I walk the streets of Sofia. It’s early summer. Today it’s raining—not the cold, penetrating rain I remember from Gothenburg, but a warm, soft summer rain that washes the streets clean of dust and reveals the colors beneath the grime. And with the rain come scents—spicy, sweet, and salty—as if the Mediterranean itself is breathing over the mountains and letting its heart reach all the way here.
It’s a reminder of where we are: at the edge of Europe, between East and West, where the air carries stories from both sea and mountain, past and future. The city is slowly waking up from winter's slumber, but I already know how it will transform. Soon the grass will grow wild, weeds will press through the cracks in the sidewalks, and the trees will spread their branches over cars, fences, and people. Summer in Sofia looks like a scene from a futuristic film—one where humanity has left and nature has taken over. But here, it’s no apocalypse. It’s just life. Raw, unfiltered life.
Here, everything is imperfect—and that’s exactly why I feel at home. Cracked walls, half-finished construction sites, graffiti covering every available surface. The roads are bumpy, the sidewalks hard to navigate, yet people move with rhythm and grace. It's not tidy. Not controlled. Not regulated like in Sweden. But it lives. It breathes. It speaks a language I understand.
I see something here I’ve long missed. A street life. A real life. People move in a beautiful mix—pensioners with socialist memories in their eyes, youth with piercings, laptops, and dreams of a new Europe. Women with walkers walk alongside children in bright sneakers. Here, the old and the new do not meet in conflict, but in a sort of mutual acceptance. A kind of unspoken understanding. Sofia isn’t perfect. But it is honest. And it is beautiful in its own broken way.
Now I understand why I no longer long for Sweden. Where I used to live, everything was so polished, regulated, confined. As if life itself was locked behind glass walls. Here, things are allowed to fall apart. Here, things are allowed to leak. And in those cracks, something important lives—maybe even something healing.
At home, I've long since painted over the garish pastels that once dominated the apartment. I replaced them with the soft, muted tones so typical of Swedish interior design—the grayscale palette of beige, grey, and white. And even though most of the furniture comes from Sofia, the small details are from IKEA, giving me a familiar sense of quality and grounding. It's a quiet fusion of two worlds—my past and my present—living together in one space.
To live in Sofia is to live in contrasts. At a café in Oborishte, you can sip a cappuccino with almond milk and hear three languages at the next table. A few blocks away, you buy freshly baked banitsa for a couple of leva from a hole in the wall. There is closeness here between generations, between cultures, between ideas. It’s a mosaic that never becomes homogeneous—but never cold.
The elderly here carry a quiet wisdom. They know what it means to lack, to stand in line for bread, to hide your thoughts. But they also carry warmth. Their eyes do not seek surface—they seek humanity. And the youth? They carry the future. Not a blind optimism, but a curiosity. A desire to create something else. Something better.
Sofia wears its history like scars on an old body. Monuments from the communist era still stand, sometimes right next to modern shopping centers. The traces are in the architecture, in the concrete, in the way people line up at the post office. But the city lives on—not despite, but because of its memories. It has not forgotten. And it doesn’t pretend nothing ever happened.
I think that’s why I feel at home here. Because I, too, am a little broken. Because I, like the city, have a past that’s left its marks. And because I, just like Sofia, have learned that it’s in the cracks where the light gets in.
This city has taught me to appreciate imperfection. To see the beauty in the unfinished. To trust that life’s pulse is present, even when it doesn’t fit into any norm or plan. Sofia teaches me to breathe, to dare to be still in the chaos, to listen to the people around me.
And the people… yes, they are what make Sofia what it is. Their kindness, sometimes rough, sometimes unexpected, but always real. The small gestures—someone helping an elderly woman carry her groceries, or a man placing a coin in a beggar’s hand without making a show of it. Here, solidarity lives in the everyday—not as a political slogan, but as an action.
I write this with tenderness in my heart. Because I know this city, with its broken roads and overgrown parks, has given me something invaluable. A new home. A new rhythm. A new way of seeing.
So when summer comes and Sofia grows wild and impenetrable, I know there’s nowhere else I’d rather be. I want to sit on a bench in Borisova Gradina and watch the world slowly transform around me. I want to hear the cicadas sing at dusk and smell the grilled kebapche in the air. I want to be part of this life—the unfiltered, messy, but true life.
Because in the end, it’s not about perfection. It’s about presence. And that’s exactly what Sofia offers—a place to be human, in all that it means.
By Chris...
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