Dear Concerned Citizen: A Response

Someone sent me fifteen hundred words this week.

Fifteen hundred words. Because I said "aggressively unchic." Not because I burned anything down. Not because I said anything actionable. Because I had a feeling about a street and wrote it down, which is — and I want to be precise here — the entire premise of this blog.

I read all of it. I want that acknowledged.

The argument is: Sofia is old. The Thracians were here. The Romans were here. The Ottomans were here. Several empires, Laura. How dare you.

I keep sitting with this theory. Ancient civilizations as aesthetic immunity. It's bold. It raises questions. Rome has been inhabited since 753 BC — does that fix Termini? Cairo predates writing itself — does that cancel what I saw in Cairo? Where exactly is the threshold? How many dead empires before a city gets to stop trying?

Because I've been trying to apply the Thracian context to Vitosha Boulevard and it's not working. Vitosha Boulevard is Sofia's main artery. Its spine. The thing every city has that says — this is us, this is what we chose to put front and center. Paris has the Champs-Élysées. Sofia has Vitosha, which has glass restaurant boxes that managed to make outdoor dining feel like a waiting room, and behind those, gutted buildings selling Made in China underwear, shoes in sizes that don't correspond to human feet, and merchandise of unclear purpose at price points that raise questions nobody is asking. The same shop. Repeated. For the entire length of the boulevard. Different names, same everything.

But the real thing. The thing that made me put my coffee down the first time I encountered it. The amphitheatre. Roman. Second century. Discovered mid-construction and instead of stopping — instead of one person in the room saying perhaps we do not build on top of a Roman amphitheatre — someone looked at those ancient stones and thought hotel lobby. You can see it through glass panels in the floor now. Guests wheel their luggage over two thousand years of history on the way to check in. This exists. This is a real decision that was made by real people.

And then — because Sofia isn't finished with you — the sidewalks. I have walked runways on four continents. I have never felt less certain about where my next step was going to land. The sidewalks of Sofia are not infrastructure. They are a daily negotiation. Tiles that tilt when you step on them. Gaps that appear mid-stride. Levels that change for reasons known only to whoever laid them, sometime in a decade nobody will confirm. I have ruined three pairs of shoes in a year. Three. On the way to get coffee.

I called the centre aggressively unchic.

The Thracians, I think, would understand.

-Laura