Communism shoppers. In the crowd cruising the Panasonic store windows, cellular phones and CD players quickened the pulses of even unreconstructed Marxists.

Then, into the scene ambled an odd duo. Both seemed to me to be in costume, but Sofians knew otherwise. They made room for a wiry Gypsy and his very real and very large brown bear, chained with a ring through its nose. For a few minutes, the bear’s jaunty dance to plunky mandolin music grabbed attention from the coveted electronics. Bulgaria’s past and the future embraced on the cobblestoned street.

Sofia is that kind of place. Bulgaria’s capital and largest city (population 1.2 million) displays its cultural confusions up front and peacefully. Forty-five years of ultra-orthodox Communism did not erase a past of gold-domed cathedrals, an imposing mosque and dancing bears. A Marlboro Man billboard has replaced the Lenin statue that loomed over Vitosha’s north end, but the uncertain drift into capitalism since 1990 has not displaced other Marxist monuments.

Beautiful and rumpled, Sofia today offers the still-authentic spectacle of Eastern European transition at astonishingly low prices and without crowds. The city is not the Westernized and tourist-mad place that Prague and Budapest have become (Sofia’s first McDonald’s opened just before Christmas, joining a sole KFC and Pizza Hut). That also means Sofia is more challenging, and ultimately more satisfying, to master than those cities. The tourism information offices are inadequate, hotel service can be spotty, the phone system is infuriating, credit cards and ATMs are pretty rare, and the sad-sack airport requires sharp elbows for crowd control. Yet, despite all that, Sofia is not as difficult a backwater as, say, Romania’s Bucharest and Albania’s Tirana remain after Communism’s collapse. The rhythms and residents of this mountain-valley city are gentler than, say, Moscow’s. Even random wandering can be a joy.

A visitor to Sofia’s compact downtown can walk among shrines of Bulgaria’s five great religions: Orthodox Christianity, Turkish Islam, Sephardic Judaism, Russian Communism and, most recent, American-style Consumerism. That odd blend rewards travelers, perhaps on a side trip from adjacent Greece or Turkey, whose histories are entangled with Bulgaria’s anyway. A Sofia tour can be combined easily with stays at Bulgaria’s ski resorts or Black Sea beaches. (The whole country is only as big as Louisiana.)

I recently taught journalism for four months at the 5-year-old American University in Bulgaria, located in Blagoevgrad, two hours by car south of Sofia. My wife, 6-year-old daughter and I spent a lot of time exploring Sofia’s boulevards of Oz-like yellow bricks. We became friends with Sofians on both sides of the confusing socialist-capitalist split; both factions serve the same strong plum brandy called rakiya, black espresso, delicious tomato and cheese salads known as shopska, and honey-drenched baklava desserts.

True, I had the advantage of knowing Russian, a sister language that shares the Cyrillic alphabet with Bulgarian. But Sofia’s young people are studying English furiously and want to practice. We felt welcomed, despite the exasperating and sometimes downright lying neyama (“We don’t have . . . “) attitude at some state-owned hotels and stores. Mercifully, privately owned hotels, shops and restaurants have blossomed fast, and Western consumer goods are increasingly available.

We were never bored in Sofia, except when tromping through the monotonous high-rise neighborhoods with which Communist planners encircled its historic core. We felt safer than in Los Angeles, except as pedestrians pitted against some insane motorists. (A good way to rebel against the political system throughout the former Soviet bloc was behind the wheel. That seems hard to shake.)

Of course, we were delighted with low prices for everything but the most upscale hotels.

For example, a good seat at the national ballet costs less than $1 and a children’s puppet show about half that. The National History Museum charges $2 to tour its celebrated collection of ancient Thracian gold jewelry and treasures. A 25-cent candle is all that’s needed to see the glittering icons of the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. Six dollars buys a fantastic dinner of veal soup, mountain lake trout and grape-stuffed blini pancakes at the elegant Krim Restaurant. Carved wooden jewelry boxes cost $5 at street markets.

Trolleys and taxis are cheap, even though cabbies usually cheat Westerners. (We often did not protest the cheating rate because it still totaled only $3 for a long ride across town. Once, though, we foolishly grabbed a cab in front of the Sheraton, the most Westernized hotel in Bulgaria, and watched our meter spin about eight times the normal rate. We soon jumped out while the driver bitterly, and wrongly, bellowed that his spiffy BMW deserved the perks compared to the usual tiny Lada taxis.)

