All Around Plovdiv
- Joelle McDonald
- Jun 27, 2023
- 10 min read
On the Way to Plovdiv
Today our plan is to visit the “second city” of Bulgaria, a place called Plovdiv that’s just under two hours away from Sofia. Like in Sofia, there is a daily free walking tour of Plovdiv which starts at 11:00 am. Initially we plan for a 2.5 hour drive (Google says it can take 1.5-2.5 hours depending on traffic) and a half hour to find parking. I, however, fall back asleep for another hour after our alarm went off. Thankfully Google Maps now says the drive will take just an hour and 45 minutes, so we have some wiggle room.
In classic Joelle style (as Hannah calls it), we make the whole drive, figure out the parking situation on our second try, and figure out how to get to the tour’s meeting point with 30 seconds to spare. Hannah is a little stressed but a little impressed at how narrow a margin I can have for things to work out perfectly fine.
Free Walking Tour of Plovdiv
As we find our group, we realize just how hot it is today. The sun is beating down on the city, and it feels like the stone streets are radiating it back. Our guide, thankfully, promises to find us shade at every stop (except one).
Roman Bazaar and Main Street
Our first stop is a section of ruins of the Roman bazaar. The layout lines up with the main downtown area today, which is by coincidence. The building was a large rectangle with entrances on all four sides and divided into many small square shops inside. The ruins are underneath the Main Street today, but there are stairs that allow us to enter and walk around the excavated part. We can see a few stalls and some columns, which are new material to imitate what the ruins would have looked like at the time.
Now it is time to walk down the Main Street of the city, passing another excavated section of the Roman Bazaar as we do. The street is completely pedestrianized, but it used to be a street full of cars. The conversion from regular road to pedestrian street took about 40 years (yikes!) but resulted in what our guide says is the longest pedestrian street in Europe (it apparently beats Copenhagen by about 20 meters). Our guide says no one has made Google aware that as of 2016 Copenhagen no longer has the “Longest Pedestrian Street in Europe” title (a fellow tour member suggests our guide updates Wikipedia, given his credentials).
The buildings along the street look far different than the Soviet style we have grown accustomed to seeing in Sofia. These facades more-or-less look like they could have been in any other (more touristy) European city: romantic, colorful, and with ornate details. Our guide tells us that before WWII the leader of Plovdiv wanted to “Europeanize” the city, so he hired an architect from Vienna to design the main street’s buildings. The architect blended all sorts of European building styles on the same street, even including pieces from multiple architectural eras on the same building. It does make the city feel quaint and European, but the underlying feeling is just a bit artificial, like the buildings didn’t naturally evolve that way over time.
We stop a block or two down the street, near a man busking with a violin. Apparently he IS this stop on the tour. He got famous on the internet for dressing like Mozart and busking with his violin. Since then he got a dog, and it turns out the dog likes to sing to his violin-playing. He doesn’t dress up like Mozart anymore, but he is perhaps even more famous as the musician with a singing dog.
From the singing dog, we continue walking down the street for quite a ways. Our guide tells us to remember where the singing dog is because that is approximately where one end of the Roman stadium is buried under Main Street. We are walking to the other end, which has been excavated and incorporated into the modern city. You can descend stairs from the Main Street down to the floor of the stadium where there is a cafe with a balcony that matches the shape of the ancient Roman building. It is fascinating to see this little slice of ancient history still functioning as an active part of life in Plovdiv today! This stadium could have seated half of the population of the ancient Roman city, was exactly one stadia long (580 meters), and would have been home to lion fights and chariot races. There is a 3D model of the stadium next to the ruins, although apparently it depicts the stadium as narrower and longer than it actually was.
Ancient Stadium
At the end of the long stretch of the pedestrian area that was built atop the ancient stadium and bazaar, we enter an area that was constructed mostly during Ottoman times and today is the epicenter of the Plovdiv restaurant scene. Originally the area was the Ottoman Bazaar and in order to get people the spend more money at the bazaar, the builders decided to make it as confusingly laid out as possible, so people would get turned around and forced to wander around shops aimlessly. Today, the bazaar is long gone (it burned down in a fire) but the confusing layout of the streets remains.
