Weaponising Friendliness

Much of the time, when dealing with administrators in places like banks or ticketing offices, they’ll use your foreignness and lack of awareness against you – bamboozling you with half-truths or outright lies in order to get rid of you before you can make them do their job. Other times, your outsider status can help you. Because administrators are insecure creatures and naturally defensive, if you have a relaxed attitude and laugh at yourself or drop in a dobre or k’vo, it can disarm them. They may suddenly become helpful or even smile along with you with what seems like relief.

Anglichanin (англичанин)

‘English’ as in the nationality. The word for English as the language is different: Angliski (Английски) but both words come from 'England' which is Anglia (англия) – Great Britain is Velikobritania (Великобритания). Anglichanin is useful as a get out for when people come up to you on the street and start asking you for something – or when your limited vocabulary lets you down and you have to back out of a conversation. Technically, it should be: Az sum anglichanin (Аз съм англичанин) ‘I am English’ but I find that you can replace the ‘I am’ with an apologetic little shrug instead.

Smiling

I’ve been told that under Communism, if you smiled too much it was assumed that you were either stupid or hiding something. This still applies - the default expression for Bulgarians is neutral, some would say stern. If you watch any kind of talent show, for example, it’s impossible to tell what the judges think of the acts. Official bureaucrats, administrators and anyone in authority tend to go one stage further: they start off with a defensive and confrontational attitude, as if you’ve insulted them or called them useless before you even speak. This, I suppose, at least saves time.

Storks

They come with the Spring and stay for the Summer. When you leave the city, you can spot their distinctive silhouettes flying overhead or their round white heads sticking up over the walls of nests. Storks reuse the same nests year after year so they become local landmarks – usually on top of electricity poles or chimneys of empty buildings. Just outside the city limits on the main highway East there are two – one in use, one abandoned – that are nestled in the crooks of the streetlights in the central reservation. They have apparently been there for at least a decade.

Central Heating

Apartments don’t generally have their own individual heating systems, each building uses the same one and these buildings are in turn linked up to a hub that covers the whole district. This means that you have very little control over your own radiators and even if yours aren’t on, you’ll still pay a percentage of the district’s overall consumption. In the winter, the central authority turns on the heating after three consecutive days with an average temperature of less than 10° and, in the summer, there’ll be several weeks of maintenance work when your whole area is without hot water.

Uzhas (ужас)

In English, we have any number of ways of saying something is ‘very bad’: terrible, horrible, dreadful, horrific, horrendous, disgusting, beastly – everyone has their own preferred adjective and each of them has a slightly different connotation depending on the specific form and level of awfulness that it’s referring to. In Bulgarian, you just have uzhas. Perhaps Bulgarians simply don’t need all those variations because everything here is so good? That said, you do hear the word uzhas a lot. In fact, if you didn’t know any other words in Bulgarian, you could probably get by with just dobre and uzhas.

Dobre (добре)

Broadly: ‘good’. It’s the root of dober den (adjusted for gender, obviously) and you can say mnogo dobre if you want to be a bit more emphatic. Depending on intonation, it also covers a multitude of other applications, including ‘alright’, ‘I get it’, and many different forms of ‘OK’. It’s the word that stands out to you most when you first arrive, mainly because it’s used so much and often in isolation which makes it easy to pick out of general conversation. Much like k’vo?, dobre is handy to have in your vocabulary to show that you’re making an effort.

Shlokavitsa (шльокавица)

The spelling of Bulgarian words using the Latin alphabet – the headers of these posts are shlokavitsa. It’s necessary because the internet, most software systems and some keyboards, don’t have Cyrillic letters. There’s no universal spelling in shlokavitsa, words are written phonetically so there are some inconsistencies in sounds that don’t have direct equivalents. Ж, for example, is like the French j so sometimes it'll be written as j and sometimes as zh. When you enter the village Живково, the sign says Jivkovo, but the sign as you leave - which is on the opposite side of the road – says Zhivkovo.

Da & Ne (дa & не)

‘Yes’ and ‘no’. Pretty straightforward – unless you’re in Greece where ne means yes and there’s the more familiar head shaking action. There’s also da be da (дa бе дa) which essentially means ‘no’ – the rough equivalent of: ‘yeah, right’. You can often tag ne on the front of something to mean the opposite, like ne znam (не знам) for ‘I don’t know’ or neobiknoven (необикновен) for ‘extraordinary’. This means it’s very functional for getting by. If you know one word such as toplo (топло) which means ‘warm’, but don’t know ‘cold’, you can make yourself understood by saying: ne toplo.

Head Shaking

The actions are reversed: shaking the head means yes, nodding means no. The origins of this are sketchy and smothered in urban myths involving the Ottoman occupation, much like the British V sign that has nothing to do with archers at the Battle of Agincourt but makes a colourful story. A lot is made of this head shaking but it’s not as confusing as you might think. It looks similar to the Indian head-wobble and is mainly used by older, non-English speaking Bulgarians. The younger generations tend to adopt the more universally accepted head movements, especially when speaking to foreigners.

Community Spaces

Amid the concrete brutalism of the suburbs, there are many parks, trees and patches of greenery. Sofians are very invested in their community spaces – parks are packed on sunny days and they’ll trim trees and tend flowers, pick up scattered bits of litter, leave food out for stray cats and re-paint playgrounds in jaunty colours. After a rain shower, I once saw a burly middle-aged man - the kind of man you’d avoid on a night out in a British city centre pub – carefully picking snails up off the pavement and placing them gently on a stretch of nearby grass.

Kozunak

This must have the same kinds of roots as hot cross buns as it’s a form of sweetened bread associated with Easter. It’s a full loaf though – a bit like panettone, but sweeter with sugar sprinkled on top and lumps of chocolate, raisins or candied fruits inside. It’s very difficult to make so you can tell which are the best bakeries as these will be the ones with queues outside in the couple of weeks before Easter. If there’s a better accompaniment to a cup of (British) tea than kozunak anywhere in the world, I’ve yet to hear about it.

July Morning

The tradition is that you get up - or, more likely - stay up to watch the sunrise on the first of July. It’s a celebration of the summer, a kind of hippie thing that takes its name from the 1971 Uriah Heep song which became popular here in the 80s, possibly as a protest by young people against Communism. It happens everywhere but is mainly focused on the Black Sea coast which is the most eastern part of Bulgaria. There are concerts, parties, camping and beach events but nothing officially organised or commercialised, it’s very much a people’s thing.