Magazine / Society / Romania and Bulgaria / Article | 12/02/2007

Savoir vivre Bulgarian style

Zakuska, tutmanik or hot dog? Most western Europeans know little about Bulgarian lifestyle and culture. A glance at the country at Europe's south-eastern edge.

Until Dimitré Dinev rocketed to fame with his novel "Engelszungen", the book with the most sparkling language, significant content and finest literature currently available about Bulgaria, he was regarded by the people of Austria, his chosen home, simply as a "Tschusche". That is Viennese slang for a person from "somewhere down there" – i.e. the Balkans. In the southern Slav languages, the word "chushd" is a neutral way of expressing "foreign" or "stranger". However, as the people who flee their homelands in south-eastern Europe have tended, especially since the Iron Curtain vanished, to do so for the sake of economic survival, they arrive in "Europe" destitute. And as a "Tschusche" has nothing in the way of resources, it is easy (though naïve) to assume that the natural and cultural riches of his country are probably not worth talking about either. It would be unfair to label such ignorance "racist" or "discriminatory" simply because one knows a little more about the Balkan countries and the people living there; probably this is just a straightforward but unpleasant example of the only too human desire for those who are comfortably well-off to look down on those who are not.

Richly coloured: the pervasive uniformity of the Communist era has vanished.
Photo: stock.xchng

In Germany, too, most of the news that trickles through from "down there" is nasty stuff about earthquakes, ethnic civil wars or mafia shoot-outs. The Balkans are either a powder keg or a bottomless pit, and at the very most a region on the edge of Europe that is not important enough economically or politically to merit detailed knowledge, even if it looks as though Bulgaria and Romania will be joining the European Union (EU) at the start of 2007.

Dinev tells a revealing anecdote about this type of ignorance. It dates from the period in Austria when he feared for his residence permit, a job, a place to study and his future as a writer. Since fleeing Bulgaria in 1990 he had been living on the streets most of the time so as not to miss any of that vital information to survival that second- and third-class foreigners pass around to each other. Of course everyone asked everyone where they came from, if only because origin was fundamental to determining your value on the illegal or semi-legal labour market. Once, when Dinev was asked by a homeless Austrian which country he was from, he turned it into a riddle: "I will tell you where the borders of my country are and then you can tell me its name: the Danube flows along the northern border with Romania; the Black Sea lies to the east; to the south lie Greece and the European tip of Turkey, and on the western flank are the former Yugoslavian republics of Macedonia and Serbia." The man thought about it. Then he looked at Dinev in bewilderment and exclaimed helplessly: "But… there's nothing there."

When Dinev recalls this incident nowadays he bursts out laughing. Just how much there is there – especially in human terms – he has described in a book that was intended to have 400 pages but ended up with nearly 600 because of the copious abundance of his stories about the two protagonists Iskren and Svetlju (the "spark" and the "beacon"). It is true, admittedly, that things look so bleak to people in Bulgaria – and this is by no means confined to Romany gypsies – that in 2005, when the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences carried out a sociological survey, over a third defined their aim for the next few years as "simply surviving". But when asked what we might learn from Bulgarian attitudes to life, Dinev's Austrian S.O., sitting with us in a rustic-style restaurant in Sofia and by no means blind to the poverty that blights the nation, has a delightful answer: "I am incredibly impressed by the optimism and positive attitude that people here have, for all their problems!"

How have I managed for so many years to bear living in a country where just observing the toil of existence is enough to plunge anyone into depression? Bulgaria is a cure for the cultural pessimism of the Germans, a sanatorium for over-burdened souls exhausted by chasing their own individualistic tails. My earliest attempts to comprehend the everyday life of Bulgarians focussed on that very particular savoir vivre that nourishes a Western yearning for lively authenticity. And however clearly I now recognise the many projections that prevent West Europeans from grasping the Balkan lifestyle, this blend of archaic vitality and stubborn refusal to adopt that rectilinear rationalism in our thoughts and actions that so often grinds us down seems to me to have lost nothing of its validity, in spite of all the pressure from the EU Commission to make the country meet long lists of objectives. Anyone who finds it cynical to be cheerful under circumstances that defy the very yardsticks of that "European community of values" – which preaches peace and liberty yet often just means prosperity and consumerism – will fall prey to the one-sided image fed to journalists who, having no command of the language, travel the country with an interpreter only to produce a "shocking" report which, while not wrong, betrays a different kind of poverty, the poverty of objective appearances, all too glaring when compared with the broader meaning that reality still enjoys here.

