Little Vienna
When you want to go from Bucuresti to Bulgaria you have to go to the border station of Ruse. When I went there last time three years ago, I just changed trains there and continued right away to the old Bulgarian imperial town of Veliko Tarnovo. But this time I want to stay in Ruse for longer.
The station Bucuresti Nord
When I arrive in the enormous station of Bucuresti Nord the international train to Ruse is already announced on platform 4. Last time this was a rather modern, but tun-down air conditioned Diesel multiple unit covered in Graffiti to such a degree that you even had problems to look out of the windows. To my surprise today it is a normal train with a Diesel engine and two coaches. Old fashioned coaches they are, where you can open most of the windows. After departure the guard joins me. He looks worn out. Sweat drips from his forehead. It is hot but I thought for me it is worse because I am not used to it. He doesn’t speak any English. After he has recovered he starts to check the tickets and does not come back. For the remaining three hour trip to Ruse I have the compartment and the window to myself.
Inside the station. Display of a railway photo competition
A second life for a german 624 DMU
I remember that this line was completely run-down last time. The train was crawling and swaying precariously. In the three years that have passed they have done a good job. We progress at comfortable speed, there are no passages where the train has to slow down to avoid derailing because of bad spots.
A station has to be clean
This is the Romanian oil producing region. But while I saw oil rigs everywhere three years ago they are not so omnipresent any more. The main source of income is agriculture. Huge fields of sun flowers and grain cover the next to flat land. The flatness is only interrupted by alleys of trees or telephone poles pointing in various directions and without wires. Every major town has a huge grain elevator. Most look so dilapidated that it is not clear whether they are still in use. However, there are lots of freight trains with carriages for carrying grain.
International express to Ruse
The Romanian border station is Giurgiu Nord. And also this station has got a revival. The building looks renovated. The grass between platforms and building is cut and the scrubs and trees are trimmed.
Typical landscape of Southern Romania
The Romanian border police comes into the train, collects the passports and disappears with the pile of documents in the building. Do they ever loose one? On the contrary, they seem even to be able to keep the order so that they just return into the train and distribute the passports in the order they have collected them.
Romanian border station Giurgiu Nord
Between Giugiu and Ruse a gigantic steel bridge crosses the vast expanse of the Danube river. Its construction in 1952 was celebrated as a big socialist feat. It is 2223 m long and has a height above the water of 30 m. The lower deck has one track for the train and the upper deck is for cars and trucks. There is an enormous queue of the latter waiting on both sides.
The Danube at Ruse
The train ends in Ruse. Again all the passports are collected. People get nervous like I did 3 years ago while they stand in the heat on the platform to wait for their passports to be handed back out. The stopover time for the connection to Sofia is not very long. Some of the others who want to continue do not have an ongoing ticket. There is not enough time to wait for the return of the passport and walk to the station hall to buy a ticket even if you do not have to stand in line. There is a Dutch father and son from Egmond on an interrail trip, They also want to go to Istanbul together. The father then returns home. The son has quite a plan. He wants to proceed to Lisbon, then to Norway, then back to Turkey and at the end of his three month trip also to Kars.
Little Vienna
When the border police comes back with the passports they call out the names to the waiting crowd on the platform. Mine is one of the first.
I have not reserved a room in Ruse but I noticed that hotel Cosmos, not far from the station, has got free rooms. A friendly lady at the reception confirms that there is space. There is also breakfast and a restaurant with a pleasant open air seating area for dinner. When I get my food an enormous noise is beginning up the street. Somebody seems to start up his car. Eventually it turns out that it not only is the car, but also a kind of evaporator on the back deck of a pick-up truck. The truck drives down the main road and leaves a cloud of thick white smoke. According to the lady at the reception this is the way the town deals with the mosquitoes. This is remarkable, since Ruse was the first town in Bulgaria which actually had a Public Committee for Environmental Protection. This was the consequence of a factory across the river in Romania, which polluted river and air to such a degree that people started to move away. In 1991, after the fall of the communist regime in Romania, the factory stopped production.
Ruse developed from a Thracian settlement. Archaeological sites of that time like tombs can be found in the area. Most intriguing however was the discovery of a Thracian gold treasure which is exhibited in the regional history museum. The treasure of more than 6 kg of 24 karat gold is thought to have belonged to the Thracian king Seuthes III of the 4th-3rd century BC. It was discovered in 1949 by three brothers.
