Easter Eggs

Instead of gorging on chocolate, you colour hard boiled eggs. The shops are full of paints and dyes and your Facebook feed fills up with photos of elaborate designs and advice about techniques. You decorate them on the Thursday or Saturday before Easter Sunday and make sure that the first one is always red. This egg is saved for a year. On the day itself, you ‘battle’ by holding an egg in your fist and hitting it against an opponent’s - first the top, then the bottom. You win if yours doesn’t crack. You then eat egg salad until June.

Easter

There’s a televised event held at Alexander Nevsky Cathedral at midnight and, if you’re in the centre at around this time, you’ll see lots of people carrying candles home from it. Like Christmas though, the main tradition at Easter is for families to get together for a big home cooked meal and the city empties as people travel back to their home towns and villages. The meal they eat consists of rice mixed with chunks of lung, and lamb. Lamb isn’t commonly eaten here - only on special occasions such as Easter or St George’s Day which follows soon afterwards.

Melnik

A tiny town close to the Greek border that has historically been swapped between the Bulgarians, the Greeks and the Ottomans. What looks like a dried up river slices right through the middle but this is actually a flood defence that peters out at the top of the only street. Numerous hotels and restaurants back onto the sand pillars that loom over the town and provide the ideal conditions for locals to cut wine cellars into them. Most people in Melnik have a sideline in selling wine which they produce from their own patches of vineyards in the surrounding fields.

Swifts

They nest in the eaves of apartment blocks and wheel around the skies at incredible speeds, changing direction suddenly and dipping at impossible angles between buildings and electricity lines. Dusk is the busiest period, but you can hear their constant squeaking throughout the day and there’s often a frenzy of activity at random moments. They arrive in Spring and, if you’re fortunate enough to have an open balcony above the height of about the fourth floor, you can spend hours on early summer evenings watching them as they zip by, often close enough to hear the beats of their wings.