What these features offer us are tales of dilapidated housing, corrupt politicians and mafia-like gangs racing along roads in pedigree cars and brand-new four-by-fours, interspersed with pitiful stories of beggars in front of the glamorous window displays on Vitosha Boulevard, Sofia's main street, who are so wonderfully photogenic thanks to the excellent illumination of the southern sun. The beggars always crop up in the same place. The blind man plays the kaval, a kind of clarinet with a hole instead of a mouthpiece which calls for the same blowing technique as a flute. Outside the side entrance to ZUM, which used to be the state-owned department store, the boy with the twisted foot and stiff knee is sitting in his broken-down wheelchair. And a few yards later the modern-day Pietà, a gypsy cradling a baby, greets any passer-by who does not look daggers at her with: "Dajte, Gospodine, nyakakva Stotinka mi dayte, Bog da vi patsi – Alms, sir, a few stotinki, may God protect you!"

But what about this neatly dressed woman with the hardened features who looks ten years older than she really is? Is she wondering whether she has enough change left to afford a slice of sausage for her son's school lunch-box tomorrow? She's hoping Boyko has managed to borrow those 100 leva from Stoyan for the heating bill. The phone has already been cut off. Her big daughter, who made friends with some influential families at the German School and managed to get into a German university with those good marks, has recently been ill. Who could resist a couple of phone calls abroad under the circumstances? But in no time at all the bill rocketed from 15 leva a month (including 10 basic rental) to 115. Where was that supposed to come from? Especially as Boyko, like so many Bulgarian men, has tired of listening to the gripes at home. Now he often doesn't even come home after work at the garage. Sits around with his "mates" in that dreary bar, and smokes two packets of "Victory" a day at 2.60 leva (about €1.35) each. Puts back a fair amount of beer and hard stuff, until he's heavy enough to fall into bed and has run out of cash.

The car they drove to the village last autumn to visit Grandpa and Grandma and load up with burkani, jars of tomatoes, cucumbers, baked peppers, jam, home-made wine and spirits, paprika paste and huge heads of cabbage (for pickling in big barrels at home) is stranded outside the house without petrol. Occasionally the alarm goes off when someone passes too close by, and what a dreadful din it makes! Like a beaten dog. One of those thousands of strays that trot around the Bulgarian streets jumping into skips of rubbish at night to pick out bits of old bread and other left-overs. During the day it's the turn of the pensioners and gypsies. The pensioners scuffle along in coats with a good 20 years of service behind them and root out the old paper. Then with their stinking bundles and cheap season tickets they catch a bus to the next collection point, where they collect five stotinka, about 2.5 cents, for a kilo of recycled paper. Not bad when you live on a pension of 60 to 200 leva per month. If you budget carefully that's enough for a tub of yoghurt and half a loaf of bread a day. Some of them do the same as the dogs: look round quickly to see if anybody's watching, then fish the remains of a pastry out of the skip and gobble it down.

The gypsies – how many are there in Bulgaria? 500,000? 700,000? 80 per cent of them estimated to be without a job – are more methodical. They come equipped with a wooden cart yoked to a mule or some decrepit pony and filter out paper, card, glass, wood, scrap metal and piping, clothes and household utensils, then they manoeuvre their chariot through the roaring downtown traffic like a UFO returning from the past and head for one of the ziganski makhali, agglomerations of huts where they eke out their segregated existence. The EU, which has set Bulgaria the task of integrating its minorities before joining, has no idea how to go about this with people who exist in a completely different world of values and exchange from that of "civic" Bulgarians, and who are just as persistent in clinging to their conservative lifestyle as the Bulgarians are. It is alien to them to think in territorial terms, to assume the bourgeois rights and duties that go with settling a piece of land, caught up as they are in their own solid social hierarchy of clans and extended families. It doesn't help to call them "Sinti and Roma" instead of gypsies; it just exchanges pejorative stigmata for ethnic ones.

