The Image of Sofia from Ottoman City to National State Capital

[Intervento a Villa Vigoni (CO) nel quadro dei incontri italo-tedeschi, 2007]

A group of researchers from the Universities of Perugia and Trieste are conducting a study
on the transformations taking place in Balkan cities and towns in the 19th century. More
precisely, we are dealing with the passage of these cities from the Ottoman period to that of
the national state, focusing in particular on those cities that became capitals of the national
states. The topic comes within the more general theme of modernization and can be
approached under various aspects: demographic, social, administrative, architectonic, urban
development, cultural and political.
Researchers from southeastern Europe have dealt with the multiple aspects of this topic
many times in recent decades. However, there is no comprehensive work on the
transformation of the Balkan city after the birth of the national states comparable to that by
Nikolaj Todorov on the Balkan city during the Ottoman period [Todorov, 1977]. National
historiographies have been oriented toward the study of the transformations of the individual
states; they have more or less overlooked the comparative study of the transformations
occurring in the cities of the new national states.
The comparison is instead quite frequent in German studies: as early as 1968 the topic of the
eighth volume of the Südosteuropa Jahrbücher was the history of the city in southeastern
Europe, “Die Stadt in Südosteuropa – Strucktur und Geschichte”. Numerous other studies
appeared in subsequent years on the modernization process in the Balkans in the 19th-20th
century; naturally, all of them dealt also with the transformations in the cities and towns; the
element of comparison was always present. As an example I wish to mention here the
miscellaneous volume dedicated in 1970 to Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftsgeschicht
Südosteuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. The comparison research also included the
monographic study of the single phenomenon: this is demonstrated by Hans-Michael
Boestfleisch’s work on the birth of the Serbian bureaucracy and the modernization processes
in the mid-19th century [Boestfleisch, 1987]. Just recently an interesting article appeared by
the Austrian Michael Metzeltin on Bucarest’s first steps as a capital [Metzeltin, 2005].
Without these studies, no comparison would be possible.
The group of Italian researchers’ desire is to find the common elements and the elements of
differentiation in the transformations of the former Ottoman cities. The research is restricted
above all to the capital cities of the new national states, because they, more than other cities
and towns, should represent the face of the new state.

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Thus I present here a work in progress that is part of a collective work in progress. What
transformations took place in Sofia between the 1870s and the early 20th century? Who
fostered them? Who carried them out? What reception did they have in the local intellectual
milieu? These are the main questions addressed.
Ottoman Sofia was not the most important Bulgarian city. The most populated and
wealthiest Bulgarian towns were on the sea, on the Danube, or were the site of important
fairs. The population of Sofia in 1862 was about 23,000; Ruse’s population was around
40,000, and Varna’s about 30,000. The value of buildings in Sofia was much lower than in
seaport cities, such as Varna and Balchik, or in towns on the Danube, such as Ruse and
Vidin; it was lower also than the value of buildings in some inland towns (Shumen,
Tarnovo, Pazardzhik) [Todorov, 1977, 432]; 22 Bulgarian towns are recorded as having
participated at the Pazardzhik fair in 1870, but Sofia was not among them [Todorov, 1977,
422-423]. In his “Journey Across Bulgaria” Jireček writes in fact of Sofia’s poverty and
isolation in the 19th century: the town had been hit by fires, earthquakes and epidemics,
which had left it looking desolate [Jireček, 81-82].
Ottoman Sofia was organized like all Ottoman cities, as an aggregation of mahallas: the
Turkish and Muslim mahallas occupied the largest part of the town, including the north, east
and south zones; in the center was the Jewish mahalla and a small Armenian mahalla; the
Bulgarian mahallas were in the west part; and in the northeast, separated from the rest of the
town by a cemetery and vegetable gardens, was the Gypsy mahalla. The residential zones
were strictly separated from the economic zones: trade was done exclusively in the pazar.
The grain pazar, the cattle pazar, the salt pazar, the honey pazar, the cloth pazar, the gold
pazar: these pazar were generally located at the boundaries between the Turkish, Bulgarian
and Jewish quarters [see Turkish Sofia’s Plan in H. Wilhelmy; Hochbulgarien II. S, Kiel,
1936, now in Želeva-Martins, 69].
Like all Ottoman towns, it was open to nature: it was encircled by a palisade with a defense
trench; a palisade and trench are not, however, the walls of a European or Arabian town. As
one historian of Ottoman urban development wrote, the Ottoman city was more Asian than
Middle Eastern in character [Cerasi, 30]. Gardens and meadows penetrated the town both in
the Turkish mahallas in the east and in the Bulgarian mahallas in the west.
Like every Ottoman city, in the 19th century Sofia did not have a municipal government
[Cerasi, 19]. There was the konak – the sole, central police headquarters – but the
government of the town was divided among various powers, judges (kadì), religious
authorities, Muslim charitable institutions (waqf) and heads of the markets (pazarbashì).

