As soon as
I had settled in to the hostel and met everybody, I immediately I got on the
internet and tried to figure out what I should do. I wrote my boss from the company I had been
working for in Istanbul, I wrote my punk friends from Turkey on Noizine in a
post entitled “Banned
from Turkey, Stranded in Bulgaria ,
I wrote Kathrin, and I wrote Yasmin.
My punk friends from Istanbul wrote me back
immediately. They were all very
concerned and were trying to figure out how to help me. Yaprak said that her mother was a lawyer and
that she would have her mother see if there was anything she could do. Yaprak also wrote that Poldi from the German
antifascist oi! band the Forbidden Kings might be able to send me a list of the
squats in Berlin from his contacts with Rash Berlin. I had met Poldi at a concert the Forbidden
Kings did in Istanbul. I was low on money and I knew that I could not afford to
stay in hostels the whole time I travelled. Besides, Berlin sounded
amazing. I thanked Yaprak for her help
and Yaprak told me that she would send me the list when Poldi sent it to her. When
I heard back from my boss in Istanbul, he told me that I was not fired and that
he was doing everything he could to try to help me. I decided that I needed to make one last
attempt to get back into Turkey and that I would leave the next day.
I went out
for a walk in the city. The Eastern European architecture of Sofia was a mix of
Orthodox churches and Soviet era buildings and the way people dressed reminded
me of a 1980s Eastern European movie. After I wandered the streets a bit, I returned
to the Art Hostel, packed my bag, went to the bus station and bought a ticket
to Istanbul. I had little hope that my
mission would work out, but I knew I had to try it.
On the bus I drank a couple of beers, listened
to music, read and slept. When we were
at the border, I waited with apprehension as the Turkish border police checked everyone’s
passports. The bus ride had taken 8
hours and I was not looking forward to doing it again. When they got to my passport and ran it
through the computer, they told me that I had been banned from Turkey for 5
years and the only way to appeal this was to go to the Turkish Embassy in
Washington D.C. The last thing I wanted
to do at that point was to curtail my journey and go back to the United States.
I didn’t have the resources to do that even if I wanted to. I got on a bus going back to Sofia and slept
through most of the trip.
Once I was back in Sofia, I wrote Craig and
my boss David and told them what had happened.
Craig wrote me some disturbing news.
Someone from English Time , which was the parent company of
the English school that I had worked for,
had gone to my room and threw out most of my stuff. Fortunately Craig had
managed to salvage some of my stuff. He said since he was also due to make a
border run in a couple of the days that he would bring it to me in Sofia even
though it was 8 hours out of his way.
Upon hearing this from Craig, I immediately
wrote David and I asked him what the hell was going on. He said that someone above him had told an
employee to throw out my stuff because they thought it was garbage. He told me
that he was outraged that this had happened.
He also told me that they had found marijuana in my room and that this
was grounds for my dismissal. This was
impossible because I had never smoked marijuana in my room. Marijuana usually makes me withdrawn and
paranoid and I much prefer alcohol.
It was obvious that English Time had made up
this story about pot in my room to dismiss me without a problem. David then told me that the school would give
me my back pay, but the Western Union payment was too expensive and in the end
I got nothing.
Two days later I went to the bus station to
meet Craig. I arrived at the bus station
at 8:30 and he was due to arrive at 9. 9
o’clock came and went and he still wasn’t there. I paced about a bit and smoked some
cigarettes. I was worried that he
wouldn’t come, but I would stay there all night if I had to. At 10:30, he finally arrived. We took a cab
to the hostel, he put his stuff in his room and we went to the bar downstairs. The bar was full with the guests and the
locals and it
had a good energy to it that night .
We decided to leave the bar. We went upstairs
where there were couches and we could have a decent talk. Craig had a bottle of Jack Daniels that he had bought at
the duty free shop . He opened it up and we drank Jack and Coke and smoked
cigarettes. It was really good to be
able to talk to my old drinking buddy again.
We talked about old times and what the others in Istanbul were up to and
we talked about what I should do now that I had been set adrift in
Bulgaria. At that point I wasn’t sure
what to do and I needed advice.