But back to this "ordinary" woman whose poverty does not show. She would consider it a slight to her pride, with a degree in Geology and a job in a basement hairdresser's, to be ranked among the poor. A family with two children needs about 800 leva a month, over €400, even though so many families have owned their homes since the days of Todor Zhivkov. The current average wage of about 340 leva is not a true reflection of income because there is a small section of the working population who earn very good money. A shop assistant can expect 120 to 300 leva a month. The taxi driver who cautiously asks me what I think of Bulgaria, prompting me to ask him, with a similar degree of distrust, which Bulgaria he means, is lucky to take home 500 leva, and that for driving 16 to 18 hours a day. There are three children at home and his wife can't find a job.

In the numerous cafés, restaurants and shops selling sweets, soft drinks and cigarettes you are normally served by young women under 25 employed to look as attractive as possible. They can only dream of living in a home of their own. Most of them will share two or three rooms, 50 to 80 square metres in all, with their parents. They can marry once their parents have saved enough for the mladozhentsi to buy a flat. And as this is becoming increasingly difficult, more and more youngsters remain single. The average statistic for children per couple is only slightly more than one, and about half of those are born out of wedlock because marriage offers hardly any additional security. In a country where traditional patterns of thinking are still very pronounced in the capital city, this is considered a disgrace. The fertility issue has assumed elementary significance. Of the nine million who lived there in the mid-eighties, 7.8 million remain. Of the million and more who are missing, one half has emigrated and the other half has died, often of starvation or cold – most of them pensioners.
The Bulgarians feel this plight to be all the more tragic in that a family with children still occupies top rung on the Orthodox value scale. God, bread and the family are the Holy Trinity. Despite the flood of goods from the West and more than 50 cable TV channels to convert the big world outside into a screen format – little enough for little Bulgaria – the strongest bonds are still those of the family, which includes the kum and kuma, the bride's witness and bridegroom's witness. These are not so much a necessary evil at the civil marriage ceremony as trustworthy individuals more likely than parents to be consulted about family problems. One friend told me that a woman recently turned up at her front door unannounced. She was on her way to the airport to catch a plane to the United States, where her husband was working. She suspected he was having an affair, but she did not want to set off before taking the advice of her kuma, my friend's mother.

Nothing would work without the womenfolk. As a free-lancing foreigner I note with some amazement that four out of the five viable friendships I know I could rely on in an hour of need are with women. Unlike most men, who are pretty quick to ask me for minor or major favours without bating about the bush, the women are keen to develop a reliable friendship that offers stimulating communication, and they are quite happy to extend this to the area of mutual assistance. And as they are the ones who have to solve the family's day-to-day problems, they can tell at a glance whether a problem is existential. If it is, and if they derive any pleasure from the contact, they will move heaven and earth to help. Not that the men are bad lads hiding behind a macho façade. Nor are they only asking you for something because you come from Germany. No, flaunting the "connections" they might bring into play is just part of the male make-up. So you are from Germany? Then it won't bother you, next time you are there, to pop into your local Fiat dealership and ask if they've got a crankshaft for my 1978 model. And you might as well check whether there's a decent banger going second-hand. If you had mentioned you were going to Varna tomorrow, they would have asked you for something you can only get in Varna.

Poverty all round you but everyone has a mobile. Women, too? A mobile phone saves renting an office. "Mobile" doesn't mean the phone in Bulgaria, but its owner. Who needs a diary? In a skapana darshava ("rotten state" – affectionate throwback to rotting communism) diaries are a waste of paper. Getting worked up about something not materialising when it was agreed more than an hour ago is pointless given the sheer abundance of potential unpredictable events. In life, on the street, on the bus, in the rickety tram, in the market place, in the café, in the doorway downstairs, you have to be flexible: any opportunity to get hold of something you need is a good one.

