ABSTRACT
Interwar Sofia and Plovdiv, Bulgaria's first and second cities by size and importance, provide contrasting snapshots of this larger phenomena, which was slow and uneven. With approximately 11,000 people, it was by all accounts a neglected backwater in relation to Plovdiv, which with over 20,000 people dwarfed Sofia in terms of economic and cultural significance. Sofia became a mecca and breeding ground for Bulgaria's new cultural and political elite, Bulgarian-speaking migrants from across the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Balkans and beyond Istanbul, Bucharest, Odessa, Belgrade, Ruse, and of course Plovdiv. While Sofia continued to surge in size and importance at the turn of the century, Plovdiv's fate was quite different. Still, if Bulgaria's path toward Europe meant a far-reaching recasting of urban space in Sofia, in Plovdiv it was tempered by the need to find, define, and preserve something uniquely Bulgarian in the urban landscape even if that something was clearly connected to the Ottoman past.
