It has been a long millenium for Bulgaria.
Between Tsar Assen II’s 13th Century empire and the World Cup this month, not a lot good has happened to the Bulgarians. In fact, Bulgaria’s loss to Italy in the semifinals may be for the best. A country so used to losing cannot cope with too much success.
Every World Cup seems to produce a happy surprise from a country so obscure that most fans aren’t entirely sure where it is. In 1990, the shooting star was Cameroon. This year it was Bulgaria, a country that combines anonymity, beauty and bad luck.
The president of Bulgaria, Zhelyu Zhelev, a highly respected philosopher who looks like Mel Brooks, told reporters, “After this World Cup, Bulgaria will never be the same.”
It could use the boost. For 500 years, Bulgaria lay crushed beneath Ottoman Turk rule. For three months in 1878, Bulgaria had its own empire, including chunks of what became Greece, Yugoslavia and Romania, but Britain and France made it give it back. It fought four wars in the 20th Century and lost them all. Then came 40 years of communism.
Five years after the Communists fell, Bulgaria still is not doing so hot.
For starters, all this history has given the Bulgarians a national inferiority complex. Centuries of foreign rule have convinced them they are the toys of fate, so unable to fend for themselves they are doomed to be manipulated by the major powers.
This leads easily to conspiracy theories: A current one has it that Presidents Bush and Gorbachev, meeting at Malta, agreed to carve up the old Soviet empire, with the West getting Poland and Hungary and the Russians getting Bulgaria. This theory, known locally as “from-Yalta-to-Malta,” reinforces the sense of helplessness that, to say the least, hinders the initiative a former communist country badly needs.
Bulgaria lives in one of the world’s low-rent districts, beneath Romania and back of Yugoslavia. The UN embargo on Serbia may not have hurt Serbia very much, but it cut off Bulgaria from whatever Western markets it may have enjoyed.
Instead of bounding ahead like Hungary, Bulgaria is sliding into a colorful Balkan backwardness. Sofia, the capital, is the money-laundering mecca of Eastern Europe, with millions of dollars of old communist money pouring through. Once the software center of the Soviet bloc, it has thousands of idle and mischievous nerds who are said to create fully one-third of all the world’s computer viruses.
Strong-arm protection rackets, run by thugs known as “wrestlers,” have become a force in the economy. Two gangs recently shot it out for the right to protect the Sevastopol Casino in downtown Sofia. Both gangs turned out to be manned totally by off-duty policemen.
Despite all this, Bulgaria deserves a better press than it gets.
Much of it is achingly beautiful. The Black Sea coast glistens along Bulgaria’s eastern border. The Valley of the Roses produces the world’s finest rose attar. Two graceful mountain ranges, the Balkans and the Rhodopes, cross the country and cradle ski villages and ethereal monasteries.
Sofia is one of Europe’s loveliest small capitals. Yellow brick roads run beneath horse chestnut trees and around the imposing grace of the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral and other, lesser, Bulgarian Orthodox churches. Fascinated crowds surround chess players in the city parks. Yellow trams run through a street market where curbstone vendors peddle books, lottery tickets and fresh herbs. Gypsy fiddlers lead dancing bears through the city center.
Plovdiv, Nesobar, Veliki Turnova-towns virtually unknown in the West-are wonderlands of Roman, medieval and 19th Century architecture. The people are hardworking and hospitable and produce Europe’s best tomatoes and first-rate wines.
This is the last of the old Europe. Most of Western Europe looks like Wichita these days. Budapest and Prague are shaking off communism and coal dust and becoming more western by the day.
But Bulgaria is the way Europe used to be. Trucks pounding from the West to Turkey pass flocks tended by shepherds wearing the broad-shouldered fur capes of an earlier century. Peasants stroll along country roads. Much of the country swears by a blind fortune-teller named Vanga who lives in a village in the south, near the Greek frontier.
But Vanga is not infallible: She predicted the names of the two World Cup finalists both would begin with “B.” Only one of them made it, and it wasn’t Bulgaria.
