Before You Leave for Bulgaria

I was warned before I went to Sofia: Ian’s Bulgarian grandfather didn’t throw things away. He took them, organized them, repurposed them. When I arrived in the summer of 2011 with Ian—my then boyfriend, now husband—we came face-to-face with over thirty years’ worth of stuff. The apartment where we were staying with the family was tidy, but it also housed every vacuum cleaner, bolt, and ketchup packet he’d encountered since his first visit to the United States in 1987.

All of these things, kept after decades of consumer-good scarcity in the Balkans, were part of the apartment’s fabric. Like one of those image-search puzzles, you didn’t realize how much was contained in a single room until you started looking carefully for any given item. Ian didn’t notice that the back of his family’s old TV had been repurposed as a colander until several days into the trip in 2011. When Ian made a comment about the inventive adaptation, his grandfather replied with an enthusiastic, “But of course!”

His Bulgarian mom was an only child, and his grandfather Shtilian was his last relative living in Bulgaria. After he died in 2015, Ian and his parents began the long process of peeling back the apartment’s sedimentary-object layers. It took eighty trips up and down the building’s elevator to get everything out. Once cleared, the apartment was spacious, empty. Later, it was renovated, the final layer of weathered wallpaper and aged appliances scrubbed clean.

In this place, emptied of things but not memories, Ian and I are now making our own home. Ever since 2020, we have spent half our year living in the Sofia apartment, filling the space.

Moving from the United States to Bulgaria was a bit of a reverse migration. The flow of people from Bulgaria to the US is much more common and aspirational. Ian’s grandparents spent most of the ’80s working to secure an academic visa for his mother before the collapse of the commusist government. When she left in 1987 for the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, she unknowingly was one of the first of many Bulgarians who would leave when communism crumbled in 1989. Then the country joined the European Union in 2007, and a second wave of Bulgarians departed, this time within the bloc’s boundaries—to Germany, Spain, Italy—often in search of higher-paid work. Today, Bulgaria has one of the world’s fastest-declining populations, dropping from around nine million in 1989 to below seven million today.

Ian’s grandfather visited him and his family in Florida regularly. Shtilian considered himself an ambassador to other Bulgarians who might be venturing west for the first time. After he died, Ian found a Word document in Bulgarian on his computer titled “Before You Leave for America.” It’s Shtilian’s unique guide for Bulgarians, meant to demystify the US: It discusses relationships (“No self-respecting American would allow discussions on a sexual theme, even with best friends. Every Bulgarian would cry: ‘So what are friends, then?’”) to how the mail works (“Americans put the letters they send in their own mailboxes [and] the box is not locked!”).

In Sofia, there is a generally positive attitude toward Americans, to the point that the warmth I’ve received feels unwarranted—especially since Bulgaria is not always warm toward immigrants. Since the country sits on the eastern edge of the European Union, Bulgaria’s border with Turkey is a common route for migrants from Africa and the Middle East. Bulgaria tends to be more of an entry point than a destination, but staying is a challenge too: The country granted fewer than nine hundred people asylum in 2019.

As Americans, Ian and I don’t have to deal with Europe’s hardening borders. But our choice to spend half the year in Sofia is still perplexing to local Bulgarians. Visit? Sure! But why move from the US to Bulgaria?

The easy explanation is that my husband is Bulgarian. This is generally understandable. The truth—that Ian was born in Wisconsin, didn’t grow up in Sofia, and speaks the language only marginally better than I do—is more complicated. The honest answer: Because I’ve always had the very earnest journalist’s dream of being a foreign correspondent. Because Bulgaria was an established home base, a place where we didn’t have to pay rent. Because Sofia is a European capital that still feels like a residential city, not a place catering to tourists. Because the times we came as tourists, we wanted to be residents. We wanted to keep buying cherries from street vendors, wanted to be immersed in a less work-centric culture, wanted to hike all the different routes up and down Mount Vitosha, the mountain at the southern edge of the city.

We planned for over a year to quit our jobs, to become freelancers, and to move in the spring of 2020. The original timeline didn’t stick, but everything else did: In September 2020, we landed in Sofia.

Visit? Sure! But why move from the US to Bulgaria?