One piece of the thracian gold treasure of Seuthes
During the times of emperor Vespasian (69–70 AD) the Danube Limes was established and the Romans built a fortress on the high Danube bank in Ruse. It was named Sexaginta Prista, "60 Prisen" (a type of ship). The ships based in the port patrolled the Danube border and even the northern coast of the black sea. Part of the fortress was destroyed when the modern river port and the railway along the river was built begin of the 20th century. The remaining foundations can be visited. The visit includes a brick built bunker. The guard explains that they had always thought the bunker was built by the Bulgarian army, but then they had a group of visitors from Germany and one of them went into the bunker and showed them the graffiti he had left there in 1944 when he served there in an anti-aircraft battery.
The remainders of the Roman fortress of Sextaginta Prisa
In the middle ages Bulgaria was a big empire ruled by a Tsar. There were constant wars with the neighbors, the Russians, the Byzantine empire and later the Ottomans. In the area south of Ruse, in the limestone cliffs along the river valleys of Malki, Cherni and Beli Lom rivers, monks started to establish cave churches and monasteries. Due to their location in the cliffs they were better protected. There are two sites close to Ruse, in Basarbovo and in Ivanovo.
The monastery of Basarbovo
I ask around at the hotel but nobody knows about buses to go there or how to organize one of the many yellow taxis roaming the town. Eventually I find a tourist information. Two women are on duty. One recommends to better visit the sights in Ruse proper. The other warns me to not take a taxi. The driver won’t understand any English and might leave me helpless in the middle of nowhere. She starts to call people she knows who might provide transportation. I leave my number and retreat to one of the many street cafes to order a lemonade. It is incredibly hot – far too hot to walk around in town to see the sights.
One of the cave churches
Eventually a girls calls. She offers to drive me to Basarbovo and Ivanovo and back and stay at both places for an hour and charges 40 €.
Inside a cave church
We first drive to Basarbovo. The oldest written mention of the Monastery of Saint Dimitar Basarbowski is an Ottoman tax register of the 16th century, but probably the monastery goes back to the 12.-13. century. Originally there were 300 rooms, 40 were used as churches. After it had been abandoned for centuries the location was reoccupied in 1937. Now 2-3 monks are living there. It is a steep climb up narrow stairs to simple caves with paintings hanging on the wall and wooden iconostasis hiding simple altars. The modern monks use more recent buildings and a new church which are more comfortably situated on the ground. It is a nice and quiet place with few visitors who throw coins into every cavity they discover. What a difference to all those hot towns full of noisy traffic I have passed through.
After half an hour, my driver, Theodora, brings me to Ivanovo. While we drive she tells me a bit about her life. She has two sons of 14 and 17 years old. Both are at school. Next to English the second languages they study are Japanese and Chinese. Her husband is a car mechanic. Next to being a mother and working, she started studying law when she was 37. She is now 42 and has stopped working temporarily because she has to pass her last exams. Then she will start working as a lawyer. Thanks to her knowledge of English she can earn some money on the side by driving tourists from time to time. I guess she has a good relation to the lady at the tourist information office.
Inside the new church
The churches of Ivanovo are in the Rusenski Nature park, a dense forest of linden trees. When I get out of the car I am greeted by singing birds and the sound of a coockoo. The park also has nesting vultures and rare birds of prey. In the ruined cave churches faded paintings of 600 years old have survived. One shows Judas who commits suicide by hanging himself. Because of the paintings the Rock-hewn Churches of Ivanovo are a UNESCO World Heritage since 1979.
The church has a balcony which was the former entrance. The banister is so low that I get dizzy. And how trustful is a balcony some hundred years old? How did these monks ever get up here? The present entrance was dug out recently. I walk the hiking path which gives a beautiful overview of the countryside. Signs point at the existence of other monolithic churches, chapels and monasteries but they are not accessible.
The accessible cave church in Ivanovo
The interesting thing about visiting both the Ivanovo site and the Basarbovo church is that you get a good impression how those church looked like when they where working monasteries. In the museum in Ruse they have a virtual reality demonstration how the places in Ivanovo might have looked like. But it is still more interesting to walk through an existing monastery.
Landscape of the river valleys of Malki, Cherni and Beli Lom
They are busy improving the road for the tourists. Theodora originally comes from Cherven, which is known for its medieval fortress. But she tells me that there are also rock churches around there which are rarely visited by anybody but the locals.
In the Ottoman times it was difficult to built christian churches. Inventive solutions were necessary. Holy Trinity Cathedral in Ruse is one. It was built in 1632. It had to be built underground. From outside you only see a low nave. When you enter you have to go down a flight of stairs for four and a half meters. It is Ruses oldest surviving building.