However, the best way to explore Sofia’s center and its chameleon-like character is on foot. That way, you can sample sidewalk food, such as roasted sunflower seeds sold in newspaper cones, cheese-filled banitsa pastries and thick yogurt drinks.

In some parts, Sofia has a 1930s Parisian taste of outdoor cafes on wide boulevards. In other patches, it resembles an austere Moscow of modern governmental and cultural palaces. Market streets are reminiscent of Istanbul, not surprising as Turks occupied Bulgaria for 500 years, until Russia helped Bulgaria win independence in 1878.

In our favorite neighborhoods, the city retains architectural fruits of that 19th century freedom: Bulgarian Revival houses that look as though they escaped from Balkan fairy tales. Painted in pale yellows, greens and blues, these houses have second-story eaves that extend like quirky canopies over the sidewalks.

My daughter kept picking out narrow turrets as her next home. Early on, I did my fantasy real estate shopping in the lovely old neighborhood behind Sofia University, where the sizable mansions of pre-Communist-era merchants and aristocrats are now mainly embassies. My fervor dampened fast when I realized that many of those homes were confiscated in the late 1940s and their past owners suffered grisly fates.

On foggy nights, strolls produce terrific surprises. Like the shock of the gold and copper domes of Alexander Nevsky Cathedral suddenly appearing in the sky. This downtown landmark helps to explain why Bulgarians--unlike the Czechs, Hungarians and Poles--never revolted against their Russian masters. The gigantic Orthodox church was built in 1912 to honor the 200,000 Russian casualties in the 1877-78 war against the Turks. The murals, icons, chanting, incense and candles enable a visitor to feel the religious revival in Bulgaria.

The revival is not just Christian. The 16th century Banya Bashi mosque, whose minaret defines northerly views of Sofia, recently came back to life, although the adjacent Turkish bathhouse remains a grand rubble. Two blocks away, the central synagogue on Ulitsa Exarch Josif is being restored. At the invitation of two young Jewish American social workers stationed there, we attended services several times and chatted in a delightful babel of Bulgarian, Russian, English, Hebrew, Spanish and Ladino, that mixture of Hebrew and Spanish spoken by Sephardic Jews who moved eastward after expulsion from 15th century Spain. The stone courtyard reeks of poignant history. During World War II, Bulgaria was a Nazi ally, but saved its Jews by stalling Hitler’s deportation orders.

The sense that current history is up for grabs adds to Sofia’s ambience.

We climbed often atop Bulgaria’s former Holy of Holies, the Soviet-style mausoleum from which the embalmed body of Bulgaria’s first Communist leader, Georgi Dimitrov, was removed peacefully and later cremated at the height of anti-Communist fervor in 1990. It now is a marble shell awaiting a new identity--an emblem of the entire country.

Just down Tsar Osvoboditel Boulevard is the former royal palace, symbol of a monarchist movement that wants the son of the last reigning Bulgarian king to return from exile. The palace now houses the national art gallery and a dusty ethnographic museum that treats Gypsy nomadic culture, complete with dancing bears, more respectfully than the rest of Bulgarian society does. We especially enjoyed the reconstruction of Gypsy horse camps.

A short walk away, at the top of Vitosha, is the Sheraton Sofia Balkan, a hotel converted into a showcase for Western luxury and business conferences. All the BMWs and Jeeps in Bulgaria seem to be parked out front, guarded by thick-necked studs who apparently take fashion cues from Martin Scorcese movies.

For those who cannot afford the Sheraton’s $235 a night tab, the lobby and bar are good places to rest, meet friends and pick up free English language newspapers and cultural guides. The bathrooms are among the nicest in a country that has its share of Turkish squat toilets. (Very decent hotel rooms can be had elsewhere, ranging in price between $25 and $90 a night.)

Across the square is the National History Museum (2 Vitosha Blvd.). Its collection is strong on artifacts from ancient Thracians, tribes of horsemen who extended rule from what is now northern Greece into the Balkans until the 4th century BC. Thracian gold is dazzling, alone worth a Sofia trip. Included is a set of gold drinking mugs in the shape of elks. The work is so fine that the animals’ noses have realistic ridges. The museum also showcases early Christian icons and Bulgarian folk costumes.

Less-valuable treasures are easy to find at bazaars outside the Nevsky Cathedral and in the underground passageway between the Sheraton and the mosque. Make sure you have Bulgarian currency, the lev, in small denominations and beware of pickpockets. My daughter’s favorites were little wooden dolls ($1.50 each) containing a vial of pungent Bulgarian rose oil. My wife brought home a lot of amber jewelry. If you are suspicious of vendors, try the Zadruga Bulgarian Folk Art Store (49 Vitosha) for newly carved and richly painted icons.