What else does a man need apart from a mobile? A car, a leather jacket, a spare packet of cigarettes ("Marlboro" or "Davidoff" in preference to "Bulgartabak"). These are the things to talk about, not family matters, over backgammon in the pub on the corner. Where they will put your drinks on the slate. But where, if you do happen to be in pocket, you are expected to be generous: generosity is the nicest way of parading your territory. And don't let anyone say the little woman back home is going without. If it's at all possible she should have that gorgeous three-piece suite she was looking at when the family was out walking on Sunday. If you can manage it at all, the country house in the mountains should be done out with panelling in the near future, "and then you must all come and visit", and the table will creak under its burden of food and drink – as the honour of any Bulgarian host requires – because everything is served up at once to spare guests the embarrassment of having to ask for something they can't see. But for the last seven or eight years the Bulgarian male has had nothing to give. He has to come up with increasingly knotted borrowing and exchanging strategies in order to acquire X in return for arranging, setting up or planning Y. The Bulgarian male is no longer able to offer hospitality: drug pet – another time!

Now the boy has started his studies, too. Nothing doing for less than 300 leva a month. You save for years to give him a decent send-off on leaving school, but even so it's burned a huge hole in the family pocket, because a school certificate is a passport to higher education in Bulgaria and as such of tremendous value, which means it has to be celebrated like three special birthdays at once. In spite of the fact that most university graduates do not find a job, "learning" is still the gateway to the world, the key that opens the chance of a life worth living. After all, if he is good – and Bulgarian students have a reputation abroad for that – your son might make it to Canada or the States, or at least to Germany, Britain or, increasingly, South Africa. Ruse University, where he is now, offers a world-class degree in Engineering and IT. Graduates find it relatively easy to get a job abroad. Of course the rector regards this "brain drain", this istichane na mozetsi, as a double-edged sword. It boosts the university's international image, but the Bulgarian government receives no payback for the modest amount it can afford to spend on education, as the Bulgarian economy will not benefit at all. What are his best students supposed to do if Ruse, once one of the leading hubs of industry in Bulgaria with its 2.8-kilometre two-tier bridge across the Danube and one of the biggest ports on the river, is now dying? He hopes the Inter-University Centre for Europe will get things moving again. It was established by Bulgaria and Romania following an initiative by the Conference of German University Rectors, and in the mid-term it should not only enable Bulgarian and Romanian students to spend a year at a university in Germany but also attract students from other European countries to come here. It is also supposed to lay the foundations for the Euroregion Ruse-Giurgiu to facilitate the flow of resources from the EU Structural Fund.

Wages in Bulgaria are low. What the male Bulgarian earns – assuming he earns anything at all given the grey zone around the official unemployment rate of 9.8 per cent – he needs for himself to preserve minimum male consensus. The man, after all, is the link between the inner sphere of the family womb and the public stage of the village or urban neighbourhood. The wife looks after the household and children and, naturally, has her own job, probably not only from 5 to 9 every evening at the hairdresser's but during the day too, to make sure there is enough coming in to enable the family to show itself in public: with well-dressed, well-fed children who know how to behave and who have whatever their peers have: "Opravim se nyakaksi – We'll get by somehow!"

From all the above you might get the impression that men dominate the street and women the kitchen. Wasn't Bulgaria once part of the Ottoman Empire, of "European Turkey"? But that isn't the case at all. The only difference is that the men usually sit together in cafés while the women (if they can afford it) are out shopping or performing the thousands of little everyday chores. In Bulgaria the heating, electricity, water and phone bills are still paid in cash at special counters in the post office or local utility. Bills large and small, vouchers and other little notes are deposited without envelopes in the middle of the month or at the end of it in the letter boxes near the entrance to your block of flats, and if (like where I live) most of the doors have been ripped off by people hunting for thick letters from abroad which might contain banknotes, you have to get used to the fact that your neighbours know exactly how often you make phone calls and take a shower.

Most of the people working in small shops and restaurants are women. Their femininity is highlighted with all available means. The greater the contrast between the sexes the better. If you have a good figure, you show it; if you have pretty hair, you let it grow as long as possible. And if you don't have pretty hair but can lay your hands on 500 to 1,000 leva, you have a hairpiece made. Because in Bulgaria long, healthy hair makes you a better woman, more fertile, sturdier, more resilient. Hair is to the Bulgarian as perfume to the Frenchman.

