"Change at breakneck speed" a Sofia Travel Page by mikey_e

I won't lie, Sofia was not at all what I had expected and I was a bit dissapointed when I got there. In truth, the initial shock was probably because I came in fairly late from Nis and ended up staying near the Lion's Bridge on Maria Luiza Blvd., a neighbourhood that is not exactly classy. The city clearly changing because of its new membership in the EU and what seems to be a surge in tourists. There are lots of casinos and sex shops, especially near the Lion's Bridge. A trip into the historic centre of Sofia, however, quickly convinces any visitor to Sofia of the city's grandeur and its architectural and cultural heritage. The imposed structures of various régimes and foreign powers lend the city a aura of international prestige that extends far beyond Bulgaria's relative "small state" status within the EU.

I came to Sofia in part because my father had travelled here in the early 70s when he was going between Istanbul and Frankfurt by train. When he stopped here he found getting around the city easy because he spoke Russian and the Bulgarians seemed to absorb Soviet culture more readily than many other Eastern bloc countries. I knew that fifteen years of Western influence would make Russification a thing of the past in Bulgaria, but I was still surprised at how many Russian monuments there were in Sofia. I expected that the liberation from Turkish rule in 1878 would have had the same effect as in Serbia - an upswing in nationalist sentiment - but instead it appears to have strengthened the bond between Tsarist Russia and Bulgaria, a connection maintained through four decades of Communist rule. Today Sofia has many monuments dedicated to successive generations of Russians who helped maintain Bulgarian independence from Turkish and the Nazi German rule.

Whatever the effects of modernity and EU membership have had on the Bulgarian capital, I left Sofia with the feeling that it was a city of great architectural tradition. The capital is filled with buildings of various styles and philosophies, from the Eastern aspects of Banya Bashi Mosque and the Synagogue to the Stalinist government buildings, Sofia offers the visitor a number of different styles to explore and photograph. And despite the encroaching influences of package-destination tourism and its subsidiary enterprises (casinos, sex shops and prostitutes) traditional culture is very much alive and thriving. A visit to one of the many churches throughout the capital is enough to convince even the most sceptical tourist that Bulgarians are fiercely proud of the Bulgarian Orthodox church and its maintenance of the country's cultural heritage.