Monotony of the endless rows

Architecturally, Sofia has little or no pretensions. The houses are all of brick encased in stucco. The width of the thoroughfares, the monotony of the endless rows of detached villas, the scrubby trees planted along the foot- walks, and the shabby-genteel air inseparable from stucco in every form and phase, reminded me frequently of the non-artistic districts of St. John’s Wood. Palace, public buildings, private dwellings, are all fashioned after the model of the house which children are first taught to draw, a rectangular parallelogram, with a broad slit in the middle for the doorway, and with any number of narrow slits for the windows in the facade.

Except in a few streets of the business quarter, the houses do not adjoin each other, but stand apart. Hardly any house is more than two stories in height: most of them consist of one story only. They all stand in a plot of ground of their own, but gardens are few and far between; the places where one might expect to find a garden are occupied by outhouses. Except in two or three of the main streets, the process of reconstruction is still incomplete.

Every now and then the broad, smooth, flag-stone pavements are intersected by stretches of unpaved ground, filled up with rubble and loose stones, which a shower of rain converts, for the time being, into a quagmire. Here and there, too, sandwiched in between the modern stucco villas, are groups of old- fashioned Turkish houses, half cottages, half shanties, with white-washed walls and broad, red-tiled roofs.

Pass their lives in Sofia

From a painter’s point of view the tumble-down, squalid old town was infinitely preferable; but, from the point of view of people who have to pass their lives in Sofia, the present is doubtless superior to the past Sofia has, in fact, been converted into a very fair specimen of a well-to-do, commonplace Western city. The streets, unlike those of Eastern towns, are all named, mostly after the local celebrities of the era of Liberation, and the houses are all regularly numbered. The main thorough- ) fares are wide and well paved with macadam. The foot- walks in every part of the town are excellent, except for the gaps I have just spoken of; and before long Sofia will be as well constructed a capital, for its size, as any to be found in Europe.