Moving to a place where no family of ours had lived for years meant there wasn’t an immediate network of relatives to catch us when we landed. With the Covid vaccine still months away, I spent that fall without work, without a friend group, taking long meandering walks through the city. I felt not just lonely, but isolated: I nearly had a breakdown after not being able to communicate with a green grocer, then listening to her joke in Bulgarian with an elderly baba buying a glass jar of milk.

“Everything is harder in Bulgaria,” Ian’s mom told us many times before we left the States. She was supportive, but puzzled. I imagined Shtilian’s reaction: Would he have been shocked to see his grandson choose to leave the US for Bulgaria? What would he have included in a reverse guide? How would it have aligned with our own encounters?

Before you leave for Bulgaria: Learn the Cyrillic alphabet. Pay attention to the characters that are shared by the Latin alphabet but pronounced differently. The letter p now sounds like an r; h is n.

Plenty of Bulgarians speak English, especially if they’re younger than thirty or work with international colleagues. But plenty of people don’t. Enjoying classic food like banitsa, the phyllo-dough-and-brined-white-cheese breakfast pastry, requires ordering in Bulgarian. In front of our building, a typical Soviet-era bloc apartment building that looks like a concrete loaf, there’s a bright-red banitsa stand. Early in our Sofia time, Ian identified himself as Shtilian’s grandson, and the banitsa lady immediately launched into an effusive, familiar story entirely in Bulgarian while we nodded without comprehension. Every day after, she would smile and wave her cigarette at us as we walked by, continuing the one-sided conversation that Ian had unintentionally launched.

Before you leave for Bulgaria: Understand that spending what’s perceived as too much money—even if you get a better product or result—will lead some people to think you don’t understand how to navigate the country, where finding creative ways to get a discount is a national sport.

People are confused by our fumbling second-language Bulgarian—why would we learn a language spoken by only seven million people in one country? But they’re more confused that we pay for language lessons. Our perplexed neighbor has more than once offered her teenage son as a free conversation partner so we can save our money. Ian’s mom once told a ticket cashier at a national historic site that we were siblings to get a family rate, emerged proudly with the four (cheaper) tickets, and sternly warned us not to hold hands.

This attitude toward finding ways to save money is connected in part to a distrust in government, where the communist-era mentality of getting things done based on who you know and who can help you navigate the system is still strong.

Before you leave for Bulgaria: Understand the scale of the bureaucracy. Picking up and sending out mail requires going to two different gisheta, or desks, at a neighborhood post office. Claiming a package that’s come through customs is a four-gisheta process.

Understand when you need to ask for help. We knew exactly two people when we landed in Sofia: twins who are the children of Shtilian’s closest friends. In either a frugal Bulgarian move or simply a very foolish one, we didn’t hire an immigration attorney to help with my long-term residence permit. We asked the twins to help us navigate the migration office.

Over the course of the fall of 2020, we got to know the characters: the military guy in the all-caps MIGRATION baseball cap who patrols the line that runs down the sidewalk and asks which gishe you’re there to see; the woman with the long blond hair who silently staples application packets in specific configurations; the woman with rectangular glasses who yelled at me for not having my documents in the correct order.

When my permit was approved and with my national ID card in hand, I was officially allowed to live in Bulgaria year-round. But beyond the state saying I’m allowed to stay, I still have internal questions about how much of Bulgaria is mine to claim. My connection feels both entirely incidental—the person I fell in love with happens to have a family apartment in the country—and entirely personal; after the isolation of our first fall, I’ve carved out a space for myself that no family network could have created for me.

I’ve carved out a space for myself that no family network could have created for me. 

At home, we’re creating our own space out of the family apartment as well. Where there were once bookshelves meticulously crammed with books, glassware, and multiple clocks, we’ve started hanging art from Sofia galleries. We have a kitchen equipped with gadgets we purchased new instead of fashioning them from other objects.

But some things remain the same: From the apartment’s living room window, Mount Vitosha still rises on the city’s southern edge even as new glass buildings steadily spring up around the concrete communist-era blocs. And just like we’ve seen in old family photos, we’ve filled the apartment with people, laughing, drinking, dancing.

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