“Mladost: between the blocks, in the rows. The literary route in Mladost 1 and 2 started from the People’s Community Centre” Mladost 1971 “, and Todora described her literary tour as follows. Dozens of people associated with literature and culture have lived here, including Mirela Ivanova and Georgi Gospodinov, and an important part of Garth Greenwell’s novel from the USA is set in the neighbourhood. In this walk, far from the centre of Sofia, we will follow texts and eyewitness accounts and, above all, seek the possibilities of conversation, of shared spaces, of accurate translation between neighbours, generations, fiction and reality.”

During the walk, we talked about the everyday uses that are changing the city, the lack of shared spaces in some parts of Mladost, but also about how residents themselves are standing up for their city. “Mladost emerged in the 1960s as a neighborhood for families new to the city with large parks and open spaces between blocks, even if they were hastily built with low-quality materials. The marketplace of Mladost 1 is still a favourite place for many, and in A Natural Novel, whose author Georgi Gospodinov lived near it for several years, you can read conversations overheard in this very place. Since the 1990s, the neighbourhood has been completely changed by a wave of new construction and development, indiscriminately built up by blocks of flats and shops. In a parking lot in the newer part of the neighborhood, Todora read us poems by Mirela Ivanova, taking us back to the crisis times of empty stores, the electricity regime, and the hyperinflation of the 1990s. Further on we continued in the direction of the Monastery along overgrown paths, bordering places between the “Mladost” and “Darvenitsa” districts. There we passed with the texts of Garth Greenwell from his book “What Belongs to You”, as well as with poems by Galina Nikolova, Dimitar Kenarov and the story of Andrea Popjordanova’s project “Neither a City nor a Garden” for Vertopo Park.

The walk ended in the park of Mladost 2, where Todora read excerpts from her own stories inspired by the Mladost neighbourhood, and we continued with the personal stories behind the items collected in Maria Makedonska’s Bitaka.

Authors mentioned in the walk – Georgi Gospodinov, Mirela Ivanova, Kalin Donkov, Kalina Kovacheva, Galina Nikolova, Dimitar Kenarov, Garth Greenway and others.