When we decided years ago to do a long stay in the Bulgarian town of Bansko, visiting the capital city Sofia was an afterthought. We knew we’d need to enter Bulgaria through Sofia, so we might as well spend a few days checking it out. But having not loved the Romanian capital Bucharest when we visited there in 2019 for our mountain stay in Brasov, I didn’t have high hopes.
Boy, was I wrong! I fell completely in love with Sofia during our four days there and Chad really liked it too. So it is on our list for a future one-month stay. Four days definitely wasn’t enough for all the museums, attractions, neighborhoods, and culture there is to see. But we made the best of the days we had and got a glimpse of what makes Sofia special. Here’s how we spent that time, which is definitely an itinerary I’d recommend for a short visit.
Day 1 – Arrival and Hotel Base
Honestly, our arrival into Sofia was a little rough. Our Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt was delayed by about two hours and involved about an hour of standing on a bus before unboarding and moving gates during a strange saga of aircraft issues, all on the very limited sleep we got on our flight from St. Louis. So we arrived in Sofia tired!
I’d read that there was a rideshare app called Bolt operating in Bulgaria, which I’d used before in other Balkan countries and had downloaded and ready to go. But it turned out not to be the case. Sofia does have a metro that would take us from the airport to our hotel with just one stop, but we were too tired to navigate it with our luggage and decided to just take a taxi. A man in the terminal quoted a price of 40 lev (about $25), which seemed fair, and led us to the first taxi at the taxi stand.
Unfortunately, in my tired state, I neglected all the things I know to do when dealing with airport taxis – reconfirming the rate, paying cash, being clear in all things. So when the taxi dropped us off at the hotel, the driver charged my credit card 40 euros rather than 40 lev (about $50). If I’d paid cash, he may still have claimed that the rate was supposed to be euros, leading to an argument we probably would have lost. So I’m glad to have avoided that, but I can’t be sure. Either way, a $25 lesson isn’t too bad a lesson to learn. And it reinforces my feeling that while it is a shame that rideshare apps have hurt taxi drivers in some places and that drivers deserve to earn a living, if there weren’t so much dishonesty in the taxi business, I don’t think the apps would be so popular.
Our hotel, Art Plaza Hotel, ended up being good though – just a small, basic room with a kettle and a fridge, but it was clean. And the daily breakfast was fantastic and gave us a great opportunity to taste some Bulgarian flavors, including their famous yogurt, some cheeses, and banitsa, a cheese-stuffed pastry.
It was late afternoon by the time we got settled, so we just had time to go out and explore our neighborhood a little before going to dinner at a traditional Bulgarian restaurant. It was a bit on the pricey side and mostly serving tourists, but the food was interesting and it was easy. It also reminded us that in this part of the world, there’s no free tap water at restaurants and bread even when not asked for is going to be charged for. The bread was needed, though, for our appetizer of several Bulgarian spreads made with various combinations of eggplant, red peppers, tomatoes, carrots, cheese, and yogurt. They were fun to try and we also enjoyed our entrees – vegetarian stew with yogurt and trout with potatoes.
Day 2 – Sightseeing Day
The next day, fortified with the excellent hotel breakfast, we set out for a day of sightseeing. Our first stop was the Regional History Museum of Sofia to give us a little history and context for the city. There we learned that Sofia is the longest-inhabited European capital, with human habitation since 7000 BC. Compare that to Athens at around 2000 BC and Rome at around 1000 BC. In ancient times, Sofia was called Serdica, a name you see in many places around the city. We also learned how Sofia became the capital city after Bulgaria won independence from the Ottoman Empire and about Bulgarian history in general. It was all very interesting and a good value at just $6 each for entry.
From there we walked around the city a little and stumbled across some Roman ruins with good interpretive signs. Some were in the open air, some were built into the under-street walkways. We saw just a small part of the remains of Serdica but left the rest for a future visit to Sofia. After a little more wandering and enjoying some of the parks and architecture, we returned to the hotel for a rest before our evening activity.
I booked tickets online for the last time slot of the day (6 p.m.) to see The Red Flat, a cold-war era apartment decorated how it would have been in the 1980s toward the end of communism. Even getting to the apartment was kind of fun. You stop at a gift shop to be given instructions and then find the building around the block. You’re buzzed inside and go up the stairs and are given a headset to listen to the story of the family who lived in the apartment. It was all very interesting and we learned a lot about Bulgarian life during that time period. It didn’t seem as bad as we’d imagined it to be (not like cold war Germany, for example, with all the spying and reporting on one another), but certainly had many challenges. The Red Flat was definitely worth the price of just over $10 per person.
After the Red Flat, we had a glass of wine in a pretty courtyard to debrief and then a light dinner of salads at a chain called So Fresh on the tourist-strasse (our term for the pedestrian street you find in almost all European cities with lots of international stores and restaurants catering to tourists). I neglected to get photos at either stop.
Day 3 – Boyana
The next day we enjoyed our hotel breakfast again and then took the metro a couple of stops down where we could catch a bus to the neighborhood of Boyana. We found the Sofia public transit system to be very easy to manage with payment by contactless card (i.e. our credit cards) and set pricing so that if you ride more than a few rides a day, you automatically just get charged a day rate.
