Stray Dogs

They used to be a big problem due to various financial crashes where people couldn’t afford to feed their pets so set them loose instead. To deal with packs of dogs prowling around deserted streets and attacking vulnerable people at night, there’s now a catch, sterilise, and release programme - you can tell which ones have been processed as they have tags on their ears. The current strays are generally quite benign but still territorial. You usually see them loping around in pairs and there’s often a makeshift kennel nearby that someone has built for them on a scrap of land.

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.

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.

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.

Tower Blocks

A brutalist landscape of crumbling concrete dominoes. Yes, they look ugly - the weather-stained balconies cluttered with junk, the patchwork of discoloured cladding, the exposed spikes of rusting support rods, the graffitied walls and linking electricity wires drooping from roofs – but, for a precious ten minutes at dusk, the concrete glows orange and pink and the sunset is reflected in all those windows. At night the shadows obscure the imperfections and you realise that they’re villages in the sky, complete communities with thousands of lives going on behind the squares of light that form patterns of pixels across the city.

-15°

It stabs at your bladder, creeps into your bones and makes the moisture in your eyes sting. You need thermals, good boots and specialist winter gear to deal with it - which is why coat racks are always a prominent feature in homes and restaurants. It’s not just clothing though, there are other preparations you need to make too. You have to watch the weather reports carefully, leave your heating on all day, consider and manage the time you spend outside and pull your scarf up over your mouth so you’re not taking the cold air directly into your lungs.

Horse Chestnuts

On October mornings the parks and pavements are liberally scattered with shiny, mahogany coloured horse chestnuts. I always want to pick them up - not just because they’re such beautiful things, but as an instinct left over from when I was a kid. The evenings spent in parks trying to find big ones hanging from low branches that could be dislodged with a thrown stick, the arguments in the playground about suspected tampering, the sore knuckles after your opponent has missed a shot. They don’t play conkers in Bulgaria so those gorgeous orbs are generally just kicked or thrown around.

Mount Vitosha

It’s visible from practically everywhere in the city so you can use it to orientate yourself -  even in built up areas, glimpsing the angle of the peak between buildings will tell you approximately where you are. Like the sea, it’s also a constant reminder of nature. Approaching weather is revealed in the gathering clouds that obscure clefts and ridges and the colours on its slopes proudly display the seasons: green in the summer turning to rusty orange in the autumn. In the winter, tracks of white spread downwards, gradually swallowing the forests and clinging to the peak until June.

Smelly Bugs

Khaki or bright green beetles about the size of a one pence piece with shield-shaped shells and an underside that looks like the scuttling hand-type creature from Alien. They try to get inside at every opportunity and fly haphazardly so they’re constantly bumping into you. You can’t squash them because they give off a horrible smell – and I suspect they’d crunch anyway – but they’re lethargic and very slow-witted so you can deal with them easily enough. After you’ve flicked them off the window or door, they’ll sit there for a few minutes pondering what the hell’s just happened to them.