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In the 1870s Austria, France and Italy established consulates in Sofia [Jireček, 84]. What
induced these powers to open consulates in an economically poor city? They had discovered
the strategic role of the city’s location at the center of the roads that crossed the Balkans.
After 1860 the Ottoman Empire began the construction and repairing of these roads [Želeva-
Martins,40], and after 1870 it also began work on the first railway lines [Jireček, 84]. Sofia’s
strategic position in the Balkans was later decisive in the Bulgarians decision in 1879 to
make that city the capital of the national state.
How did Sofia appear to the western European at the end of the Ottoman period? Jireček
arrived there shortly after the birth of the national state and his impression is summed up in
the word schrecklich: he writes “roads, doors, windows, roofs are characterized by an
absolute lack of uniform geometric lines... most of the buildings were dilapidated... large
and small wooden frames filled with mud and, on the outside, not always painted,” the roads
were paved with poorly laid stones or were dirt, and in the winter they became swamps or
canals: large stones were set in the roads order to cross them. In the Turkish mahallas, walls
of varying heights separated the buildings from the streets [Jireček, 84]. Jireček speaks of
these first impressions ten years after his first arrival in Sofia and observes “no city in
Europe in our time has changed its appearance so rapidly [ibid.]. What is the explanation for
such a statement?
First of all, there were two radical demographic changes, and two important changes in the
town’s government. The demographic changes regarded the size of the population and its
ethnic makeup. Sofia had 28.676 inhabitants according to the 1873-1874 salname
(yearbook) [Todorov, 1977, pp. 328-329].The ethnic structure of the population in the
Sofia’s region according to the 1866 census was: 38,7% Moslems, 37,6% Bulgarians, 19,7%
Jews, 4% Gypsies [Todorov, 1969, 38] When Russian troops broke through the Turkish
defensive line at Pleven most of the Turks and Muslims fled from the city of Sofia. In 1881
Sofia’s population had temporarily dwindled to 20,051, but there were only 1,258 Muslims,
while it had 14,052 Orthodox Christians and 4,274 Jews[Jireček, 85]. Not only did Turks
and Muslims no longer constitute the majority of the population, they had instead become a
small minority. Within the space of a few years the population of Sofia more than doubled:
in 1893 it had 46,593 inhabitants [Kolev V., 49], although less than 1,700 were Turks,
whereas the Orthodox Christians numbered 35,286 and the Jews almost 7,000 [Jireček, 85:
C. Argirov’s (translator) footnote 65]. The rapid increase in Sofia’s population is linked to a
political-administrative factor: on April 3, 1879, the Constituent Assembly chose Sofia as
the capital of the Principality: as above sed, the strategic position of the city in the Balkans

3
plaid an important role in the decision, Sofia was also more central than other Bulgarian
cities in the territory of the Great Bulgaria, that Bulgarian politicians sought. Another
administrative change played an important role in the city’s transformation: during the
months of the provisional Russian rule the municipal government was established [Mičeva-
Deneva, 1994]. The city’s government was centralized for the first time; from its inception
the municipality dealt with town planning, the buildings to be demolished, the buildings to
be built, monuments, the paving of roads, the creating of public parks and gardens. For the
first time a city head of building was named: the Russian General Headquarters in Bulgaria
named the Bohemian Adlof Kolar chief architect of Sofia [Želeva-Martins, p.70]. In order to
build a new city, it was necessary to know the old city: thus the Russian technician
Margevič had the task to perform topographic survey in 1879 [Gančev, Dojčinov,
Stojanova, 30]. But a topographic map was not enough for developing the town, a cadastral
plan was needed: it served also to understand what should be done with the properties that
the Turks left behind when they fled. The first cadastral plan of Sofia was begun in 1878 by
the chief architect of Sofia Adolf Kolar [Gančev, Dojčinov, Stojanova, 30]: the French
engineer S. Amadier with the Bohemian engineer Venceslav Roubal carried out this
cadastral plane in 1881. Later, a team of engineers, architects and topographers worked for
eight years, from 1889 to 1897, on a new cadastral plan (Iohann und Wilhelm Bartel Plan).
On the eve of World War I there was a third cadastral plan. Topographic surveys and
cadastral plans served as the basis for zoning plans: from 1879 to 1897 there were two
zoning plans and an important zoning plan variant. The road network, public buildings,
monuments, parks, gardens, and even private homes were created in following with these
zoning plans: all the zoning plans of Sofia were in American-style with the streets crossed
right angle;[Tašev, 27] it was already after the first zoning plan that Sofia lost his old eastern
look, two/three-storey buldings rised in place of the Turkish dilapidated hovels, the
silhouette of minarets disappeared slowly from the profile of the city [Gančev, Dojčinov,
Stojanova, 34];
The provisional Russian military government under Dondukov-Korsakov began this process
immediately; the administrations of Aleksander von Battenberg and later Ferdinand von
Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha continued it. The architects and engineers working on the cadastral
plans, the zoning plans and the designing of buildings and monuments often came from
Austria, especially the Bohemian part, such as Adolf Kolar, Vaclav Roubal, Vaclav and Jiri
Prosek [Doytschinov, Gantschev, 2001]. Thanks to the work of these technicians Sofia
changed look particullary, when Dimităr Petkov became its mayor (1888), Josif Prosek was

