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Buying your place in the sun: real estate near the Black Sea
In the last couple of years, the southern Black Sea coast has become an increasingly popular destination for both investors and tourists seeking high-quality fun for a low price. While the northern Black Sea is more suitable for a “back to nature” type of experience, the southern coast is more typically seen as a place for active vacations. The southern Black Sea is a more developed tourist region compared to the northern, yet prices in both places are pretty much the same. How profitable investment in a real estate property along the southern coast will turn out to be, depends on the location and the type of investment. In other…
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Bulgarian cuisine: the favourite chips and cheese
Chips are a guilty pleasure all over the world. In Bulgaria, they are doubly so – because they are rich in calories and because they are “simple”. If there is an underappreciated food in Bulgaria, it is ‘kartofi sas sirene’, or chips with cheese. Even the most inept housewife can make them. In their absence, drinking beer loses its reality and becomes a meaningless act. You can order them at roadside pubs with only three items on the menu and in posh restaurants where the list of dishes is longer than ‘War and Peace’. Under Communism, they were a social status symbol. And yet nobody outside of Bulgaria has ever…
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Between Heaven and Earth: the Rock Churches of the Ivanovo
Once, the rock churches of Ivanovo drew hermits, kings and pilgrims. Now, it’s the tourists’ turn. At the beginning of the 13th Century, a monk named Joachim was so charmed by the picturesque cliffs near the Rusenski Lom River that he decided to settle there with his three disciples. The beauties of the place and its proximity to the diocesan centre of Cherven attracted votaries’ attentions to the church that Joachim carved out of the rock. The hermit quickly became popular and soon began welcoming eminent visitors. One was King Ivan Asen II, who donated a considerable amount of gold to the church complex. Four centuries earlier Ivan Rilski, Bulgaria’s…
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Nesebar: Life on the old Island
Because of the thousands of summer tourists, it’s hard to look around Nesebar. But a stroll along its meandering streets and among its half-ruined churches is always worthwhile. In the 6th Century BC, the Greek city-states of Megara and Miletus contended to control of the Black Sea coast of Thrace, which supplied the ancient world with the timber, hides, copper, slaves, and salt its economy needed. Miletus was in the superior position. It managed to establish a colony first, Apollonia (present-day Sozopol), on the southern coast of the Bay of Burgas and to gain control over Anchialo (present-day Pomorie). It was only a century later that Megara found a suitable…
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The Israel Museum and the Shrine of the Book store the Jewish past and pose riddles of symbolism
5000 sq m is a lot of space, but not enough for the Israel Museum to display all the artistic and cultural monuments of the Jewish people and the Holy Land. 8000 years of history is too much time. However, what the museum in western Jerusalem is truly remarkable for is symbolism, hidden in the sculpture garden and the architecture of the ethnography, archeology and contemporary and modern art wings. Because of the city’s complex topography, the first-time visitor starts thinking about the symbols in the Israel Museum only after passing by the Knesset. The parliament of the still young Israeli state and the complex containing its millennia-long past are…
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Big Buddha, little Buddha: once it was golden. Now he’s pink
In the future Buddha will be a towering giant… After the Chinese, Buddhas must be the most numerous folk on the globe. With 360 million Buddhists worldwide, each having at least two or three statues of their founder, this amounts to about a billion copies of the same body. Given such abundance it’s no surprise that Siddhartha Gautama appears in so many different forms. Emaciated or with folds of fat on the legs, tiny or the size of a three-storey building, he appears in all kinds of styles, from the finely crafted to the shockingly kitschy. Thailand is responsible for much of the proliferation of the world’s Buddha population. The…
