James first visited the capital city of the Balkan nation of Bulgaria, Sofia, back in 2005 and decided to return to see how much the city had changed over that time. Freed from communist rule in the early 1990's all of the once communist countries of eastern Europe had some catching up to do with western Europe. The western perception of eastern European countries of being cold, grey, concrete, monstrousities is not the main, but certainly is one of the, tragedies of these nations. That they are misunderstood.

Sofia itself is one of the oldest capital cities in Europe and the area around the city has a rich history of human settlement dating back nearly 7,000 years and sits in the area known as 'old Europe' which had a lot of, for it's time, sophisticated culture, which was way beyond places like Mesopotamia or Egypt, both more famous civilisations which rose thousands of years later. To the west is what should be the famous 'Vinca' culture and way to the east the 'Varna' culture, to name but just two.

In the last 3,000 years the country's history has been made up of Thracians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Turks and Bulgars themselves. The entire area of the Balkans has one of the longest and most interesting histories of any areas of Europe and it is a great shame that that history has been buried underneath a few decades of communist concrete. If you visit the city today what you will notice more than anything is not the communist concrete but the beautiful pre World War II architecture and city layout. What Sofia is a great example of is of a culture that was thriving equally across the whole of Europe up until World War II, and that is one of beauty, class, character and optimism. They call that type of architecture neo-classicism or beaux-arts, and it was wide spread across Europe, not just in Sofia. What you really see is the end of an era of European history by it's replacement with post war concrete. And for James that seems such a shame. If only that style