Bulgaria &c: Budapest

March 16, 2017

The train to Budapest stopped at Curtici to clear outbound Romanian immigration. I said "bona ziua" to the officer, who asked if I spoke Romanian. I said no, only three words: bona ziua (hello), moltsumesc (thank you), and papanaş (a Romanian dessert that is something like a creamy jelly donut). He had a laugh about the third Romanian word I knew.

A man sitting across the aisle from me had a 1/5 of some brown liquor that was 40% alcohol. Within 3 hours, he had drained the bottle.

Upon arrival at Budapest Keleti station (1), I walked to the hotel and then walked to find a place for lunch. At lunch, I asked the owner of the restaurant what kind of wine he had served me (the wine was quite tasty). He rattled off a name too fast for me to understand, then said it is his favorite wine, and he has at least two bottles a day at home. I hope he does not live alone!

A bike tour of Pest (2) was next on the agenda. Being so early in the season, the group was just the guide and I. We pedaled out to the area of the city that was the site of the 1896 exposition. The exposition was supposed to be in 1894 to mark the 1,000 year anniversary of the arrivals of the Hungarians (Magyars) in the area. When delays arose in preparing the exposition buildings, historians were asked to recalculate the Magyar's arrival date to be 896, 1,000 years before the expedition was ready!

There was a castle that that was designed to represent the various architectural styles of Hungary (which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time). I said that one of the towers reminded me of the town of Sigişoara (3) in Romania which I had visited two years before. As it happens, the tower in Budapest was a replica of one in Sigişoara, which the Hungarians assert was part of Hungary at the time (4).

The tower at the 1896 Exhibition Palace based on a tower at Sigişoara.

The House of Terror is in this area. The building was used to interrogate people by both the Nazis and the State Police during the communist era. Small pictures of those killed in the building have been placed below the windows.

Pictures of victims on the exterior of the house of terror

We also visited the Parliament building. In the late 1800s, there was a architectural competition to design the Parliament building. There were three entries, and the selection committee liked all three so they built them all. The first prize winner became Parliament, the second prize design became The Hungarian Museum of Ethnography, and the third prize winner now houses the Agriculture Ministry.

                    Exterior of Parliament

                         My bike tour guide

Throughout the city, there are various reminders of the 1956 invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union. Hungary had begun to chart a separate course from the Soviet communism model. The Soviets were not pleased and invaded Hungary to ensure that it remained a Soviet client state.

           Memorial of the 1956 Soviet Invasion

In the evening, I attended a concert by the Budapest Festival Orchestra, which performed Mendelsohn's Italian Symphony and Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. The concert was at the Bartok Bela (5) Concert hall, a modern venue on the south side of town.

(1) Keleti station was the site of a large migrant camp during the European refugee crisis in the summer of 2015.

(2) Budapest is actually two places: topograpgically flat Pest on the east bank of the Danube, and hilly Buda on the west bank.

(3) Sigişoara is best known as the birthplace of Vlad Tepeş, who served as the basis of Dracula in the novel by Bram Stoker.

(4) The Magyars (as Hungarians call themselves) have never forgiven the world for the Treaty of Trianon, which defined Hungary's borders upon the disillusion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the first World War. The treaty left a large number of ethnic Hungarians outside the country's borders, especially in Romania and Northern Serbia.

(5) Bela Bartok is Hungary's best known classical music composer. In Hungarian (as in Chinese), the family name generally comes before the given name; hence the Bartok Bela Concert hall.

Bulgaria &c: Timisoara

March 15, 2017

Early morning train (3:35) to Craiova. There was thick fog on arrival, with many arriving trains blasting their horns to warn of their impending arrival. Not to be outdone, the train drivers in the station began replying with their own horn blasts in an ad-hoc competition. The connecting train passed by the Danube on the way to Timisoara.

        Morning fog at Craiova Train Station

 Passing the Danube. Serbia is to the left,  Romania to the right

Upon arrival at Timisoara Gara De Nord, I had a very pleasant walk to the hotel. The city center is quite compact, and has a number of parks, gardens, and pedestrian promenades. The tallest structure in town is the spire of the Orthodox Cathedral.

