The voices of Plovdiv

Day 4 in Plovdiv, The 2019 European Capital of Culture. First impression:  It is hard to identify a common thread, something that unifies the city, around which the different cultures, subcultures and individuals evolve. The apparent unsettled character of Plovdiv made me wonder how the presence of the UCoC affects the city's dynamic in different ways.

My first observations resulted from sensing the city and its different areas. Being a relatively small one, what struck me at first were the radically different sensations that arose from a street to the other. While the old town is full of the scents of flowers, the twitters of the birds and picturesque old houses, the main street features high traffic, a heavier atmosphere and the city center oscillates between construction sites, hipster bars and abandoned buildings. Navigating between these differences within the city conveys a feeling of lack of unity, as if the diverging voices of the city all wanted to be heard at the same time, but which voices those were remain to be discovered.  

Meeting Svetlana , the artistic director of the ECoC, informed me a bit more on what these voices were.The architectural lack of unifying point seems to be the physical expression of a cultural dichotomy instilled by the ECoC organization, beyond the local divides between communities. Indeed, her perspective on culture was different than I expected, and from there emerged the dichotomy “bobo” vs “traditional”. She brought up the former term herself. The word “bobo” comes from the French bourgeois-bohême and mainly refers to people of the creative class, artists and thinkers who chose this lifestyle while coming from a wealthy and well-educated background. She considers culture to be demanding of an intellectual effort, which aligns with this “high class” consideration of what is worth being named “culture”. This shows the intentioned of turning Bulgarian culture towards a more standardized European understanding of it. She also mentioned the local people’s demand for untertainment, which according to her goes against the appreciation of “proper” culture. Now on the other hand stands the traditional culture, folklore as well as the entertainment that seems to be a major part of the local culture

The meeting ground between the local and the European. The city’s identity cannot be found even in plurality, as there seems to be an opposition between these two visions of culture. The ECoC’s ambition is to create a space of encounter between the local and the European. It should aim to make the European local and the local European. But the agonism is nowhere to be found and this adds onto the already present divide between communities.

While the European Capital of Culture appeared to me as a project to anchor local places into the European Union as well as contribute to its development, what I have encountered so far seem to reveal that it operates on a different wave as the city itself and its inhabitants. I hope to encounter more of a dialogue between the diverging voices while navigating the city further, as both have the great potential to inform each other; make them grow into something richer and stronger.