Bulgar and Nasty
‘Oh, friends of our owner,’ I was told. I made some inquiries and found that the proprietor, Mladen Mutafchiisky, used to manage the state arms company, Teraton. I couldn’t find Allardyce, but in the Chopard jewellery shop Jay Jay Okocha was looking for a bit of bling for the missus. I wished him luck for the Wigan game on Sunday.
Meanwhile Tsvetan wanted to show me another Sunny Beach phenomenon: the rampant property speculation, 80 per cent of it fuelled by British investors. Adrian Musgrave, at Bulgarian Properties, said he was selling between one and three apartments a day. The Brits were coming from all over, he said, but many were relocating from Spain, where they had grown tired of lax planning laws. He assured me that the rules in Sunny Beach were stricter than those in Milton Keynes, where he and his wife had sold up - they had bought in Sliven, on the road to Plovdiv, and had four other houses in surrounding villages.
Tsvetan said that there are now more than 1,300 property companies registered in Burgas and Sunny Beach, all of them vying for the ever-swelling number of British arriving in the area. In 2001, 69,000 Britons visited Bulgaria; last year 259,000 made the trip, much of the increase down to property-hunting. At the Property Investor Show at the Excel Centre last week, more than half the stands were devoted to Bulgaria.
Tsvetan drove me south, towards the Turkish border and a village called Sinemorets, which he promised would bear comparison with The Beach, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. The road had been funded by the European Union, we were reminded by regular blue-starred signs, but was fearfully potholed already. As we bumped along we passed relics of Todor Zhivkov’s communist era: a decayed pig farm, a coalmine that had never worked because there was in fact no coal, and a shipyard that Tsvetan swore had sold a boat to Bill Clinton.
There was little other traffic, save for the occasional Lada filled with angry-looking peasant types. Despite the sea (‘Just a piss away, as we Bulgarians say,’ said Tsvetan) it was a harsh landscape, unforgiving and choked with low scrub. Seeing the way some hotels and apartment complexes were built, with little obvious regard for the houses and beaches they now overshadowed or obliterated, I asked him about Adrian’s analysis of the local planning regime. It did seem, he admitted, that the application process went a little quicker if you had the necessary Hummer and the bodyguards and the bags of cash.
