ONCE known as Bulgaria's Manchester, Pernik, a beautifully ugly relic of the twentieth century, has taken on the character of a small tired city waiting for something to happen, whether it be its renaissance or just Armageddon.
Only 50 minutes by train outside of Sofia on the opposite side of Vitosha Mountain, Pernik served as the centre of the country's coal mining industry from the 1890s. Throughout the Communist era it was a great factory town with a population of 110 000. When Communism fell, the factories and coalmines lost state backing and Russian business. Now, they lie like dead giants, with grass growing untended on their grounds and paint peeling from their great walls. The population is currently about 70 000.
Dimitur Stoianov, a 39-year-old amateur gospel musician who grew up in Pernik, served as my guide. He is a loud, happy man, with a cue ball head, aggressively open about his Protestant Evangelical faith. (We met on the train coming from Sofia, which he had visited mainly to buy a guitar string; Pernik does not have any musical instrument stores of its own.)
He showed me the gymnasium where he went to school, and the site of the cinema where he saw Bollywood movies in his youth. The lobby of the cinema has become a cafe. The plush red doors, now ripped, which led to what had once been the theatre were locked. And no, there were no active cinemas in the city.
There was the glass factory which had shut down, a giant black block with broken windows which stands impotent against a mountainous backdrop. And there was the bread factory along the Struma River. Some kids were fishing nearby.
A tiny concrete stage for summer concerts sat in the city park. Covered in graffiti, it hasn't seen a performance in years.
Pernik's under-visited history museum - the last entry in the sign-in registrar was 10 days old - is housed in a cool white building dating from 1973. The city, evidently, has a proud 6000-year history. There's intrigue involving Alexander the Great (something to do with marrying or not-marrying a glamorous local lady), problems with Nero during the Roman era and Krakra's battles with the Byzantines in the eleventh century. And it's all well represented here with broken ancient reliefs and spearheads.
There's an Ethnographic Museum here too, which includes masks used in a famous biennial festival, which a few American visitors had compared to Indian rituals. Stoianov seemed uninterested in the "Pagan" customs.
Opposite the museum, stands the Miner Directorate, a handsome building dating from 1932, made of Italian marble and Czech terracotta. There, we met Kiril Serginov, a guide at the miner museum, a friend of Stoianov's and a musician himself. (He moonlights as a Roy Orbison impersonator.) He talked about all the things money from the mines funded from the 1930s to the 1980s: an Olympic-sized swimming pool, big bands and theatre.
On a hill, atop the city, stands another older symbol of the city's faded glory, the skeletal remains of a medieval castle, dating from Krakra's time. To get there, you have to hike through a small residential area, where chickens and sheep run in and out of yards. Near the cracked stone stairs that lead up to the ruins, stands a bordered-up restaurant. Once there, you find there's very little left of the old castle except some yellowish brown foundations, but with the mountains behind you, you can stare down on the Eiffel Tower view of the industrial landscape, which looks more peaceful than sad.
The streets of Pernik were heavily flooded after last week's torrential rains, leading to some cruel jokes, comparing the city ironically to Venice. But the people who live here, Stoianov and Serginov among them, are proud of their city and what it stood for at one time. Stoianov, who sees Communism as a direct enemy of his faith, somehow manages to square his own beliefs with his nostalgia for the town's height, which coincides with the glory days of the old regime. He says he prays that something might happen here to change things.
Evidently, some things are already changing.
The area outside the train station is filled with all the markings of post-communist Eastern Europe - GSM stores, summer clothes shops and cafes blaring awful techno music. It's far from impoverished.
When asked how a depressed town could accommodate these places, Stoianov says there are still some open factories where a few city residents work. Others commute to Sofia and make money there.
And then there's another surprising development. Some real estate agents are starting to appear in town. With housing prices rising in Sofia, Pernik has become a good cheap alternative place to live.