Bulgar and Nasty
‘But is it true that this is how capitalism started in your country and America?’ he ventured hopefully. Ever the optimist, Tsvetan wondered how Bulgaria compared with Spain, which surely had been the same ten years earlier. I said I thought Barcelona would probably remain the bigger draw for the weekend tourist. ‘But what about Veliki Tarnovo?’ he said. We barrelled on down the road, past donkeys and half-built villas and uncollected rubbish.
Sinemorets turned out to be rather nice, with a strip of sand separating the sea from a sweet-water lagoon reaching back into dense forests. And there was a sort of cove where one could just about imagine the Bulgarian budget version of The Beach. It was dark by the time we got back to Burgas, the socialist tower blocks jutted up into the blackness, and we passed the jagged outline of the Naftex stadium again. ‘The Bulgarian Las Vegas,’ announced Tsvetan.
The following morning he picked me up at 5.30 a.m. from the Helena Sands and we drove the four and a half hours to Sofia. The sun of the Black Sea had given way to the teeming rain of the interior, and we sat in a café overlooking the parliament and the golden domes of the Aleksander Nevski memorial church. Across the road a large digital counter on the Banque Nationale de Paris building counted down the days to EU membership.
We were joined by some of the journalists I had met earlier in the week, and I made further attempts to understand SIC and VIS and the government. I found myself compiling a long and confusing list of names that were impossible to spell and probably dead anyway; Konstantin Dimitrov, blasted away on Van Dam square in Amsterdam in 2003 and Ilija Pavlov, a friend of Iliev who founded Multigroup, shot the same year. Pavlov had made his first million by getting hold of a Russian submarine and selling it for scrap. ‘A journalist who is buried started to write about it,’ said Tsvetan.
