In a park, in broad daylight, flanked by inflatable slide castles and ice cream stands, I saw a fat skinhead walking around with a swastika on the back of his hoodie. And not a Hindu counterclockwise one, but a tilted, right-facing, whole-shebang NSDAP swastika. Countless more are littered throughout Sofia.
A surprising aspect of certain Balkan societies is the ubiquity of neo-Nazi symbolism, about which the public is almost completely unbothered. If you wander one block out of the Sofia city center, in any direction, you'll see them. At first, you’ll take out your phone and send photos back home. Then you'll stop. The shock will wear off as they become as routine a sight as stray animals in the streets.
The typical response from locals amounts to little more than a verbal shrug. “They're just kids,” they tell you. They insist that the people who draw them don't know what they really mean.
I doubt that. Despite what some Sofians will have you believe, I don't think these are merely symbols of adolescent rebellion. It’s also probably not incidental that the swastika far outnumbers symbols associated with anarchy or communism, of which I only ran into a couple. To believe otherwise would require a massive decontextualization of Bulgaria’s political history.
(Here’s a short summary: a sizable portion of Bulgarians have hardline irredentist beliefs. Irredentism, in Bulgaria’s case, is the belief that the true borders of Bulgaria extend far further than what is displayed on modern maps. They maintain that it was only because the Kingdom of Bulgaria sided with the defeated Axis Powers in the war that led to their losing Macedonia, Thrace (northern Greece), and Moesia (Romania and Moldova). Each of these territories is populated in large part by ethnic Bulgars with whom they share a common linguistic heritage, whom Bulgar irredentists also deem Bulgarian by blood. Were it not for the defeat of Germany, Bulgaria would be a respected global power rather than a middle-income Black Sea beach destination for Russians. Add in a lot of anti-Gypsy and anti-Muslim sentiment, and that’s Bulgarian irredentism in a nutshell. It’s a sort of far-right imperialism that views the true Bulgaria state as larger than it currently is, and enclosing more than it currently does.)
The centerpiece of Sofia is NDK, a monolithic socialist-era conference center fronting a park and promenade which doubles as the city square. There, hundreds if not thousands of people are gathered at any moment of the day. It feels as bustling a hub of human life as Times Square, Picadilly, or Montmartre. Since the nearest gym was located in the basement of the NDK building, I was constantly having to pass through the square, which acted as a kind of home base for me. There I found a big swastika spray-painted on the side of the building, overlooking the city.
I figured it'd be brushed off by the end of the day. But the next morning, it was there. And the next week. And the week after. For the entire two and a half months that I was in the city, so too was this graffitied swastika on the wall of the busiest and most trafficked pedestrian area of the country. If they’re merely the drawings of know-nothing kids, why is the public so complacent? Wouldn’t they bother to clean it off the walls, or paint over it? The public reaction seems to be total indifference.
Some fascist symbolism propagates through football fandom, with the most militaristic fans (known as “ultras”) of Sofia’s two most popular teams, CSKA and Levski, having a reputation for ultranationalism. For young people, not just Bulgarians, a football ultra is an easily joinable in-group impermeable to the influence of outside social norms, through which any sort of fringe ideology can circulate unfettered. I believe these were breeding grounds for much of the graffiti I saw, given that “CSKA” was often written overtop or underneath many swastikas. Most of the graffiti, however, seems to stem from the Bulgarian National Union (BNU), a political organization whose stenciled geometric logo was usually found not far from visible Nazi symbolism.
The BNU holds annual torchlit rallies dedicated to Hristo Lukov, a Nazi-era Bulgarian general who fought for the expansion of Bulgaria’s borders. The march is attended by 1,000+ supporters through the streets of Sofia every year. The visibility of the BNU logo is, to me, evidence enough that there is, at minimum, some prior knowledge of what these symbols represent. This is not a shoddy group of youthful rebels ignorant of history. They are a registered political party with an organized youth division and a paramilitary wing.
A tourist I met in Sofia showed me a photo on his phone that he had taken earlier that day. It was of a portrait of Hitler next to a Nazi German flag that had been draped over a synagogue’s signpost. When I walked past that same synagogue later that night, the installation had been taken down. So I guess there are limits on the public’s complacency.
I hope my Bulgarian friends reading this don’t get the wrong idea. This is an observation of unrepresentative political phenomena, not an attack on Bulgarian people as a whole. I enjoyed my time in the country, and I was moved by the people I met there. With the notable exception of cab drivers, who will happily quadruple your fare if they detect the slightest scent of America on you, the people of the Balkans are incredibly generous, kind, welcoming, and resilient. They were always in my corner. They wanted to see me thrive there. And they want to see you thrive there too; they want to know it’s possible, for anyone. And it is.