Now, I have two historic personal recollections of the great nation of Bulgaria. Firstly, as a young boi growing up in Ireland in the mid-nineties, the greatest footballer who everyone wanted to emulate was bizarrely not a bronzed, sculpted Latino but a paunched, scruffy Bulgar named Hristo Stoichkov, a maverick rebel who played by his own rules and didn’t give a flying flip what anyone thought. When taking a free kick , the coolest thing imaginable was to “do a Stoichkov’ meaning leather the ball into the top corner then turn to bollock your teamates for no reason . Legend has it that during the USA 94 World cup, he took de facto control of the Bulgarian national team from the hapless manager and proceeded to allow everyone smoke, drink and play cards till all hours to unwind. They enjoyed their best finish ever, coming 4th. 

The second connection comes from when I first moved to London in 2005 ,aged 20 and fresh out of Uni packing a 2.1 Bachelor’s degree in Archaeology.  I found gainful employment as an ungainly waiter in a Maida Vale celebrity cafe, where the clientele included Paul McCartney, Ozzy Osbourne, Paul Weller, Bjork and the man who made millions from writing the Peter Andre smash hit ‘Mysterious Girl’. So shite was I as a waiter, the only reason I was kept on in any meaningful way was due to the benevolence of my Bulgarian colleagues, who took pity on me, christening me “Gerry” , after Gerry Adams and introduced me to the wonders of Rakia, the Bulgarian fire water, and Depeche Mode, the English synth band beloved by Bulgarians.

At the time, Bulgaria wasn’t in the EU, so one afternoon, the cafe was raided by the home office and my Bulgarian colleagues were summarily dismissed for the crime of being vastly overqualified and incredibly competent at their jobs, only to be all re-hired 2 weeks later once the home office buggered off and a fine paid. This formative experience of the Neoliberal free-market dependence on immigrant labour has underpinned my political leanings ever since and has made me the committed far right bigot I am today. I jest!! Luckily, that was years ago , and as I write this in 2023, immigration has been fixed and we never need to talk about it again. 

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And what freedom of movement I have enjoyed in 2023, as this year has given me the immense privilege of seeing the expanse of the continent of Europa. From Krakow in the centre (yeah, Central Europe) to Ghent in the North, Corsica and Rome in the Med, I have sampled the fine fare of this continental cultural buffet we call home. So, to complete the set , we go east to the borderlands of Europe, to a land of Cyrillic fonts ,yoghurt and Socialist/ Ottoman/Roman/ Thracian architecture; yes, it’s Bulgaria, in the most eagerly awaited Irish/ Bulgarian clash since the Quidditch World Cup final,  and only marginally less racially insensitive!

So let’s  Live, Lev and indeed Love in country no.45 of visiting every Irish pub on earth!

For this trip, I travel in a pack, joined by a group of my childhood friends on our annual Lads Lads Lads trip. Since 2015, we as a group have chosen a random European city to visit, our criteria being temperate climes, abundant opportunities for cross- cultural exchanges and the availability of cut price fags , booze and pounding techno. Currently, the trip consists of 50% Dads Dads Dads, as Brendan and soon dad to be Darragh have contributed to the booming UK migrant birth rates by going over there and stealing their jobs and their women. Good stuff lads. I am also joined by my brother, Eoghan, but we couldn’t be more different in our respective outlooks . Whilst I am famously quite partial to an  Irish pub, he notoriously hates them,  to such a degree that he has been closely linked to several unprovoked arson attacks on Irish licensed premises, such is his loathing . No, he likes them too.

Bulgaria joined the EU in 2007, and now Bulgarians are free to travel where they like. The country however still suffers from a 2-pronged problem of institutional corruption and population decline. Our local host Yav who grew up after the Communist era tells us all about the city, while at the same time knowing all the best bars and techno clubs. “Rather than helping, the EU just gave us money to help solve the problem of corruption, but the politicians just took the money “ he tells us. The country has experienced negative population growth over the past 10 years, the most pronounced example of a widet global trend. (The only country in Europe to buck this existential threat is Ireland, having one of the fastest growing birth rates in the EU. Guinness IS good for you, it appears.)

On joining the EU, they added a new language to the euro notes as a third alphabet became represented – the Bulgarian-made Cyrillic alphabet, which in my learned opinion is arguably the most fiendishly confusing one. With Arabic or Hebrew, you know you can’t even begin to make out the words so you don’t even try. But with Cyrillic, the same letters are different letters, the ultimate troll script, so you think you can kind of follow it but a P is an R and an R is a V and so on. The alphabet was introduced by Cyril & Methodius, who sound like an excellent Slavic garage duo. Sofia is one of the oldest inhabited settlements, known for years as Serdica, and  was ruled by their southern neighbours the Ottomans for centuries , meaning the food is banging . The Russians then helped liberate them in the 1870s, only to come along after WW2 and add them entirely of their own free will to their collection of Socialist brothers and sisters behind the Iron curtain. 