*

Entertainment in Sofia includes both traditional and Western offerings. (One caution: Double-check the timings of cultural events as Balkan schedules are apt to change.)

At the State Opera House (1 Vrabcha St.), we saw a spirited ballet of “Zorba the Greek.” Thrilling the audience, the gentleman who played Zorba kept commanding his exhausted troupe through five finale encores. The somewhat dusty yet elegant Opera House rocked. The state still subsidizes such wonderful cultural organizations, but the arts community fears collapse in the face of upcoming privatization. They also are feeling the pinch of an American entertainment invasion.

Eric Bogosian’s very American play “Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll” was a huge hit in Bulgarian translation. American movies in Bulgarian subtitles are so popular that we often could not find a native Bulgarian movie.

Unfortunately, the American films shown there tend to be action flicks, not our favorite genre. Yet the movie-going experience was a lovely reminder of pre-multiplex days--in large and beautifully maintained theaters that have ushers, fine snack bars and a choice of tickets for balcony or orchestra.

Cafe life in Sofia is strong, especially as an inexpensive way for unemployed young people to pass the time. In warm weather, sidewalk tables allow escape from ubiquitous cigarette smoke. The Yuzhen (Southern) Park at the bottom of Vitosha has many umbrella tables where senior citizens and Melrose-wannabes sit side by side. The crowd is particularly interesting and dense when the ultra-modern National Palace of Culture, or NDK, is booked with concerts and its basement disco is in gear.

Bulgarians are eager and generous hosts, as well. Our most interesting evening was in the apartment of a poet who was both a friend of the last Communist dictator and the father of a young capitalist studying at a university in the United States. I didn’t think it was polite to journalistically grill my host about those Sofia complexities just then. Besides, it was his brandy.

And what we first thought was a very adequate supper of chicken and salad turned out to be merely the appetizers for a 10 p.m. meal of ham, sausages, pastas, cakes and the delicious Bulgarian red wine that sent us giddily into the Sofia night.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GUIDEBOOK: So Sofia

Getting there: British Airways, Lufthansa and United fly to Sofia from Los Angeles (with changes of plane in Western Europe). Round-trip, restricted fares start at about $1,075 in the off-season. Balkan Holidays tour agency (phone number below) offers packages to Sofia.U.S. citizens can stay up to 30 days without a visa.

Where to stay: Balkan Sheraton, Sveta Nedelya 5 (tel. 011-359-2-87-65-41, fax 011-359-2-87-10-38), the most elegant and Westernized hotel, $235 and up per night. Grand Sofia, Plaza Narodno Sabranie 1 (tel. 011-359-2-87-88-21, fax 011-359-2-88-13-08), across from the parliament building, is central and modern; doubles start at $90. On the main tourist path at 4 Tsar Osvoboditel, The Bulgaria (tel. 011-359-2-87-19-77) offers the historic atmosphere of an Eastern European spy movie; doubles start around $70. Two smaller hotels offer charming accomodations in quiet, neighborhood settings for about $30: the Hotel Rai 90, 13 Lidice St., and the Hotel Ganesah, 26 Anry Barbus.

Where to eat: In an old mansion, Krim has turn-of-the-century flavor and a Bulgarian-Russian menu that’s hard to top for about $7 a dinner. At 17 Slavyanksa St. (local tel. 87-27-50), Krim’s a hangout for literati, politicos and Mafiosi.

The swank Thirty-Three Chairs, at 14 Assen Zlatarov, near Sofia University (tel. 44-29-81), is a pink rathskeller that experiments with Balkan dishes. Rabbit stew with plums, raisins and bacon, $6; crab and peaches salad, $5.50.

Spago-like pizza made with crusty filo dough (around $2 a pie) and fruity ice creams are the specialities at Pizza Venezia, 12 Benkovsky St. (tel. 87-25-41), near the opera house. Homesick Yanks can grab a passable burrito dinner with beer for $5 across from the National History Museum at Eddie’s Tex Mex, 4 Vitosha (tel. 87-67-83).

For more information: Balkan Holidays, 317 Madison Ave., Suite 508, New York, N.Y. 10017; tel. (800) 852-0944) or (212) 573-5530, fax (212) 573-5538.

--L.G.