symploke

In the early 1990s people in emerging markets were thrilled to be showered with a confetti of colorful western advertising images. But, in those exhilarating early post-wall years, ads were not immediately recognized as ads by a world that had been visually deprived of commercial aesthetics since the time of Stalin, and thus their function as marketing tools was initially disabled. Western ads were first viewed as symbols of a conquering political and economic system, later utilized as tools, and eventually found their place as signifiers within a pre-existing cultural context. These misinterpretations of post-Cold War western advertising images had at least two causes: a lack of disposable capital in post-Soviet Eastern Europe and the inability of western corporations to imagine the dynamics of a non-consumerist society as they launched their first global marketing plans in this new territory. While western Europe’s conversion to American-style capitalism had been aided by the laying of a groundwork for the basis of consumerism through government funds after WWII, in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s this work was left to the private sector—with results that were not what had been hoped for by the corporations which were involved, nor particularly helpful to the economic development of Eastern European itself. Meanwhile, the advertising images left behind in the post-Wall campaigns have found new functions, at least in Bulgaria.

Eurolines, the continental version of Greyhound, boldly advertises in its brochures that it offers “Europe au Quotidien.” If you don’t mind spending four days immobile in one of their cramped plush seats, this private bus service can show you the highways of Europe between locations as far-flung as Galway and Istanbul. My Eurolines ticket would take me from Paris across Germany, Hungary, Serbia, then dip into the northern section of Kosovo before stopping in Sofia. My travel agent said that if I got to their depot an hour early I might even get a window seat. Only one other Eurolines bus was leaving the morning I arrived. It was going to EuroDisney. [End Page 132]

Forty-two hours outside Paris our bus stopped, and I stepped out its doors into the world of the 20 cent pack of cigarettes, the land of the two dollar haircut, a city whose café menus are incomprehensible but contain, reassuringly, nothing over three dollars. Sofia is spires and domes and curlicued ironwork, shopping housewives in leopardskin-print dresses dodging brick and plaster and cobblestones piled up on the broken sidewalks. There is something Victorian about the streets here, and certainly something medieval, something Socialist, something Turkish. It is green and shady where you least expect it, frilled and dentilled and orbed in its most obscure underbellies, scoured bare and naked in its most obvious open spaces. On the main street young people wandered with Walkmans on their heads, workers strode along with cell phones pressed to their ears, and pensioners made their way across tramlines with orthopedically-designed aluminum walkers. In Sofia people had plenty to look at in the windows of their local Gap, Renault dealer, Dunkin Donuts, and Benneton boutique. And as a result of this, most of them had been slowly learning over the past ten years to consider themselves among the world’s poor.

I was staying with a friend who had been told as a child that since ball point pens were from America, if you found one in the street it was most likely planted there by the CIA and rigged with a bomb set to explode when the cap was lifted. My friend was explaining this and other urban myths from his side of the Iron Curtain as our walk led us around the corner of the Palace of Culture, that monumental administrative beehive-cum-convention center blocking the view of the closest mountain from the city’s main boulevard.

At the corner of the building we stopped and I heard him catch his breath. There in front of us stood Mount Vitosha in all its snow-capped glory, a dark giant rising above the tram lines of the city’s western suburbs...