When Bulgaria became independent, Sofia was a very dirty town, without a street paved with anything but cobble stones, and with but one house of any pretensions, the Turkish ‘konak.’ To-day, besides a palace and a parliamentary building, there are a national bank, a post office, a military academy, several vast barracks, and many other Government buildings. There are parks and public gardens where bands play on summer evenings; new streets and avenues have been laid out, and some of the narrow ones of Turkish times have been widened; substantial shops and hotels mark the business quarter, and modern homes the avenues. Still, Sofia reminds one of a lanky girl whose spindle shanks and lean arms have outgrown her pinafore. The dwellings, by setting far apart, try to reach out the long new avenues and cover the gawky child, but in places she is absolutely bare.
One day I drove out along one of the avenues to call on a Cabinet Minister. The coachman drew up at a modest cottage, whose greatest charm was an ample garden. I repeated the name of the Minister, and looked dubiously at the coachman.
‘Touka, touka’ (‘here, here’), he said, so I entered.
A little girl, the Minister’s daughter, responded to my rap and invited me in. The servant was cooking.
Not far from here were the humble homes of two painters and a sculptor, upon whom I often called. They were instructors at the National Institute of Art, of which Ivan Markvitchka is the head.
But the streets of Sofia have not altogether parted with the past; there are many touches of the old Turkish times left. Many of the shops are dark, low, and dingy, though the shopkeepers no longer block the pavements with their wares and sit cross-legged among them. An ancient Turkish bath and an old mosque stand side by side in front of the market place on the principal trading corner. The bath is not attractive in appearance, but the water is excellent—brought by pipe from a boiling mineral spring in the mountains a few kilometres distant. The place is closed to the public on Mondays, when the garrison of Sofia is scrubbed. Detachments of a hundred men arrive hourly, each with a towel and a bar of brown soap; three-quarters of an hour later they are turned out clean.
Compulsory service in the army has been a great training to the Bulgarian peasants. The natives of Macedonia bathe as they marry, only once or twice in a lifetime. A child is not washed when it is born for fear of its catching cold, nor when it is baptized, for oil is used at this ceremony.
An open letter from a Greek priest to the American missionaries concerning the use of oil instead of water at the baptismal office, demonstrates the Macedonian prejudice against water—except for internal use. The priest defended the use of oil on the score that, as a result of oiled christening, the Macedonian peasants, though they never wash, carry with them no foul odour, as do peasants baptized with water.
A VIEW OF SOFIA: VITOSH IN THE BACKGROUND.