            The Orthodox Cathedral, Timisoara

The National Opera Theatre was performing Scripcarul pe Acoperiş. I was not familiar with this work and it had no obvious translation. I looked at the cast and there were characters such as Tevya, Tzeitel and Yentl; so, it was "Fiddler on the Roof"  While the character names and pronunciation may sound very foreign to us, they sound familiar in Eastern Europe (1), much closer to where the events depicted in the musical play actually ocurred.

I got a ticket for a loge seat. The usher was quite nice and told me the view was not very good, but that I could move. I went up to the second balcony, where I would prefer to be anyway. The National Opera Theatre building was quite nice inside, with many interior details typical of the late 1800s.

        Corridor at the National Opera Theatre

         Stairway detail, National Opera Theatre

The show was very well done. Even though it was performed in Romanian, I was able to follow the story reasonably well. From somewhere deep within the cob-webbed recesses of my brain, I was even able to find the English words to the choruses of many of the songs.

(1) Romanian is a romance language, derived from Latin (like French, Italian, Spanish etc.). However, the pronuniciation has been influenced by the Slavic languages (e.g., Russian, Bulgarian, Serbia) common in neighboring countries. In the 1800s, Romanian was commonly written in the Cyrillic alphabet (used for the Slavic languages), which included a letter for the "ts" or "tz" sound: ц.

Bulgaria &c: Belogradchik

March 14, 2017

I took the morning train from Sofia to Gara Oreshec. Northwest of Sophia, the train passes through the deep gorge of the Iskar River, which is so narrow in some place the two railway tracks are on opposite sides of the river.

                   The Iskar River Gorge

The route became flatter after Vratsa, with the Stara Planina mountains to the west. I had my Bulgaria map and a print-out of the train schedule on the seat next to me. As we got nearer to my stop, I ticked off the stations with a pencil to ensure I did not miss my stop. The conductor noticed, picked up the schedule and stared at it for a long time. As well as I could, I told him I was getting off at Gara Oreshec, then going to Belogradchik. He came by as the train approached Gara Oreshec to ensure I got off at the right stop.

Because my time in Belogradchik was limited and there no public transit available, I arranged to have a local guide (Anggel) pick me up at the station. He said very few foreign tourists come to this part of Bulgaria. Belogradchik is a short ride away up into the hills, and the name means small white village. The town's main claim to fame was that it was home to the factory that made most of the phones used by the eastern block countries during the communist era.

There is a fort in the town that takes advantage of the natural rock formations on top of the hill. The location had has been used for fortification by the Romans, Bulgars and Ottomans over the centuries. We were accompanied on our tour by Sarah, the local dog who always seemed to know we were going next. The guide took me off the official paths, scrambling up and over rocks to some very impressive views.

                    The Belogradchik Fort

                  Sarah, my unofficial guide

We then used Anggel' s 1993 Land Rover (with right-side, England-style steering wheel) to drive in the mud roads behind the fort. There are various rock formations that look like people and animals. 

                      Elephant head rock

We had a quick lunch at a restaurant overlooking the rocks. There was something familiar about the view, and I realized that a music video by a Bulgarian Gothic Metal band I like (https://youtu.be/tKpvzjzCQXg) was filmed at a location in view of the window. My guide said he remembered the day they filmed the video; he was below the rocks where they were filming and was wondering who was playing the drums.

Back to the station to catch the train for Vidin. From there, and after a bit of haggling about the fare with fingers and numbers written on scraps of paper, I took a cab across the New Danube River Bridge to Calafat, Romania. Calafat looks like it's best says are behind it, but there some grand-looking buildings still around.

Church in Calafat, Romania

Bulgaria &c. Mountain Train Back to Sofia

Monday, March 13, 2017

I caught the 10:10 train from Dobrinishte to Septemvri. This is a narrow guage (1) mountain railway starting at 834 meters elevation at Dobrinishte. From here to Balitsa (about 25 kilometers), the train is used mostly by locals (mainly older people and students).

                    The Train at Dobrinishte

The coaches are heated with steam, with the excess released through pipes out from the bottom side of the cars. At Balitsa, a train came from the other direction, and a steamy mist enshrouded the narrow platform and the trains.

                     Trains meet at Balitsa

After Balitsa (elevation 773 meters) the serious climbing starts. There are a number of times the train does a complete circle, crossing over itself to gain elevation. As we climbed the mountains, it began snowing (a wet Spring snow that clung to the trees). We reached the highest station on the line (and the highest in the Balkans) at Avramovo, at an elevation of 1,267 meters.