4
chief engineer of the city (1886-1890) [Želeva-Martins, 87], the new prince Ferdinand von
Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha named the Transylvanian German Friedrich Grünanger court
architect [Stern, 1993] and, last, but not least, the new founded National Bank of Bulgaria
started to grant long term loans to the town councils and mortgage loans for construction
sector (in the first place to the capital) [Stopanska istorija na Bălgarija 681-1981, 249-250].
In accordance with the contemporary European town planning Sofia had its parks and
gardens: Prince’s Park, City’s Park [Želeva-Martins, 77], Doctorate’s Garden [Želeva-
Martins, 84], Boris Park [Želeva-Martins, 87], Botanical Garden [Želeva-Martins, 87 and
100]. Usually Swiss landscapers, like Daniel Neuf or Lucien Chevalas, created them. All
these foreign technicians imported, of course, Western European architectural models and
town planning schemes: the maked clean sweep of the past. Nothing changed, however,
when, in the early 1890s the first Bulgarian architects and engineers appeared: they had
studied at the universities of central and western Europe, in Prague, Vienna, Heidelberg,
Paris, and Ghent [See the biographies of the Bulgarian engineers and architects in Conev,
2001] . In 1893 the Association of Bulgarian Architects and Engineers was established
[Conev, 9-10] and one year later came out its journal [Želeva-Martins, 94]. Only in the end
of the century the first feeble movement for “national character of the Bulgarian
architecture” began [ Želeva-Martins, 96]: any way, this did not mean a return to the Turkish
past.
Thus the face of Sofia changed rapidly, and the city adapted to its role as the capital. It was
the seat of the prince and his court, of government and of parliament, and thus the seat of
political debate and disputes and of an increasingly large bureaucracy. At the end of the
century it was the seat of the first Bulgarian university [Arnaudov, 1939]. It was connected
by a railway to Belgrade-Vienna and Istanbul in the July 1888, to Pleven, Tǎrnovo and
Varna in the 1895, to Ruse in 1900 [Stopanska istorija na Bălgarija 681-1981, 237 and 242-
243]. The handicraft decreased: for instance, there were 40-50 furrier’s workshops in 1876,
but only 10-12 twenty years later, there were 50-60 shoemaker’s in 1876 and only 4 or 5 in
1896: this decrease was linked to the emigration of the Turkish population [Stopanska
istorija na Bălgarija 681-1981, 238-239]. Bureaucracy, army, banks, schools and, of course,
building industry were the employers. After 1900 there were an increasingly capital inflow
from abroad, which foster the development in Sofia of commercial and industrial
enterprises, utilities, insurance and finance companies [Todorova, 1999]: for instance, a
Belgian financial company with the support of a French bank cartel had the monopoly over
electric energy in Sofia and thus obtained also the control over tramway city network[Berov,

5
1963; see also Kostov, 1989]. Sofia was increasing and its population was more than
100.000 inhabitants in 1910[Kolev V., 49].