Our first stop in Boyana was Boyana Church, a medieval Bulgarian Orthodox church with famous frescoes that has been a UNESCO site since 1979. We arrived about 30 minutes after its 9:30 a.m. opening time and bought our tickets ($7 each). Entry is limited to just 10 people at a time, staying only 10 minutes, and they have a strict no photography policy to protect the frescoes.
We were told to wait 10 minutes, so we sat down with some other tourists who seemed to be waiting near the ticket office. After about 10 minutes had passed though, we realized that they’d been waiting for others in their tour group to finish in the church. But this worked out great for us because when we walked down the church, the group was completely finished and we were able to enter by ourselves with the guide for the church. She spoke English and so we were able to ask her lots of questions about the art, their reputation, and the scenes depicted. We learned that the frescoes are featured in textbooks in the public schools so most Bulgarians know about them. The most interesting part is that the frescoes are in two layers. The earlier layer from the 11th and 12th centuries is only partially visible. It was covered over with a new set of frescoes in 1259, which are the ones that are so famous for introducing greater realism and individuality.
Since we couldn’t take photos, here are a couple websites where you can see them: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/42/gallery/&maxrows=14 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyana_Church and a photo below advertising the site that we saw that evening on the Lover’s Bridge. One of the most interesting is the depiction of the Last Supper, with Jesus on the left rather than in the center and traditional Bulgarian foods on the table.
After the church and a quick stop for the onsite restroom (clean and modern by the ticket office), we set off to hike up Vitosha Mountain to Boyana waterfall. The hike was well-marked with two possible paths, the “easy” trail and the “difficult and dangerous” trail. We chose “easy” but it was still plenty steep, ascending 1800 feet over about 2 miles. Still, it was a lovely hike and the waterfall was nice.
Afterwards, we had lunch at a Georgian restaurant called Pirosmani near the Boyana church. It was an interesting meal with a great eggplant salad, Georgian soup dumplings called khinkali, and tasty shotis puri bread. It really piqued our interest in visiting Georgia in the future. We took the bus back to the metro station and returned to the hotel to rest a while. We went out again in the evening to walk in the local park and enjoyed some very tasty buckwheat crepes from a restaurant near the park called La Soleil. The proprietor had lived for a time in Wichita so it was interesting to chat with him. Since the restaurant was not right in the tourist zone, the price of our meal was very good too.
Day 4 – A Little European Normalcy
For our final day in Sofia, we did a little morning sightseeing to two side-by-side orthodox churches: St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral and St. Sofia Church.
The Alexander Nevsky Cathedral is big and beautiful, but the first thing we noticed was the big stage and risers set up for a performance in front of it. That night, the Sofia Opera would be performing Les Miserables. They actually had 9 scheduled performances for that time period, but we were glad one would fall on our last night in Sofia. We decided not to try to buy tickets but to come back after 8 p.m. to hear the music. In the meantime, we visited inside the cathedral. Unfortunately, they don’t allow photos, but it was very grand inside.
After the cathedral, we walked around a bit until the archeological part of the St. Sofia Church opened at 10 a.m. We checked out the little church first, which did allow photos for a fee, which I paid, I think around $3. Then we went down to the archeological level to view the ruins and crypt beneath the church, which date to the 3rd century AD. It was interesting to walk around and view and included some nice mosaics. The price was about $5 each.
We spent the rest of the day back in our room working since I had grading to do and emails to answer. We went out again in the late afternoon, taking the Metro up to the Paradise Center mall at the south end of the big parks south of our neighborhood. We walked through much of the huge South Park and then enjoyed a nice drink at the Carnivale Funky Gastrotaverna west of the park. Afterwards, we took a tram back toward our area and were lucky to get a table at a restaurant called Aubergine close to La Soleil. Our meal there was very tasty – Chad had a delicious stuffed eggplant that he was able to recreate at home in Bansko and I ordered the bean fritter with salad.
From there we walked up to the cathedral and were lucky to find a bench just behind the stands where we could listen to the familiar music of Les Miserables sung in Bulgarian. We stayed through most of the first act and really enjoyed it.
Next Day – Departure
We left Sofia by bus to Bansko. I had prepurchased tickets online from the company Union Ivkoni, which gets terrible reviews but all the bus and train companies seem to here. We took the metro up to the train station, which is also where the central bus station is. Or I should say where the central bus stations are because there are actually two, one for domestic buses and one for international. We had a little trouble finding the domestic terminal on the far end, but luckily we had plenty of time and it all worked out. The bus itself was incredibly cramped but we were able to sit together and it wasn’t an awful 3-hour ride to Bansko.
Summary
We really enjoyed our brief time in Sofia and are enthusiastic about coming back for a longer stay. When we do, we also plan to explore more of Bulgaria including getting out to Rila Monastery, visiting Veliko Tarnovo in the north, and spending some time in Burgas or another coastal city. It will take a few years I’m sure because there are many other places in Europe we want to explore, but I’m confident we’ll return.