A visit to Sofia

Visiting Sofia, one is struck by the evidence of the overlaying cultures and civilisations, one upon the other, that have replaced, but not fully eradicated those that came before. First there are the ancient remains, the Roman sites that are being revealed as the foundations of new buildings are dug, and by the current work on the metro in the city centre.

The Sveti Sedmochislenitsi Church

Then there are the Ottoman buildings. Ottoman rule ended only in 1878. More survived than, for example, in Belgrade, where very little remains to show it was once a predominantly Muslim city. As the Ottoman Empire gradually retreated and was ejected from central and eastern Europe, from the end of the 17th, and through to the 19th century, the usual pattern was to wipe out all trace of its having been there. Muslims were expelled or fled, and the mosques were mainly destroyed. But Bulgaria was a late-comer to national liberation.

A small town of a little over 10,000 when it was chosen as the capital of the newly independent state, Sofia had been a provincial centre in Ottoman times. Of course, the new nation constructed buildings appropriate for a European capital of a mainly Christian country, notably the enormous Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, named in gratitude to Bulgaria’s Russian liberators. Some Ottoman buildings were converted to new uses, notably the 16th century Black Mosque, the Orthodox Sveti Sedmochislenitsi Church for the past century or so, now unrecognisable as the Muslim edifice it once was. The mosque itself had been built on the site of an earlier convent. Earlier still had been a 4th or 5th century Christian basilica, and before that a pagan temple.

But some of the Ottoman heritage remains. The hamam next to the one surviving mosque is no longer in use, but looks splendid from the outside. Also from the 16th century, and recently reopened after falling into disuse in communist times, the Banya Bashi Mosque is named after the baths. My companion on an evening stroll through the city told me that, as a boy in the 50s and 60s, he and his father went there regularly, as they did not have a bath in their home. And the building in which the archaeological museum is now housed was formerly Sofia’s largest mosque, the Grand Mosque.

A reminder of the pre-Islamic, Christian Balkans is the restored basilica of Hagia Sophia, close to the Cathedral. It was built in the 6th century, before the arrival of the Bulgars, during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian, who commissioned the great basilica of the same name in Constantinople.

Sofia was perhaps not the most obvious choice of capital for the new state. Nowadays, entering or leaving the city through its soulless, dilapidated suburbs, a wasteland of concrete monstrosities from the communist era, is a depressing experience. But it is a city with roots, with a long heritage. Its city centre, steadily being renovated, is increasingly matching its ambitions.