         The highest rail station in the Balkans

The descent then began, with the tracks at one point spiralling through 540 degrees to lose elevation, passing through numerous tunnels on the way. I had opened the window to get a better view. The conductor was sitting a few rows in front of me; she turned around and started talking to me in Bulgarian. I wondered: Was she scolding me for the open window? Asking me to sit down (I was kneeling on the seat to get a better view because the window opened from the top)? Neither. She pointed to the lights and was asking whether I wanted her to turn on the lights as we passed through the many tunnels. I said "no thanks" in Bulgarian.

       Entering one of the 35 tunnels on the line

A friend told me about a novel by the Japanese writer Kawabata called "Snow Country" that begins with:

“The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.”

From Tsvetino onward, we picked up some more local passengers. After Velingrad, we passed through a beautiful narrow gorge before arriving at Septemvri, and a connection to the standard guage line back to Sofia.

(1) The standard rail guage (i.e., width between the rails) used in most of North America, Europe and China is 4 feet 8 1/2 inches. The rails on this Bulgarian line line are 760 mm, or about 2 feet, 5 15/16 inches apart (sometimes called the Bosnian guage). Narrow- guage lines are most common on mountainous terrain where construction costs (especially related to the width and height of the tunnels) would otherwise be too expensive.

Bulgaria &c: Rila Monastery and Dobrinishte

March 12, 2017

I had arranged for a driver from the hotel in Blagoevgrad to take me up to Rila Monastery,  the most famous in Bulgaria. While I would normally take the bus, this would have left me at the Monastery for 6 hours and resulted in my arrival at Dobrinishte rather late in the day. The driver's name was Stoyan. He did not speak much English, but after a few tries, we found we had a bit of French in common. He used the rectangular vent in his car as an ad- hoc map to point out different places in Bulgaria (which is roughly rectangular in shape). I pointed to where Gyueshevo would be, and he was surprised I had even heard of it. He also said he had trouble pronouncing it, as I did when buying a rail ticket yesterday. We passed through the town in which Stoyan lived, named Barakoova, pronounced "like Barak Obama" he said.

The Monastery is located high in The mountains up a long twisty road, with some waterfalls tumbling off the hills. The Monastery itself was quite nice. In the center there is a stone tower (what might be called a redoubt in military terms). Stoyan said the tower was for "anti-Turk" fighting (1). There was a lot of a very vibrant blue color in many of the frescoes. The color reminded me of Voronet blue, named after one of the painted monasteries of Southern Bukovina in Romania.

                           Rila Monastery

                      Monastery Entrance.

We went out the far side of the Monastery where there was old house where that made мекици (may-KEET-see), which is basically fried dough. There was a group of students from Blagoevgrad there with their teachers visiting the Monastery (and eating fried dough). They asked to take a group picture with the foreigner (me). One of the students told me he has a cousin in Boston. When I asked a teacher to take a picture with my phone, one of her teenage students had to help work my phone (some things are the same everywhere). As we passed through gates to the Monastery on the way back to the car, I noted that the ambiance got quieter and calmer as soon as we passed into the Monastery.

       
                                     Where they make the fried dough

As we returned to Blagoevgrad, Stoyan told me that Blagoev (after whom the town is named) was one of the founders of the modern Bulgarian nation. After a quick snack at the Blagoevgrad bus station (I was pleased I was able to sound out the Cyrilic name of what was basically grilled cheese) I caught the early afternoon bus to Bansko.

There was no taxi at the Bansko bus station (I had about 5 more miles to go to Dobrinishte), so I made my way up to the ski slopes, expecting more people there. There is a ski lift (and ski trail) right from the center of town to the slopes. I found a taxi to take me the last few miles to Dobrinishte.

                                  Bansko

At Dobrinishte, I walked up to an orange-domed church on the hill outside of town that I had seen on the way to town. As it happens, the church was brand new and had not yet been finished inside.

            New Church outside Dobrinishte

Dobrinshte is a spa town where people would come to "take the waters" back in the day (and still do). I decided to partake and went to the Alpha spa. There were three outdoors pools. One was so cold, I think the water was still snow earlier in the day (I dunked twice very quickly). There was a Bulgarian brother and sister that were goading each other to get in. The second pool was probably about 85 degrees (where I spent more time). The final spot was like a hot tub, except fed by thermal mineral water. There is something quite refreshing about a good soak in warm mineral water.

