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78 Chapter 3 From the Orient Express to the Sofia Café Smoke and Propriety in the Interwar Years In the early years of the twentieth century a young Bulgarian woman traveling alone on the Orient Express nearly set the train on fire. Raina Kostentseva later related this tale proudly in her memoirs, recording neither her age nor the exact year of the incident. At a prolonged stop, Kostentseva stepped out of her compartment and onto the platform for a breath of fresh air. As passengers milled about, two foreigners engaged her in conversation and offered her a cigarette. Ready and willing to smoke, Kostentseva suggested that they adjourn to her compartment, where she had special Bulgarian cigarettes and, more exotically, a special lighting kit involving flint, steel, and tinder that would have been “completely unknown to them.” As Kostentseva related, she lit a fire in front of the curious foreigners , and they lit up her Bulgarian cigarettes while she smoked one of theirs. After smoking and engaging in lively conversation, they parted with warm good-byes. Kostentseva extinguished the fire and put the paraphernalia back in her bag. She lay down to sleep but soon smelled smoke, the odor rapidly growing in intensity. Her quick wits about her, Kostentseva jumped out of bed and noticed that her bag was on fire. She tossed it out the window,saving the train and herself from catastrophe.1 As the burning bag fell next to the tracks, Kostentseva’s train continued to head north and west, not to but rather away from the Orient. Bulgaria, in fact, was a stop on the Orient Express, one that was already in the Orient, FROM THE ORIENT EXPRESS TO THE SOFIA CAFÉ 79 from the perspective of many travelers. Even Kostentseva herself, with her Bulgarian cigarettes and lighting kit—perhaps meant as presents for someone at her European destination—served up a bit of the exotic to the foreigners, who were presumably on their way home.Yet in her behavior,traveling alone and smoking with foreigners, Kostentseva was breaking out of many of the behavioral conventions for a Bulgarian woman of the period. While such conventions were in gradual flux at the turn of the century,and more rapidly after World War I, Kostentseva, a woman from a rather “modern” family in Sofia, was surely ahead of her time. And she was also headed westward, both literally and figuratively. Smoking, even by women, was not Western in and of itself;it was the public (or semipublic) display,the image of a woman with a cigarette in her mouth that broke new social ground. In fact, the incident on the Orient Express was one of the few moments of relative social abandon in Kostentseva’s memoirs, which detail her life in Sofia from the turn of the century through the interwar years. For even in Sofia, a rapidly growing and rather cosmopolitan city by this time, the social world of this relatively modern girl was deeply embedded in a matrix of intertwined social conventions , in which gendered patterns of sociability and consumption were tightly circumscribed.2 Still, these social conventions were unstable in this period, especially after the momentous changes that accompanied and followed World War I. During the war itself,women,along with the peasantry and workers,were mobilized on the front and home front in unprecedented ways. Their newfound roles in the military or in wartime production brought new kinds of social and political mobilization as the war came to a close, and their increased assertiveness in the public sphere was a harbinger of a new era. New leisure venues and an increased consumption of tobacco (along with alcohol) by both women and men penetrated Bulgarian social life.3 Indeed, in postWorld War I Bulgaria, the most dramatic change in the culture of smoking, particularly in its public incarnations,was the partial inclusion of women in a rapidly changing world of public leisure consumption. This pattern was also a general European, if not global, one, but there was something very specific about the Bulgarian experience. Women’s emergence into a world of public smoking and sociability took place in the shadow of the Europeanization of leisure establishments, a kind of boarding of the Orient Express on its return to Europe. The new culture was most evident in Bulgarian cities, where it was inspired by the influx of people, ideas, media, goods, and new modes of thinking. Sofia itself was at the epicenter of an explosion...

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