 During communism, due to its location, Bulgaria welcomed tourists from across the iron curtain to its black sea resorts, but presumably none from Ireland till the 90’s. The workings of the communist era are always fascinating to those who grew up in the Free West (of Ireland) , albeit it’s worth noting that Soviet-era Bulgaria compares favourably when one considers the state of Bray in the 1990s. And so, it proves that 2 of the main attractions hark back to that era. The Socialist Art Museum is located miles away from the centre in a hard to find industrial estate, where, peaking over the chain link fences , you spy absolutely hench Lenin-likenesses that were gathered from all over the country and plonked unceremoniously in this garden, out of the way and consigned to the dustbin of history. Full Marx for anyone who finds the place first go.

Theres no time for Stalin’, so with haste we move to the second attraction , the Red Flat, an entertaining time capsule where they have recreated an 80s era communist flat, complete with furry chair throws, Soviet era bootleg records and questionable velvet curtains .Despite not having grown up under the communist yoke, there is a certain curiosity to the whole thing.  Imagine growing up in a improverished backwater ruled over by an autocratic , moralisitic, hypocritical minority where everyone watched everyone else and opportunites were scarce!? Thank God I grew in 1980s Catholic west of Ireland!

These throwbacks appeal mainly  to tourists, who gawk at what must have been normal life for the previous generation, but have now ironically been monetised by the ingenious free market Capitalist pigs to entertain punters . No wonder they won. The audio guide is well worth it, telling the story of the family who lived there and all props that you can mess about with like their clothes and rally bikes. Could the family have known that one day, their unassuming flat would become home to dithering hungover hipsters ( see below) posing in their hats and fondling their crockery to put on Social(ist) media?

One thing that would have been unheard of in 80’s Bulgaria would have been a delicious pint of porter. Yet thanks to free movement and the inevitable advance of progress, in 1998 Sofia was blessed by that great signifier of socio-economic advancement, the Irish pub. (*There is a school of thought around the Irish pub as an economic and cultural barometer, like the Big Mac index , which is pretty spot on. Read more here )

The pub in question is JJ.Murphy’s , a popular boozer made even more popular by the fact the rugby world cup semi final is on. JJ. Murphy’s performs the admirable feat of being so authentically Irish that its discombobulating. As we walk in , I am immediately transposed to a pub that could be anywhere in Tralee, absolutely packed with a raucous English speaking throng crowded around a horse shoe bar. Every single foreigner in Sofia is here, every Kiwi, Englishman and South African , while for the locals who don’t give a shite about rugby they have the UFC on out the front. The pub apparently also does things like cultural nights and language meet ups, which shows the multifaceted role of the Irish pub abroad. Normally, this would be the dream, but it’s so Irish pub-y, it’s disorientating . The contrast from drinking previously in the chilled local craft bars, in the hazy Indian summer heat to now , being in a packed bar scrum trying to get a round takes you out of feeling abroad. And so, we skiddadle outside to the courtyard area, where stray cats prowl the perimeter, and breathe in the smoke of a hundred criminally underpriced cigarettes. I sample the local Guinness too , which is fine. 

We leave Sofia, a youngster in modern European terms but culturally timeless. Actually, not all of us leave.  On the way home, disaster strikes for my brother at Sofia airport , as he becomes the latest victim of Post Brexit British anti-Bulgarian immigration legislation. Since no one truly understands the unfathomable Brexit border regulations, my brother’s perfectly legitimate passport card can’t be accepted to enter the UK just as we are about to board the plane, so the poor bugger is in danger of missing his flight to London and his subsequent connecting flight to Dublin. Not even a befuddled Irish embassy apparatchik , contacted via phonecall can save the situation, leading us to believe that JJ Murphy’s must be the real Irish embassy. And since there are no more flights, he must rebook to Dublin via Frankfurt.  Thank God control has been taken back and our borders safe from 40-something-adidas-tracksuit-wearing-Irish-neer do wells. Much like the Tom Hanks hit film The Terminal, I would have worried about him becoming statelessness , but following the nights partying, I was assured he was , in fact, in an absolute state. I lamented my brother’s situation before moving on to sending fire memes and hashtags of #bringhimhome and #irelandisnotfull in the group chat and I was delighted to hear that some 24 hours later after various stopovers on his own euro trip, he is home at last, left to kick out against Bulgarian bureaucracy like some sort of modern day Stoichkov. Solidarity, brother !