Some Bulgarians refer to the country’s communist era as The Time. The beginning of the transition to democracy customarily is referred to as The Changes.

But the ouster of the Bulgarian Socialist Party government in 1996/97, to which Jack Hamilton was a witness as a journalist, had no name. It was not orange or velvet. Perhaps, he writes in his book The Good Balkans, it might be called the blue revolution – blue being the colour used then and now to denote Bulgaria’s anti-communist parties, even though these days they are more conventionally referred to as "centre-right" or "right-wing".

Hamilton spent four years in Bulgaria, on the staff of The Sofia Independent before it suspended publication, and as correspondent for the Wall Street Journal Europe and the Sunday Times.

Veteran expatriates in Bulgaria will well know that the country was a different place then, even if some themes such as the influence of organised crime and corruption were well established. It was a pre-Nato, pre-EU, pre-McDonald’s, pre-shopping mall, pre-property boom Bulgaria. A certain era, from the hopeful uncertainties of post-communism through the 1996/97 financial collapse (and the revolution without a name) through to, perhaps, the period from 2001 onwards with the rise of foreign investment, easier credit, wage growth and, of course, the property market story – an era which, by the way, now is transmogrifying into its successor.

A somewhat headier place, going by Hamilton’s book.

That book now joins the rather sparse canon of literature in English about Bulgaria in the category of other academic works of history by luminaries such as RJ Crampton. Bulgaria has a chapter or two in books like Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts and Misha Glenny’s The Balkans and McMafia, and more recently there was Kapka Kassabova’s acerbic memoir of growing up in communist Bulgaria and of visiting the country after long years of exile, Street Without a Name.

His book, Hamilton says, fills a niche in which "no one has written about Bulgaria" (he was not aware of Kassabova’s book).

"The last travel book about Bulgaria was in the 1960s (Al Haskell’s Heroes and Roses, published 1966) but it was a bit twee and was to do with communist Bulgaria."

The Good Balkans, of course, is hardly in the Rough Guide, Lonely Planet or Fodor’s category either. Appropriately, it is subtitled Adventures between old and new Bulgaria.

While he worked for an expatriate newspaper and easily could have been seduced into a cocoon of fellow foreigners and expat hangouts (however fewer these numbered in those years), Hamilton learnt Bulgarian – this much in any case would be obvious from his accounts of conversations in remote hamlets and, for instance, with oddball hermit priests – and delved into an insight into the realities of Bulgaria that some who spent twice the time in the country might never gain. References to expatriates make up a relatively small proportion of the book, which seems, well, proportionately fair. It is a book about Bulgaria, not about a minuscule section of its population.

Hamilton has stayed current on Bulgarian events, still has friends locally and has visited the country about twice a year since he left. His view of the country is neither that of the newbie expat befuddled into a euphoric fuzziness by his first encounter with rakiya, nor that of the disdainful foreigner propping up a bar and holding forth from his view as a self-imposed internal exile from the country he lives in.

The book’s title may label Bulgaria "the good Balkans" but it does not make Hamilton a praise-singer.

With frankness, Hamilton says: "It is very easy to be depressed, especially if one looks at Boiko Borissov about to become prime minister, and all the corruption scandals and the many failures of this government and the previous ones.

"I remind myself that it was not very long ago that this was a communist country and that it has undergone a transition in which it had a very vast distance to travel. I remind myself that it is remarkable where Bulgaria has got to. People tend to forget that."

There are issues from the past to which he attaches a clear importance, but not to the exclusion of all else.

There is the question of those who collaborated with the communist regime as agents or informers. Bringing this past into the light means more than just publishing lists of names, Hamilton says, but involves issues such as understanding what made people become collaborators, of understanding "the mechanism, the technology of the regime". He agrees that the country should have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to deal with its past, not solely for the sake of revelations but mainly for the sake of understanding that past and because "there is too little reconciliation going on".

About present-day Bulgaria, Hamilton says that the "worst and biggest" issue is not what goes on or does not go on in Parliament, but the need to establish firmly the rule of law.
Asked to look ahead to his vision of what Bulgaria would be like five years from now, Hamilton quips that by then, the Borissov era should be over but in terms of government and politics, he doubts that anything much would have changed.

"I would like to see the emergence of a really genuine political movement properly dedicated to reform and to make genuine institutional changes. Maybe a new generation will do that.

"But if that does not happen, I think that Bulgaria could become the ‘Italy of the Balkans’, neither great nor that terrible either. Let’s face it, Italy’s governments are rubbish and the country has a lot of problems – and yet for ordinary Italians, life is good and politics need not be that relevant to their lives. Bulgaria has problems that it might not be able to shake off but it could still be, in the same way, a nice place to live.

"Life could be good for Bulgarians even as life is good for Italians."