The cathedral of Ruse
Descending into the nave
After the establishment of modern Bulgaria Ruse became a cultural and economic center. A town center of richly ornamented Neo-Baroque and Neo-Rococo architecture developed. The city got the nickname of little Vienna, which is a bit overstated, even if “little” is written in quotation marks. However, the town was so important that it had Bulgaria’s first private bank, the shipyard built Bulgaria’s first steel ship, it had the country’s first agronomical and technical school, the first insurance company and the first weather station.
Number plates of Romanian Diesel and steam engine
And, in 1867 Ruse became the terminus of Bulgaria’s first railway line linking it to Varna. Originally the Bulgarian railway ended in Ruse at the banks of the Danube. After the building of the bridge the old station at the river was closed. It is now a lovely little railway museum. When I walk there in the morning the heat is still bearable. There are outside exhibits and the gate in the fence is open. Behind the gate is a former signpost where a gate keeper keeps watch. When I enter he shouts at me something about ticket. I offer to pay him for the ticket because I think this is the entrance. He mumbles something incomprehensible and locks the gate behind me.
Sleeping car
A moment later it turns out that he probably is mad at the lady who should sell the tickets at the entrance of the station building but was not there. Now she shows up and demands the tickets from us.
The other visitors are an American couple from Denver. They have a rental car and spend a five week vacation in Romania and Bulgaria. They have visited other Balkan countries before. I don’t know why they came to this museum since they are not especially interested in trains. There are no explanations in English. They tell me that they never used a train in the US. They are convinced it is unpractical and inefficient.
The outside part of the museum has a collection of old royal carriages. Although this was not the standard of travel for the man in the street in the time when they were built in Germany in 1894 and 1910 it shows how luxurious rail travel could have been when you were rich or important. Especially in the US the oligarchs of the time owned their own trains which they used to travel around the country. A luxury which the current reduced infrastructure would not even allow any more. The oldest is a three axle coach from 1866 with an open sitting area in the middle. You could travel in the open, smell the smoke of the engine and listen to the birds around you. Times long gone.
The entire museum seems to be mainly catering to its own staff. We have to leave these luxurious coaches because a lady comes and wants to clean inside. Not that there is much to clean.
Curtain with insignia of BDZ, the Bulgarian railway company
There are also a couple of steam and Diesel engines with an ordinary local train and freight cars. The carriages of the local train are also from the time around the turn of the century. The steam engine is from 1866. It is in contrast to a modern steam engine from the 1940’ies. More than 7000 of these engines were built to help the German advance to the east during the war. After the war they were found all over Europe, Russia and even in China and Vietnam.
German class 52 engine as Bulgarian class 15
The station building is the oldest still existing in Bulgaria. The interior is almost original. There are lots of photos but since there is no explanation in English you can only guess what it is all about.
The old riverside station of Ruse
The nice icy lemonades they sell here in the cafes are my best means to survive the heat. I go to the main square and try to cool down in the shade of the parasols. Then I decide that it is best to visit another museum. While the railway museum offers an insight how travel was in the time when Ruse’s great “little Vienna” center was built, the Kaliopa house offers an impression how one an ordinary middle class family lived. I walk there and ring the door bell. An old lady opens and I pay the standard price of 5 Lei entrance fee for the retired.
The Kaliopa house
The exposition shows how a household in Bulgaria was influenced by the European urban culture at the turn of the 19th century. The furniture and piano are from Vienna. The rooms are decorated with heavy dark wall paper and curtains typical for that time. The old cup-boards are filled with bourgeois clothing, jewelry, silver cutlery and china. Things long gone in modern Ruse.
Period living room in the Kaliopa house
The lower floor shows a contrasting exhibition of things for the daily use made from discarded shells and ammunition. There are cups, but also decorated pieces of art. The accompanying black and white photos show how Ruse looked like more than 100 years ago.
Artefacts made from ammunition shells
Ruse is the birthplace of Elias Canetti. His ancestors were successful merchants. Their mansion from 1898 still exists. However, the family moved to England, when Canetti was 6 years old. Canetti wrote in German and received the Nobel prize in 1981,
Block of houses where Canetti grew up
For once, the traffic in Ruse is bearable. The cars are led on a thoroughfare around the town center, which is a big pedestrian zone. The heat drives me back to the pleasant terrace of the hotel and more lemonade. But I think the heat makes me irritable. Why does it make such a noise when other people move their chairs on the terrace. Why do the screaming little kids or those men discussing in a loud voice always have to sit close to me? But I don’t want to go to my room. It is hot here and it still much more pleasant on the terrace.
The center of Ruse is full of these coffee machines
Another 2000 km to Kars
Mosquito elimination in Ruse
Sources:
Three ice cream stands next to each other at the central square in Ruse
Link to previous post:
No comments:
Post a Comment