Poster advertising the spa

(1) Bulgaria was ruled by the Ottoman Empire (invariably called "the Turks" by the local inhabitants) for almost 500 years from the late 1300s to 1878.

Bulgaria &c: Kyustendil and Gyueshevo

Saturday, March 11, 2017

The morning train ride to Kyustendil was pleasant. I stopped in Kyustendil to visit Dimitar Peshev's house. On March 9, 1943, as the Jews of Kyustendil were being gathered for transport into Nazi hands, Peshev interfered to prevent any Bulgarian Jews from being sent out of Bulgaria. He considered Jews to have the same rights as any other Bulgarian citizen. He was the vice president of parliament, and his efforts were successful. He was later made an honorary citizen of Israel, which funded the house museum.

 The Peshev House and Museum, Kyustendil

From Kyustendil, there is an afternoon train to Gyueshevo. When I went to the ticket counter at Sofia train station to get my ticket to Gyueshevo, I asked for a ticket to GyueSHEVo with an accent on the SHEV. When the ticket seller did not understand, a nice woman nearby said GYUeshevo, with an accent on the GYU. That worked.

Gyueshevo is a village of only about 275 people located where the tracks end on the Macedonian border. The Gyueshevo train runs only on weekends and Wednesdays and is mainly designed for local villagers to go to Kyustendil for shopping. It takes 1.5 hours to trundle through the various little villages west of Kyustendil. 

When I arrived at Gyueshevo (I had been the only one on the train for the last 1/2 hour or so), I signalled to the conductor 1 hour with my fingers, which was the time I had available to visit. He signalled 4 with his fingers, meaning that the train leaves to return to Kyustendil at 4:00. Getting left behind in a tiny village with no food or lodging places for the night (especially when you don't speak the language) would have been interesting.

I was well off the beaten tourist path. Gyueshevo is not in any guidebook; I had found a mention of Trinity Church (1) in Gyueshevo in an on-line resource, which said there is an ossuary in the Church. Because I did not know what the word "ossuary" meant, I decided to go visit (2).

                 Trinity Church, Gyueshevo

The Gyueshevo train station is enormous; it was designed 100 years ago to be the main railway border crossing from neighboring Macedonia. The line on the Macedonian side has still not been built.

                   Gyueshevo Train Station

I think the conductor was intrigued that an English speaking tourist was even on his train. He came by to talk during the return trip (I was the only passenger for a large portion of the trip). He waved his hands outside and said some words in Bulgarian, one of which sounded like a cognate for panorama. We were passing snow-capped mountains and fast-flowing rivers. I responded with some of the few words I know in Bulgarian, "da, da, dobre" which means yes, yes, good. This was the best I could manage. As we approached Kyustendil, a snow-capped mountain was shrouded in cloud reflected the setting sun, which had appeared only late this afternoon.

                           Near Kyustendil

I took the minibus (3) to Blagoevgrad, where I stayed for the night.

(1) The church was built in 1930 to commemorate the many soldiers who died nearby during the Balkan wars of the 1910s, including WWI, which started as a Balkan war after the assasination of Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo.

(2) I could have just looked up the word "ossuary" but then I would not have had a nice train ride through the mountains and villages of Western Bulgaria.

(3) Judging by the signs inside most of these minibuses, they were originally used in France. Based on the expiration dates on the (expired) fire extinguishers, the minibuses came from France 2 to 3 years ago.

Bulgaria &c: To Sofia

Friday, March 10, 2017

After arriving at Sofia, I took the Metro to my hotel, grabbed a quick kebab for dinner, then took the Metro to the Inter Expo Center where the metal band Sabaton was playing that night. I've seen this band three times before when they were opening for Nightwish, my favorite metal band.

The venue was just an indoor exhibit hall with about 5,000 screaming Bulgarian metal fans.

The opening act was good: Twilight Force. The second act was just loud: the band Accept. Sabaton came on last and played for 1 3/4 hours. As they started to play, an older Bulgarian woman signalled to me that she needed help climbing onto a rickety wooden bench; she wanted a better view. 

Sabaton play songs with a military theme; all the songs on their most recent album were named after battles (e.g., Rourke's  Drift). They were fabulous.

The concert venue

Sabaton performing

The official Sofia concert t-shirt. The colors in the middle are from the Bulgarian flag.