Charlottesville artists, Roger Williams and Victoria Long (a former New City Artist in Residence at The Haven), received a small grant from the Charlottesville Sister Cities Commission to react creatively to the cultural landscape of Charlottesville’s sister city Pleven, Bulgaria. 

Here is the second guest entry in a two-part blog series on their Pleven travels, following their first New City Arts guest entry.

As our time in Bulgaria draws to a close, we want to take some time to reflect and draw connections among our experiences here. Here are some fragments of what we're thinking about:

We also saw a lot of elderly passengers on the city bus we took in the late morning one weekday. To ride the bus, you need either an identification card or to pay a woman who walks up and down the bus collecting fare and checking passes. The driver sits at the front behind a Plexiglas window with a lace curtain. The buses are connected by an upward-extending arm to a web of electric cables that creep along all major roads. We rode this particular line to its end at a traffic circle in a housing development on the outskirts of town. There was an exodus at this stop, and individuals all made their ways slowly up the hill to their respective homes in a complex of concrete apartment buildings...

It was hard for us not to feel overwhelmed standing among those concrete buildings. They dominate the visual landscape in Pleven. We thought the buildings seemed like gray ships, only they were not moving. We imagined that each floor contained its own little world. Later, we were introduced to the term "brutalist" which is used to describe this style of architecture. Commonly found in socialist government building projects (but also found in the USA in lots of places), brutalist buildings might seem cold to us nowadays, but perhaps it depends on how you look at it. It's true that many of them haven't weathered the decades well; the concrete bears water and rust stains. Still, these buildings originally were intended to communicate honesty, strength, functionality, and frugality...

In the late afternoon one day, we made our way on foot towards the town's central cemetery. There were two horned cows at the entrance, standing indifferently near a woman weeding in her garden. An elderly man walking by stopped us and said something in Bulgarian. It could have been a question or a warning. All we could do in response was shrug apologetically, with a quiet mutter of "Angliski." And all he could do was to shrug back...

We toured a new Eastern Orthodox Church in a village just outside Pleven. The village's mayor, who wore jeans and was friendly, met us there. The icon painter, Vlado, was finishing his work: wall paintings of saints, their lives, and stories from the Bible. The building had huge sheets of plastic draped over the iconostasis (the ornately carved gate at the front of the sanctuary)...

Pleven has many efforts in place to involve and educate children in the arts. The municipal arts center (where our host Vladimira is the director) offers free workshops for children; the local symphony and opera company put on a production for schoolchildren that we saw; there are centers for performing and visual arts that provide low-cost and/or free after school programs for youth. Our guide Anita described the ceramics program she was in at one of the centers as a "haven" growing up, despite the facility's limited funding. (We were also treated to a brief lesson from the program's gregarious and inspiring tutor.) As in all communities, these sorts of opportunities are vital to a well-rounded, engaged livelihood for younger people, and it's great to see so many such things happening in Pleven...

We had a conversation over coffee outside a cafe with Vladimira about the issues that face young artists in Pleven and the sense of purpose she feels to stay in her hometown to try and improve it. It reminded us of the challenges facing the creative community in Charlottesville and how worthwhile it is to stay and try to make our own city a better place, rather than transporting to a larger city with more cultural cache.

Now that our time in Pleven has ended, we're left with a lot to think about, a list of books we want to read, ideas we want to mull over -- and of course a book, a cassette of field recordings, and an exhibit to create. We're excited to get to work, and to share more about our sister city in Bulgaria.