Smoking in Sofia

One evening in Veliko Tarnovo, after I watched our tour guide Petar roll something like his twentieth cigarette of the day, I Googled smoking statistics in Bulgaria. As I expected, Bulgaria has the highest rate of smoking in the European Union. Forty percent of men and about twenty percent of women smoke. That’s a lot of money spent on tobacco, but it’s also a lot of time spent leaning against doorframes and sitting on steps, blowing streams of smoke into the sun. A cigarette is often accompanied by an espresso in a paper cup, bought for a euro from a convenience store or a vending machine.

When I told Petar this, he nodded, unsurprised. "We start smoking at the youngest age, too. It's very sad," he says as he lights up again. I ask him how old he was when he started smoking. "Twenty-four, very late." He made it through all those teenage years when you're most vulnerable to peer pressure, and then he gave in at the last minute. Now he's thirty-four and smokes more than anyone I've ever seen. He tells me that he could roll a cigarette in a hurricane.

a monument to the Trabant, a crappy East German car

I was uneasy during my first few days in Romania and Bulgaria, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. In Norway, the Netherlands, and Estonia, I felt very much under the radar, invisible, unnoticed, which isn’t always the best feeling but it’s a safe feeling. When I’m traveling, I feel safer when people don’t notice me. In Romania and Bulgaria, I felt noticed, and I couldn’t figure out why. There are fewer people in the Balkans with light coloring, sure, but I was far from the only blue-eyed girl on the street.

It hit me when I was spending an evening alone in Sofia. It’s not that I was more noticeable here, it’s that people here notice more. When you smoke five cigarettes a day, that’s at least twenty or thirty minutes you spend outside, watching people go by. People watching is the best free entertainment there is. It wasn’t anything particular about me that made people watch me while drinking their espresso and puffing away on their expertly-hand-rolled cigarettes. I just happened to be there.

peoplewatching in the market is fun

The title of this post is “Smoking in Sofia,” so let me start telling you about my time in Sofia. First of all, it’s pronounced SO-fee-yuh, with the stress on the first syllable, not So-FEE-yuh. You want to say it right and be cool, because Sofia is a very cool city, in a grungy, post-Soviet way. It’s the only capital in Europe that’s not either on a major river or on the coast and instead it’s on top of a bunch of thermal hot springs that the Ottomans liked to use for bathing. The main public bathhouse was turned into what Petar called the most boring museum in Europe. There’s a large concrete square left over from when the government decided to blow up a communist mausoleum, used a ridiculous amount of dynamite, and ended up needing to bulldoze it because the mausoleum was built to withstand nuclear war. The country’s prime minister is a former Soviet bodyguard who controls a Bulgaria’s illegal drug trade. The boulevard outside of the old royal palace is made of expensive granite but is used as a parking lot. The parliament building is the former headquarters of the communist party and is right across from the bank; supposedly there are old underground tunnels running from the party building to the bank to the airport.

the Bulgarian parliament and former communist party headquarters

There’s a park next to the mosque where young men who fled from Afghanistan, Syria, and Palestine hang out and stare at passersby because their immigration status prevents them from getting jobs. Sofia’s synagogue, locked behind stone walls, is one of the biggest in Europe despite Bulgaria’s small Jewish population. The Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, the biggest Orthodox cathedral in Bulgaria, doesn’t have seating inside because there is no sitting during services. The decorations are also mostly gold because Orthodox Christians believe that is what heaven looks like—golden. We also passed a Russian orthodox church that was closed because its priests were accused of being Russian spies and were deported. I walked by the church later that afternoon and saw two men in clerical garb sitting inside the church’s gate, smoking, of course. The new priests, sent by the Russian patriarch in Moscow. I made eye contact with them and walked a little faster.

I had a free morning in Sofia and woke up at ten a.m., later than I’d intended, and rushed to the state art gallery—housed in the aforementioned former royal palace—to look at a pretty exhibition of Bulgarian landscapes. Sofia’s cool was rubbing off on me, I imagined. I crossed streets like the cars were in my way, not the other way around. The night before, I’d walked the streets in the dark while eating a sandwich from a paper bag. That morning, after waking up late, I’d zipped up my black boots and smoothed my hair into a low ponytail. I felt very cool.

trying to be cool in Sofia. Full disclosure: I photoshopped my zits out of this picture.

I had to be on a bus at one in the afternoon, so I picked up a hummus and avocado sandwich to take on the bus and a coffee to drink on my walk back to the hotel. I had a little bit of extra time, so I decided to loiter on the sidewalk next to a store window—there was no bench, nowhere else to sit—and drink my coffee. Like a true Bulgarian, minus the cigarette. I felt oddly giddy—now I was the one in power, the one staring at passersby, the one sipping espresso from a paper cup. My gaze was the one people had to avoid. I put one boot on the wall behind me and kind of wished I had a cigarette.

a painting by Zlatyu Boyadzhiev, the most famous Bulgarian painter ever. I don't remember the title, but I propose an alternative title: "Charlsie's Brain (left) and Her Brother's Brain"