How was the existence of Sofia as the capital welcomed by the Bulgarians, by the Bulgarian
culture born of the struggles for independence? For a long time the capital of Sofia was
endured, not loved. The literature of the independent Bulgarian state was strongly critical of
the urban environment. The writers portrayed this environment as being artificial, connected
with money, corruption and the lack of morality. Sofia was scorned as the seat of this new
urban and bourgeois society: in the play “Službogonci” [Hunters for a job as civil servant]
the most famous writer of that time, Ivan Vazov(1850-1921), gave a vivid satirical portrayal
of the people which were looking for a job as civil servant, because it gave prestige; the
same Vazov mocked the petit bourgeois habits of a civil servant and his arrogance to the
peasant people in the tale “Sluginja” [Maid]; the journalist, teacher, politician Stojan
Mihajlovski (1856-1928), was disappointed of the new bourgeois society, wrote epigrams
against politicians, journalists, civil servants and blamed contemporary times and the city
life (see “Poema na zloto” [Evil’s poem]; the satire of the Sofia’s middle class milieu was
steady in the Bulgarian literature also in the first times of the twentieth century, when Jordan
Jovkov (1881-1937) derided in the play “Milionarǎt” [The millionaire] the ranking order of
values of these society, where the money had the first place. There were not only the satire
against the society of the city, but also dramatic and moralistic novels, tales, plays. Ivan
Vazov condemned the political and social life of the new Bulgaria in the novel “Nova
zemja” [New land], in the tales of Georgi Porfiriev Stamatov (1869-1942) the city was the
habitat of the corruption of morals, first of all of the woman’s amorality; Anton Strašimirov
(1872-1932) wrote same novels – “Krǎstopǎt” [Crossroads], “Visiašt most” [Suspencion
bridge], “Bena” about the city life, where the protagonists are ineffectual eggheads. We
could go on with the novel “Iz gǎnkite na sǎrceto” [From deep down of one’s heart] of
Canko Bakalov Cerkovski (1869-1926) and others. We cannot find a good image of the city
life, a fond look of Sofia for a long time. Only some years before the Second World War
came out a novel of Jordan Jovkov, “Obiknoven čovek” [An ordinary man] (1936), where
the city life was depicted in an articulate way and the entrepreneurship was exalted and set
against gambling. We can find the condemnation of the blemishes in the modern city life in
a large part of the European contemporary literature, but in the Bulgarian literature, from
Ivan Vazov to Stojan Mihajlovski, from Canko Bakalov Cerkovski to Elin Pelin, the
contempt for the city was accompanied by great praise for the rural world. For these writers

6
the country was the center of true values. There were no poets paying tribute to the new
situation arising.
What was happening in literature took place also in painting. The new painters loved to
paint the countryside: thus we have Nikola Obrasopisov’s joyous manner of describing a
village festival in “Selsko horo ot samokovskja okolija” [Country horo contadino in
Samokov’s district] (1892), Jaroslav Vešin’s love of snowy landscapes in the paintings
showing the return home from the town market (1898) or the life of smugglers in the
mountains (1899), the spiritually imbued atmosphere of the paintings by Ivan Angelov,
where the country landscape is the hero together with the women at work – “Žetva”
[Harvesting] (1905) – or with men gathered for a trial – “Kletva na svidetelja” [Witness’s
oath] (1906) - . When these painters painted Sofia, they loved to depict the tired humanity of
shepherds and farmers arriving there, as Anton Mitov did, describing the rest of the women
of Sofia’s countryside after the trading in the city bazaar (1903) ; or they showed a certain
nostalgia for the past, as happened with Hristo Berberov, who affectionately painted the
mosque cemetery (1899) . It wasn’t until the dawn of the World War I that there was a
painter such as Nikola Petrov who was enamored of the city: he painted it covered with
snow in “Sofija zime” [Winter Sofia] (1907) with its old and recent, new monuments, like
in “Cǎrkvata na Sveta Sofija” [S. Sofia Church] (1909) and with its first trams in
“Poduenskijat most” [The Bridge of Poduene Quarter] (1912).
Why was there this long rejection of the new Sofia, Sofia the capital? There were certainly
profound political and cultural reasons: the diffidence toward the development of
bureaucracy, the disappointment of the fragmentation of small and large political parties, the
defending of the weakest class, the farmers, against the transformations being made by the
national state. Moreover, the new Sofia, which grew to a population of over 100,000 by
1910, was made up of a majority of immigrants from other small Bulgarian towns and from
the rural areas: these people could not think of Sofia as their city. But that is not all. We
must also consider that the Bulgarian culture modeled itself after western culture. New ideas
about technical and political modernization arrived from western Europe, but in the latter
half of the 1800s doubts about modernization also arrived. In substance: Josif Oberbauer
was an Austrian who worked on the great 1887-1896 cadastre of Sofia, but he was known
above all for his watercolors of the old Sofia that he helped to destroy. The Bohemian Ivan
Mrvička painted affectionate scenes of Bulgarian rural life and the survival of old traditions
within the city. He would serve as a model for Bulgarian painters for many years. More
examples could be given of European – and Russian, I would add – literary models for

7
Bulgarian writers. In short, I would say that Europe exported modernization, but also doubts
about that same modernization.

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