An Observer in the Near East

by William Le Queux

A diplomat’s wife, with four pet spaniels, on her way, I believe, from Japan to the Turkish capital, was seated at the next table to ours. She had ordered coffee, for which she paid with a thousand-franc French note! The takings of the “pudding-car” of the “Orient” must be considerable, for the maître d’hôtel promptly cashed the note—nine “one-hundreds,” some French gold, silver, and copper—and received a few centimes as a tip! It was my first quaint experience in Bulgaria. Mark Twain with his million-pound-note should come here. Curiously enough, I afterwards met the diplomat’s wife in Constantinople.

Entering Sofia from the station, the traveller is at first sadly disappointed. The place looks dismal and half finished. There are wide roads and boulevards laid out, with scarcely a house in them. Your cab suddenly turns a corner. The high pointed minaret of a mosque comes into view, and lo! you are in a wide boulevard, which would really do credit to Brussels. You pass a many-domed building, the Cathedral, and presently a pretty garden behind railings, and a long handsome building with sentries at the entrance-gate—the Palace of Prince Ferdinand. You are in modern Sofia.

After a wash at the hotel, I went to the Palace, signed my name in His Royal Highness’s visiting-book, and then went forth to wander in the streets.

It was now already dark. In the trees of the central boulevard thousands of rooks were cawing and circling above, disturbed by the lights and movement of the street. Men were shouting the evening newspapers in strident voices, and one could almost imagine oneself back on the Boulevard des Italiens at the absinthe hour, with the camelots crying “V’la la Presse!” Only, in Paris, rooks do not nest in the streets, nor do the watchmakers have twenty-four inches of space and a chair in the windows of the smaller cafés. A walk along any of the principal streets at once shows the Bulgar to be a fighter, for the display of arms of all kinds, even to the modern Browning automatic pistol, is immense.

Here, one is really in the Balkans. The last official census gives sixty-six Englishmen and forty-six Englishwomen in the whole of Bulgaria. I met six only. Uniforms, upon Russian models, are everywhere—the peaked cap, the grey overcoat, the big revolver. Men in European dress jostle with peasants in linen blouses, round astrachan caps, and drab blankets around them, or others in sheepskin jackets with the wool inside, all with the inevitable round Balkan cap of astrachan. The Turk, too, is quite at home and friendly with the Christian, and modern progress is typified by the electric trams whizzing and clanging everywhere.

Peasants in Sofia Market Place.

The Old Mosque: Sofia.

Sofia is essentially a town of progress. During the past eighteen months whole streets of new villas have sprung up upon its outskirts, and such a rush has there lately been for building plots that our Foreign Office—who want to build a new Legation—are unable to get any decent site in a central position. Sofia is just now in the transition stage. Great new public buildings and fine boulevards are springing up everywhere. There is a beautiful new theatre, a new post office, a new Agricultural Bank, and hosts of minor structures, all spacious and well built, which, in themselves, show Bulgaria to be a country of rapid advancement.