We start at an Ottoman mosque just beside the stadium ruins, which confusingly seems to have a restaurant operating out of the front. We’ve never seen a mosque/restaurant combo so we aren’t exactly sure wants to think. Ten years ago the building was apparently in bad condition, but it was recently renovated to restore its beauty and history.
Arts and Crafts District
As we wind through the restaurant-laden section of the city, we learn it is called the “Arts and Crafts” district. In 2019, Plovdiv was chosen to be the European City of Culture, a title which is bestowed on one city each year and comes with external funding and an increase in investment within the city itself to beautify and renovate itself. The city is clearly proud to have been chosen as the City of Culture, with monuments and banners stating its nomination still spread through the city. As part of that investment, the city decided it wants to have more of a place for art to be seen. This section of the city was then filled with all sorts of galleries with local art, and it was very popular for people to make a night of coming to see the galleries, going to nearby bars and restaurants too. Of course, between an art gallery and a bar or restaurant, the latter can pay much higher rent, so eventually all of the art galleries were priced out of the area, leaving a big foodie scene in their wake.
Old Town
Next, we are headed to Old Town. A picture I saw online of this part of the city is the only reason we are here today—it looked cool enough to be worth a visit. The neighborhood is up high on a hill and recently many of the old residential buildings have been restored and turned into museums. The buildings here are very unique, with the second floors all wider than the first and supported by curved wooden beams. Our guide explains to us that this is because during Ottoman times, when these buildings were built, there were very high taxes levied for the amount of ground a building was built on, but not for the size of the building overall. People would build smaller first floors to avoid high taxes without sacrificing too much living space.
We stop here to learn a bit about the role of education and religion in Bulgarian society in the past and today. Education has been a pillar of community in Bulgaria for some time. Especially in more populated areas, schools were a center of life and culture. In more rural areas, where there weren’t as many schools, religion was very important. “DIY” churches in places like barns and homes were used as a gathering place. Priests were often the only people in the community who were literate, so they were the teacher and protector of the area. This made them highly influential. Today, however, people do not go to church very much or do things like religious fasting (unless perhaps they are older), so despite religion’s historical importance, it is less relevant to life today.
As we walk through old town we see some abandoned buildings in disrepair, a far cry from the renovated ones hosting museums. During the communist era, all private property, including homes, was made public; then, after the regime fell, all public property was made private again. However, the period between socialization and privatization was long enough that in many cases the original owners had died and left seven or so heirs to fight over one home. Since then it has been very hard for anything to be done with those properties. As our guide said, of the seven heirs “three think it should be sold, two want to turn it into a hotel, one wants to do something else with it, and the last is in the United States and doesn’t know any of these conversations are going on.” That one got some laughs.
Roman Theater and the Arts
We approach the end of our tour by visiting a statue of Alexander Nikolov (aka Sasho Sladura) right by the Roman theater that marked the end of our tour. The statue depicts an unbearably sweet looking man holding a violin on his knee. He was a renowned musician from Plovdiv who studied first in Bulgaria, then in Western Europe (I forget which country) and got offers to play in world class orchestras all over Europe. He, however, turned them all down and chose to return home. In Bulgaria he was part of the presidential orchestra, but when communism came, the government cracked down on the creative arts and anyone associated with the former government. That meant that Sasho was assigned to play at a small restaurant, an extreme demotion, politics aside. Nevertheless, he became famous in his little restaurant and was known for being sweet and kind. This gave him the nickname “Sasho Sweetheart.” He was also knew how to play jazz (which was banned) and publicly criticize the communist government, with jokes and comments made while playing at the restaurant, something very dangerous. He was eventually sentenced to two years in prison for his dissent, then sent to a gulag. He died there after only 11 days. The statue of him is placed outside Plovdiv’s Art Academy building and honors all the victims of the communist government’s brutal policies against artists and the arts.
