From tsatsa to sushi

From camp sites to building sites, from wild beaches to wireless internet, Clive Leviev-Sawyer traces the transitions along Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast.

Text and photography: Clive Leviev-Sawyer

Surfing is the new preoccupation along Bulgaria’s coast. No, it is not that the waves have strengthened sufficiently to propel a board. The surfing is all done online.

Like the real thing, the surfing requires a pose. Sophisticated, blas?. The sight is to be seen at every fashionable beach bar, where between sipping cocktails, the terminally pretentious languidly gaze into laptop screens. On the varnished slats of a bar table, the laptop is the new status icon to be seen to have. Time was it was the car key with the marque of a luxury make; that was succeeded by the mobile phone. Now that almost everyone has a mobile, the ostentatious display of a laptop is the new way to say that you are a cut above the common herd. Every restaurant and bar that offers WiFi makes a point of advertising it.

Seven years in succession, we have holidayed on the southern Black Sea coast, usually around Lozenets. Founded many decades ago as a place to descend to the seaside in summer and named for the fact it once was home to vineyards, the village symbolises the change that has come to the coast.

In communist times, the “people’s republic” built the Oasis camp site, while on a promontory overlooking the beach south of the village, whitewashed bungalows were erected by and for the Polish communist youth. Along the coast, even into post-communist times, the southern coast boasted “wild beaches”. A wild beach, however the English translation may suggest mammoth waves, meant one without lifeguards, toilets, food and drink stalls, or beach chairs and umbrellas for hire. Usually, it meant that there was at least one part of the beach where it was informally understood that clothing was optional.

When first I visited Lozenets in summer 2001, much of the old Oasis camp site was still there. The chaise longues were white-painted exercises in elementary woodwork, with one end built at an angle of about 30 degrees, certainly not adjustable. Lifeguards doubled as cash attendants for payments for the hire of these and the fixed-in-place straw umbrellas. Either end of the uncombed beach was by custom the nudist area. The closest toilet was the communal facility amid the bungalows, and drinks and snacks – Bulgarian brand beers, mastika, other spirits and tsatsa, fried tiny sardine-like fish – were fetched from the makeshift bar amid the dunes. A river ran through it, too, idly through much of the summer, though the occasional downpour would make it change its course on the final leg across the sands into the sea.

None of this should be over-romanticised. A decade after the beginning of Bulgaria’s transition, the Oasis resort was somewhat faded, everything from the bungalows to the lawns into which weeds were intruding requiring attention. Still, with an on-site affordable restaurant and tennis court, it was a summer holiday destination that suited the pocket of largely the whole of the domestic market.

In autumn 2003, the bulldozers rolled. From the vantage point of where once those from the land of Lech Walesa and Pope John Paul II had once gazed on the Bulgarian beach below, I watched and photographed from year to year as the trees that had sheltered the old Oasis were felled, as a grader shifted the course of the river, as the bungalows were reduced to pastel splinters.

On the precise spot where the old beach bar stood, there is a sushi bar. Tsatsa is not on the menu. Nor is mastika – only the Greek equivalent, ouzo. The ragtag beach-gear-clad staff of the beach bar are gone too, replaced by trilingual clean-cut servers in livery. A bottle of wine, on average (selections from all major EU wine-making countries) costs more than a lunch for two used to. Russian nouveau riche gaze idly at the koi drifting in the designer pond in the middle of the restaurant. Where once couples returned to the dunes under the moonlight, uniformed security firmly ensure that no trespassers tread the sands too close to the clustered edifice that rises higher than the trees used to. Where once there were a few battered old pedlos for hire, a stall in the complex rents out a full range of water sports equipment. From the village, the dreadfully potholed old coastal road has been resurfaced as far as it takes to reach the entrance of the complex.

Northern Lozenets has seen its changes, too. Part of it has become, in effect, Sofia by the sea. Near restaurant Grozd 2 (seaside cousin of the original in central Sofia) and an offshoot of Sofia’s Bytheway cocktail bar, on one day I counted a total of one car parked along the roadside that did not have the capital city’s C or CA registration – the vehicle was an ancient local ambulance. This northern cove of a beach similarly boasts a surf school (in this case, meaning water sports) and in front of the bar, 2007 prices for chaise longue hire were 30 leva a day. Service was efficient and the cocktails excellent; beyond the cordons, in one cramped rocky corner, a little band of nudists clung to their carefully unselfconscious air. Everyone, designer-clad or not at all, ignored the intruding cacophony of that other ubiquitous fashion item, the jet ski. Swirling plastic straws amid the ice and fruit fragments in their spirit cocktails, those ashore spoke of trying Greece or Turkey next year.

The final week of last summer, we stayed in a new hotel in the old camp site Yug (meaning “south”). Air-conditioned, with modern furnishings, multiple cable channels, mainly in Russian, internet cables in the rooms, and a pool a mussel’s throw from the shoreline, it was one of what is customarily termed in latter-day Bulgaria a family hotel, perhaps only to distinguish it from the all-inclusive mass tourism monstrosities to be found almost everywhere along the coast. Yet, though on a smaller scale, it typified much of what is good, bad and in transition along the Bulgarian coast: largely clean, well-serviced and modern facilities, with a restaurant with ghastly service, used also as a canteen by the serving staff.

No seaside can change the eternal allure of sunrise and sunset. Yet a foreground can change, and on our last night, just before the very first cold front heralding the coming autumn closed in on the beach, the soundtrack to that last sight of the seaside sun was the grind and growl of a quadbike, carving endless and futile circles on the cooling sand.

Source: Month2Come