Far from condemning their daughters' lust for life, most parents will make huge sacrifices for their dichitsa, their "little ones". Everything you have is for the children. The beauty of their devoyki, their maiden daughters, is the pride of the family. Schools of modelling encourage girls from nursery age onwards to foster the right smile, the right step for the cat walk, because by the time you are 16 it should be second nature. The suffering of the "little" gems who do not outgrow 5'3" is beyond words. They sit resigned in front of the television fascinated by the contest for "Miss Bulgaria", an event that fires the imagination of young and old alike: "How much beauty there is in our little Bulgaria!" For the older generation at least, there is nothing libertarian about this undisguised desire for beauty or the "sex sells" allure of adolescent pop singers.

One reason communism was so unpopular was that it had no time for fashion and fast cars. Countless boutiques, draperies and tailors workshops now service the need for imaginative clothes. Many Bulgarian women can sew, as the most subversive German magazine before the Iron Curtain opened was not "Spiegel", but "Burda", which promised a little escape from the ubiquitous sameness that began with a nationwide school uniform. There has been an explosion of colour amid the grey concrete prefabs and crumbling 19th-century facades of central Sofia. Any shop with the space to do so displays its products outside the door. At every bus stop there are brightly painted metal pavilions or kiosks selling cigarettes, chocolates, cheap electronics, newspapers, nuts, juice, lemonade and alcohol. A good bottle of distilled liquor costs four to ten leva less than a good bottle of wine. In many concrete blocks of flats on the edge of the city the back walls have been torn out of the vestibule to make way for a small shop or café. In the last few years the mini-cafés have faced new competition from the myriad coffee machines that have sprouted across town like mushrooms.

The savoir vivre of Bulgarians in times of encroaching poverty is easily described: it involves meeting friends for an espresso in a mini-café, smoking, chatting and, if you have enough ready cash, enjoying a piece of cake, a bar of chocolate, a croissant or a fried doughnut ring. On the way to work you can grab a zakuska, a pastry, for 40, 50 stotinki: perhaps a pasty with white cheese (not always sheep's cheese), tutmanik (cheese bread) or a hot dog; at lunch time pizza is the favourite, an eighth for one lev, bearing in mind that the overall diameter is at least two feet. The men tend to feed on meat: two or three kebabs, little balls of spiced mince, or strong tripe soup. Washed down by a beer and lots of bread. One national speciality is the bosa (bosaya means suck), a beige potion of wheat, water and sugar; it is drunk with banitsa, a yoghurty phyllo pastry. It is viscous with an acidic taste, but you get used to it. The voluminous carbohydrates, alcohol, smoking and innumerable cups of sweet coffee consumed each year by Bulgarians have catapulted them to the top of European charts for cardiac arrest.

But what is the point of a long life if you are miserable? And anyway things will not get any better. The vox populi will tell you that ever since national liberation 130 years ago and the first people's assembly of 1879, politicians have always done the same: lined their own pockets. Stefan Stambolov, for example, risked his life as a poor sod in the ranks of the revolutionaries, fighting for a free Bulgaria, and just a few years later, as Prime Minister, he was a ruthless champion of state power who made his citizens slave away while he acquired houses and great wealth through his astute diplomacy. Nothing has changed since. After a few years in parliament, all 240 members are set up for life. The little lullaby quoted in a newspaper article praising a certain MP as a good father speaks unintended volumes: "Spi, detentse sladko, / Deputat e tvoyat tatko – Sleep sound, sweet baby, / Your father is in parliament!"

These brief glimpses of a not so very small country (about as big as the eastern states of Germany) in the south-east corner of Europe may show that here, where nothing seems possible any more, the impossible can always happen. Remnants of an archaic faith in miracles, unbroken traditions and the many high days and holy days of Christian, secular or pagan origin testify to a spirit of underlying euphoria – as if, under a mountain of ashes, there is still an abundant ardent glow.

Further articles on the subject » EU Enlargement / Neighbourhood Policy, » Public Culture, » South East Europe, » Bulgaria
More from the press review on the subject » EU Enlargement / Neighbourhood Policy, » Public Culture, » South East Europe, » Bulgaria