Notes from Sofia

By Raul Dias

Here’s an honest observation. Sofia isn’t a beautiful city. The modest sized capital of the Eastern European country of Bulgaria will never be up there with the top five ‘must-visit’ destinations in one’s lifetime. Nor will it ever be bestowed with those silly, rather patronising monikers of ‘Paris of the East’, ‘Venice of the South’ etc. But what it does have in abundance is character. Everywhere you look there’s an oxymoronic grittiness coupled with a breathless vibrance. And probably one the greatest contributors to this is Sofia’s bounty of street art and graffiti in all their candy-coloured brilliance and in-your-face insouciance.

First ‘Impressions’
Ever the thrifty traveller, one of the first things I did after checking into my hotel was to sign up for a free graffiti and street art tour of the city. Run by a bunch of passionate art students and experienced street artists who double up as guides, the two-hour long walking tour is their way of helping visitors discover Sofia and its colourful history.
And speaking of history, I was told by my guide Stella that it is thanks to Bulgaria’s socialist past that the street art sub-culture and era of the true-blue graffiti artist emerged. The drab, Soviet-style apartment blocks with their plain, grey exteriors provided the city’s 21st century street artists with a range of ideal surfaces for large scale mural art. It was also the sudden ‘invasion’ of satellite television and the emerging hip-hop scene of 90s America that served as harbingers of this sub-culture.
At first frowned upon, slowly street art came to be respected for what it is—art! In fact, graffiti is so well-accepted in Sofia that the tram stop under the National Palace of Culture (NDK) is officially called “NDK Graffiti”, all thanks to the abundant, ever-evolving graffiti than can be found around the tram stop.
Municipally sanctioned street art in particular also started to be used as a means to deter artists from committing random acts of vandalism. A few years ago, “Theatre on the Street”—an art project by Bulgarian NGO, aptly named Transformers—saw 30 artists, over 10 days transform 51 pavement-side electrical boxes into graffiti art along Sofia’s theatre-infested Rakovski Street.   

  

Interpreters of Maladies?
At one of our stops, a car park on the city’s arterial Knyaginya Maria Luiza Boulevard, a little north of the busy Serdika metro station, we were met with a rather evocative mural by local graffiti legend who goes by the tag of Bozko. A veritable nom de plume, a tag we’re told, is not just an artist’s signature and mark of territory, but also an allusion to their style.
In the case of Bozko, that style is something that borders on hallucinogenic with otherworldly characters harbouring hidden social messages. For example, painted below a peeling Chupa Chups lollipop advertisement, his Pinocchio-like figure from a project series titled Urban Creatures seems to reference the untruths the advertising industry perpetrate with its ever-growing beak-nose. The interpretations are limitless.
With a diametrically opposite style from Bozko, Nasimo, another local Bulgarian muralist, I was told, is known for his dreamy, largely figurative works that draw a lot of inspiration from classical art and convey a sense of escapism from reality. Behind the old Turkish Thermal Bath House, we stopped by two of his pieces a few meters away from each other. Both sublime. But the one that caught my attention the most was a photorealistic mural depicting an embracing couple with cupid superimposed onto them. The fading rays of the evening sun bouncing off the glass panels of the adjacent building and casting fluid-like rippled effects onto the wall, made the piece even more magical than it was.

(This article first appeared in the 28th July 2019 issue of The Hindu newspaper's Sunday Magazine section on page 27 https://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/travel/notes-from-sofia/article28723200.ece)