"I'm ashamed to be here earning just one or two leva a day," said Assen. He and his wife were packing up their stall as we spoke. It consisted of an odd assortment of sunglasses, old calculators, paper money from communism, cups, plates, and an amateur portrait of an elderly man - all laid out on a cloth on the bare ground.

His neighbouring stallholders each had a similar array of objects on display, and a handful of potential customers wandered up and down gazing indifferently at the wares. Most were raggedly dressed men and women, though I noticed a couple of suited businessmen showing interest and looking decidedly out of place at what is known as Bitaka market, located next to a dirty stream under a busy road bridge with the constant, deafening din of traffic all around. The market at Stochna Gara is where Roma gather unofficially to buy and sell objects they have found while litter picking, or have gathered from their homes outside Sofia.

"You can find some very precious things here," said Assen, "and the traders from outside Alexander Nevski Church often come to find antiques - they buy them for a few stotinki and sell them for much more to tourists." He said that it would be impossible for them to open a stall there as the rent would be too high for him and his wife, who have been coming everyday to Bitaka for the last month or so. They don't pay any rent for the tiny piece of muddy ground they lay their wares on, but their meagre business is always at risk of being moved on by aggressive police. "Some of them aren't so bad, and some of them make trouble," he told me. Last week, all of the traders were thrown out of the market by police, but the following day they returned to their business. "There's simply nothing else we can do," Assen said with weary resignation.

He used to have a better job as a builder, and said that if he could find such work again he would take it, but he doesn't have any information or contacts to get back into the construction industry.

Both Assen and his wife had little hope for the future. "Things will only get worse for Roma people," they predicted. Their son works in an official market where he struggles to make ends meet as the rent is high and his wife is unemployed. "I don't see a bright future for him," Assen said sadly. To illustrate the utter poverty of their existence, he recounted the story of how he had seen a young child collecting scraps thrown away by stallholders at Bitaka. "He was desperately hungry," said Assen, "and he used the scraps to open his own little stall - just to make a few stotinki for bread."

Despite their tiny incomes, the stallholders voluntarily contribute 20 stotinki each day to pay a few to clean the market area, and Assen was clearly proud that they could maintain such a system in their difficult circumstances. "We are very religious," he said as he folded his threadbare deckchair and prepared to carry away their bulging bag of oddments. "We believe that God will protect us."