Races to Modernity: Metropolitan Aspirations in Eastern Europe, 1890–1940

8. Architectural Praxis in Sofia: The Changing Perception of Oriental Urbanity and European Urbanism, 1879–1940

8. Architectural Praxis in Sofia: The Changing Perception of Oriental Urbanity and European Urbanism, 1879–1940 Elitza Stanoeva Sofia became Bulgaria’s national capital in March 1879, a year after the country’s emancipation from the Ottoman Empire.1 This structured the agenda of urban development in accordance with the higher objective of nation state building. During the post-Ottoman decades, the constellation of architectural landmarks epitomizing modern urbanism was constructed simultaneously with the political and cultural institutions of modern statehood. In the historical context of newly gained statehood, the creation of a representative appearance for the national capital was a priority of urban reconstruction envisaged as a symbolic manifestation of national sovereignty. The analysis presented in this chapter reveals how strongly technocratic discourse and practice, namely architectural production, was conditioned by ideological incentives and aspirations on the level of national identity building, which it also opportunistically instrumentalized. It traces the changing visions of Oriental and European urbanity as they informed and molded the monumental architectural projects in Sofia, and as they became entangled with the shifting notions of a modern city advocated by the professional community of Bulgarian urbanists and architects. Building modernity at home, Bulgarian graduates of European polytechnics were 1 I am grateful to Manuel Tröster for the thorough reading and comments on this chapter. The translations of Bulgarian quotes in the text are mine. 180 Elitza Stanoeva inspired by the images of modernness they had absorbed abroad, mainly in Austria-Hungary, France, and Russia. Thus, Paris and Vienna, Berlin and St. Petersburg haunted their imaginations and, in effect, were mirrored in monumental ensembles in the new cityscape of Sofia. Accordingly, Bulgarian architecture embraced neoclassicism with its symbolic charge of reviving a centuries-old European cultural tradition. With a much more limited material reverberation on the representative appearance of the capital city, secession and constructivism also made their way into the artistic glossary of Bulgarian architects. My analysis emphasizes the transfer of knowledge from the West and the replication and reworking of foreign trends. As in the neighboring countries that had achieved their autonomy from the Ottoman Empire earlier, this transfer was conditioned by a political imagery conceptualizing modernity as a European culture’s attribute , consequently striving for modernization with a distinctive European veneer.2 Those trends were adopted initially directly and uncritically along the lines of internationalism in architectural production , and later indirectly under a chauvinist guise along the lines of a search for national cultural authenticity. The path that Bulgarian architectural praxis followed was in no way unique, but it rather reflected the general spirit that shaped the epoch politically as well as culturally, and especially the waning cosmopolitanism and the growing crisis of international cooperation in the interwar period. Between the Orient and Europe, 1879–1900 In the immediate post-Ottoman period, the political identity of the Bulgarian state was caught between the value poles of the detested Ottoman past and a desired European future. The tension between the Oriental legacy and the aspiration for all things European was embedded in the ambiguous legal status of the newly formed Principality of Bulgaria as defined by the great powers in the 1878 Peace Treaty of Berlin: a constitutional monarchy, yet a vassal principality of the Ottoman Empire under a nine-month Provisional 2 See the chapters by Eleni Bastéa and Dubravka Stojanović in this volume. Architectural Praxis in Sofia 181 Russian Administration. Within this political context, the transformation of Sofia into a modern capital city served the purpose of cultural Europeanization heralding the country’s divorce from the Ottoman Empire and its true belonging to Europe. The splintering polarization of the two cultural models was already spearheaded in the agenda of the Provisional Russian Administration, whose guidelines were “to sow the seeds of a new nationality rooted in the Christian teaching of love for your fellow men and in the respect of human rights, on the grounds studded and soaked with the victims of Muslim fanaticism, arbitrariness, and centuries-old oppression,” as reads the general instruction of the Russian tsar Alexander II to his imperial commissar in Bulgaria.3 The parallel processes of political and urban modernization that shaped the building of the Bulgarian capital were guided by the transfer of knowledge and practices of European modernity, which was embraced as a normative model for emulation by the newly established state. The administrative and cultural reforms of implementing new public institutions...