Finally, our last stop are the ruins of the Roman theater of Plovdiv. Today there are workers setting up a set on stage for a concert. Though this theater is an ancient ruin and tourist attraction, it is also still used for all kind of performances like music, opera, and theater. The theater uses the natural slope of the hill to create the descending benches, carved out of the hill itself. This style of building made the stadium particularly subject to being filled with debris, burying it completely over time. When it was discovered, many houses had to be destroyed to uncover it completely.
Lunch
With the tour over, Hannah and I take off to look for lunch before continuing to explore the city. I found a cute vegan restaurant in the windy “arts and crafts district” that is now full of only restaurants. It is a small place but has tons of options for us. We end up ordering two mint lemonades (it’s HOT out), a noodle bowl with tofu, and a vegan pizza. The pizza isn’t our favorite (too fake-cheesy), but we eat half and order a second noodle bowl and a strawberry lemonade to share. This is our first meal eating out since we left, and we are so excited to be eating anything other than oatmeal and pasta with red sauce and lentils.
Exploring on our own
Fully fed and air-conditioned, we head back out to old town. Though our tour went through it, we didn’t get to see much of it. We wander around looking for post cards and pass countless antique shops. We see some of the museums but our brains are feeling a little too full to absorb any new information. Instead, we set our sites on finding one particularly cool looking building that we have seen on post cards outside of shops. Along the way, we find a church hidden behind a stone wall but with its gates open. Just up the hill from there is another open gate, we pass through it to find the building we were looking for (also a museum), but the small yard in front of it is full of tents with people making and selling crafts. There is a weaver cutting sticks into thin strips for baskets, a glass blower working over a blow torch, and two blacksmiths hammering metal rods into knives like the ones they are selling on the table in front of them. I can honestly say I’ve never seen a glass blower or blacksmith work in real life, so it is a pretty cool sight.
Eventually we leave and wander some more up the hill to what appears to be a dead end. On the way back, we pass a man playing a lute and stop to chat with him. He asks where we have travelled to in Bulgaria and tells us his story briefly, giving us just enough to leave us wondering about his life. He asks me if I am a musician to which I respond that I play piano and violin. Excitedly, he runs inside with his lute and comes out holding what I can only call a square, wooden flute. He starts puffing out a beautiful tune effortlessly. Just after he tells us that he used to be a street musician, playing his flute in a new place every day. Then, one day he looked into a woman’s beautiful blue eyes and now he has two children and stays only in one place to play his music. It seems that to keep himself entertained he has picked up the lute, which he says he isn’t very good at. He plays at a spot where almost no passerby come, so he may just do it more to pass the time than for money. He also tells us he was a professional baseball player in Bulgaria, but baseball in Bulgaria is “like snow in Africa” so he doesn’t play anymore. We leave our interaction knowing we won’t forget the baseball-player-turned-street-musician-turned-romantic anytime soon.
Afternoon Run
It’s now late afternoon, and we make out way back to our car to drive to the trail I plan to run on in a village about 25 minutes away. We find it easily enough, but the trail itself is so overgrown that at first I run by without it even catching my eye. Hannah, who is walking behind me, misses it too, and we end up going through someone’s fields until those too become overgrown. Mosquitos eat us alive until I eventually bail and find Hannah down the hill. I try running around the town next, but it only takes about three minutes for me to get through the whole thing and hit the highway. Defeated, we head back to Sofia for a dinner of pasta with lentils and a much needed night of rest.
Bonus quote from our guide: “Have you heard of Bulgarian roses? Some of you probably have some of you probably haven’t because we are terrible at marketing. But Bulgaria produces 70-80% of global rose and lavender oil in the world”
France is the main buyer of Bulgarian rose oil, so if you use perfume, there is a good chance you are spraying a little bit of Bulgaria! Also, when Old Town Plovdiv was in its prime an ounce of rose oil cost as much as an ounce of gold.
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