Architecturally Sofia has little or no pretensions

Architecturally, Sofia has little or no pretensions. The homes are all of brick encased in stucco. The width of the thoroughfares, the monotony of the infinite rows of indifferent villas, the scrubby timber planted alongside the foot- walks, and the shabby-genteel air inseparable from stucco in each kind and section, jogged my memory regularly of the non-artistic districts of St. John’s Wooden. Palace, public buildings, personal dwellings, are all normal after the mannequin of the home which kids are first taught to attract, an oblong parallelogram, with a broad slit within the center for the doorway, and with any variety of slim slits for the home windows within the facade. Besides in a number of streets of the enterprise quarter, the homes don’t adjoin one another, however stand aside. Hardly any home is greater than two tales in top: most of them consist of 1 story solely. All of them stand in a plot of floor of their very own, however gardens are few and much between; the locations the place one may look forward to finding a backyard are occupied by outhouses. Besides in two or three of the principle streets, the method of reconstruction remains to be incomplete. Once in a while the broad, clean, flag-stone pavements are intersected by stretches of unpaved floor, stuffed up with rubble and free stones, which a bathe of rain converts, in the interim, right into a quagmire. Right here and there, too, sandwiched in between the fashionable stucco villas, are teams of old- normal Turkish homes, half cottages, half shanties, with white-washed partitions and broad, red-tiled roofs.

Probably superior to the previous Sofia

From a painter’s standpoint the tumble-down, squalid outdated city was infinitely preferable; however, from the standpoint of people that must go their lives in Sofia, the current is likely superior to the previous Sofia has, the truth is, been transformed right into a very reasonable specimen of a well-to-do, commonplace Western metropolis. The streets, not like these of Jap cities, are all named, largely after the native celebrities of the period of Liberation, and the homes are all often numbered. The principle thorough-) fares are extensive and properly paved with macadam. The foot- walks in each a part of the city are glorious, apart from the gaps I’ve simply spoken of; and earlier than lengthy Sofia might be as properly constructed a capital, for its measurement, as any to be present in Europe. At night time the city is lit with oil lamps’; by night time as by day the streets are singularly quiet and orderly. The personal homes, although homely, are snug. The sanitary preparations are nonetheless of a primitive form. I’m on no account positive, nevertheless, that they don’t seem to be — extra conducive to well being than the flowery system of water-drainage which is to be substituted of their place, when a contract, already made for supplying Sofia with an sufficient provide of water, is carried into impact.