Author: Scott Stavrou
About the author
Scott Stavrou is a writer and creative writing teacher with Write Away Europe. He’s the author of the critically acclaimed novel Losing Venice (People’s Book Prize 2019 short-list) and the satirical fiction collection, Hemingway Lives: the Super-Secret, Never-Before-Published Blogs of Ernest Hemingway, and a recipient of the PEN Hemingway Prize for Fiction.
Before moving to Plovdiv, he lived and worked as a writer in Prague, Venice, and the Greek islands. His books can be found online and in bookshops and more of his writing is available at ScottStavrou.com and information on future Plovdiv Writing Retreats is available at WriteAwayEurope.com. His next novel, Never Shore Enough, will be released in spring 2021
Plovdiv: It’s About Time
It’s a paradox of travel that those with wanderlust in their hearts understand: the more you see, the more you wish to see. The next place and the next time can sometimes supplant the here and now. But if these changing times have taught us anything, it’s that our time, and how and where we spend it, is our most precious commodity.
Travel teaches us many things, lessons large and small. We learn how big the world is and how small a part of it we are. We learn about others, both our vast differences and our many shared similarities. If we’re lucky, we learn about ourselves. About how to be a better citizen of this great big world we all share.
If we’re very lucky and get to see the right place at the right time, we learn how to live better. How to spend our time. How to live in the here and now and fully inhabit it.
Plovdiv, with its rich history and promising future, is very good at the here and now.
It’s a sense and a feeling that permeates the Plovdiv of today; an exciting awareness of being in the right place at the right time.
Because Plovdiv, you see, is all about time — and how to spend it. And it turns out that the best way to handle time is to realize that while we all are influenced by our pasts and our visions of the future, the most valuable currency we have to spend is today. To learn to live in the now.
Like all of life’s best lessons, there are layers of complexity and even shades of contradiction in even this simple truth. But this is just one of the many characteristics that make Plovdiv so compelling.
Perhaps one of the first things about Plovdiv that appeals to discriminating travelers is that it seems a bit off the beaten track. You don’t end up in Plovdiv by accident; you earn it by your deep desire to seek out the thrilling serendipity of new discoveries. After all, Plovdiv isn’t the first place that your friends think of when they talk of traveling to Europe. It’s likely that many of your less fortunate friends have never even heard of Plovdiv. But it’s probably the coolest city your friends don’t know about. There’s that innate self-satisfaction of taking the road less traveled. Of being someone who sets the trends rather than follows them.
But then you find out you were wrong about that, too.
Because Plovdiv charms visitors with its complexities, even contradictions. Like its ancient nearby neighbours, Rome, Athens, and Istanbul, Plovdiv is a City of Seven Hills. But as Europe’s oldest continuously inhabited city, it’s even more ancient and bears more marks. In fact, as many will tell you, only six of its seven hills remain, one of them having been quarried away to help build parts of the Old Town. The Old Town that stands sentinel over Kapana, one of Europe’s most charming and captivating creative districts.
No one you know has heard of it, yet somehow everyone has been there before. It’s both the oldest continuously inhabited place in Europe with all the history and hallmarks that entails, but also a vibrant, dynamic city with a promising future that still, somehow, prides itself on living decidedly in the present.
Plovdiv is Bulgaria’s second-largest city. And the old saying goes, when you’re number two you try harder. But thankfully this is not the case in Plovdiv. One of the first things you’ll likely notice is the pace of life. It’s not a city of strivers, trying to be something they are not. Plovdiv is delightfully and markedly happy in its own skin, secure in its identity and proud of doing things its own way. And this rubs off. You learn how to live differently, how to be the best vision of yourself.
Plovdiv is about time but also about now.
As a historical crossroad with a long and sometimes sordid history, everyone has passed by and it’s had legions (quite literally) of visitors long before you found out it was the next new thing. It’s been coveted, conquered, and strolled across long before you arrived, played host to visitors — both welcome and unwelcome — throughout the ages.
Today’s trendy digital nomads and adventurous expatriates were preceded by Plovdiv’s original Thracians, then for a while, everyone came calling at this historical crossroads. Philip and his Macedonians’ footsteps were followed by Greeks, Persians, Celts, Romans, Goths, Huns, Slavs, Russians, Crusaders, and finally, the Ottoman Turks, who overstayed their welcome a bit by some five centuries. Yet the Plovdiv of today is very welcoming, to everybody, and it proudly bears the marks of its majestic history even as it poises for a new future. It has found a way to meld the past with its future, to mix it seamlessly with today. Roman ruins and still used ancient theatres stand beside Turkish mosques and Russian statues. Cool cafes, coffee shops and co-working spaces, along with hip restaurants and bars, share stones and space that link the old to the new. Europe’s longest pedestrian zone lets you stroll from the past to the future.
And yet Plovdiv, despite its long and storied past, today remains resolutely itself, firmly anchored in the present and its own strong sense of self. It combines the richness of its long history with the vibrancy of a dynamic future and still positively prides itself on its ability to live in the here and now.
As a cultural crossroads long-used to linking East and West and North and South, it has a vibe of being somehow at the centre of everything. And crossroads and their comings and goings are where decisions are made. And when you stride the stones of Europe’s longest pedestrian zone, Plovdiv’s storied past will speak to you and what it will say is aylyak.
It’s one of those wonderful words with a complex etymology and a simple meaning and it’s deliciously and delightfully unique to Plovdiv. And whatever the etymology, what it means is, more or less, live and linger in the now. A simple word and a simple concept but one that can be hard to fully appreciate outside of Plovdiv, where it’s less a word to be translated than a lifestyle to be understood. As you sit and savor the hereness, the nowness of Plovdiv, you’ll have time, if you spend it right, to appreciate the irony of being taught one of life’s most valuable lessons — to live in the here and now — in one of Europe’s oldest inhabited settlements. Perhaps the lesson here is that it takes time, maybe even all of it, to learn that all we have is here and now.
The way to learn it is to enjoy being surrounded by all that’s gone before and be comfortable with all that may come. Because all our yesterdays are pasts and all our tomorrows are but potential, but Plovdiv and its admirers live well and comfortably in the here and now.
That’s the glorious thing about the Plovdiv of today. It’s the right place at the right time. And in Plovdiv, it’s now.