Craig told me that I needed a plan or
otherwise I would just drift. I certainly recognized this danger. I told Craig about my idea to go squat in
Berlin for two months and then to go on to my PhD program in Belfast. He said he thought it was a good idea. It was
at that moment that I decided that that was what I was going to do.
I warned Craig about Gokdil . I told him about the horrible
things that had happened to me. He told
me that he also thought the company was fucked up and that a friend of his was
going to get him a new job. I asked him
if he could stay in Sofia a little bit longer.
He said that he would like to, but that he was really scared that the
same thing that happened to me would happen to him and that he had to get back
to work.
It had been an excellent night. We both knew that we probably wouldn’t see
each other for a long time and we wished each other well. We finished off the bottle of whiskey, smoked
our last cigarette and went to bed. The
next morning I went with him to the bus station in a taxi and I never saw him
again.
So my plan was definitely to go to the
squats in Berlin but I needed to wait for Yaprak to get the information for me
from Poldi. I therefore bided my time in
Sofia, wandering around the streets (which were very confusing to me because
the street signs were written in Cyrillic), going to cafes and drinking
espresso and smoking Karilla cigarettes from Greece (my favorite in the world)
and hanging out in the hostel bar in the evenings. This routine was pleasant but I wanted more;
I wanted to check out the local punk scene.
I looked for a Sofia punk MySpace page and I found one. There were two shows coming up in the next
week.
The next evening there was a show. I got
directions from a girl who worked at the hostel. It was in walking distance so I set off on
foot. At first it was hard to find but
eventually I found a group of punks and hardcore kids standing outside drinking
and I knew that I was in the right place.
The bands inside were very energetic and
played 1980s style hardcore punk. Even
though it was very cold, most people were standing outside drinking beer and
vodka they bought from the local corner market.
People were very curious about me because they didn’t get a lot of
foreigners at their punk shows, but almost no one spoke English. Finally I found a punk who spoke English and
I started talking to him. He was very
friendly and he told he liked my Subhumans T shirt I was wearing but he told me
to be careful because there were a lot of Nazis at the concert and the Subhumans
were a left wing band. He also told me
the pub the bands were playing at was owned by a Nazi. I was a bit thrown back
by this and I asked him if the punks in Sofia hung out with Nazis. He said that he and his friends didn’t, but
that a lot of punks did. We started
talking about antifa and punk. He told me that he used to be involved in
antifascist work in Sofia but that he had stopped because it was too dangerous
and the Nazi problem in Sofia too great.
I hung out with this guy and his friends a little bit more and then I
walked back to the hostel. When I got
back to the hostel, I told a girl what had happened and she said that she
didn’t like blacks either. I was
disgusted.
I would see Nazis all around Bulgaria and I
had to be careful. One time I meet this
girl on Okcupid because I wanted to meet new people and I was a bit lonely in
Sofia. She had green hair, listened to
indie music and she was in love with everything that had to do with Japan. She seemed pretty interesting and we agreed
to meet for coffee. When I showed up,
she was with her friends. One of them had a Blood and Honor dog tag. Blood and
Honor is an international organization that promotes Neo-nazism in music. It
was started in the late 80s in the U.K. by Nicky Crane and Ian Stewart
Donaldson of the Neo-Nazi band Screwdriver.
I was shocked that her friend was
wearing this dog tag and very uncomfortable.
We then left her friends. I asked her how she could be friends with
someone who was a Nazi. She answered
that they were friends since high school and he had his beliefs and she had
hers.
Bulgaria was a very homogeneous country with
the main minorities being Roma and Turkish communities that have lived in
Bulgaria for centuries and immigrants from Turkey and other parts of Eastern
Europe. Nazis target those who they do
not understand because they seek to blame the problems in their lives on the
vulnerable. Attacks of hate have caused
a lot of suffering for the Roma and Turkish communities of Bulgaria and many
people have been killed. I felt that it
was not appropriate to just look the other way, when the suffering caused by
hate was real.
I thought that it was really awful that Nazism
found its way into the punk scene because it is the exact opposite of what I
feel punk is about. In my view, Punk is about being free and working for a
better world where everyone gets to live a full and expressive life. Punk should celebrate differences and
encourage diversity. When punk exploded
in the late 70s, it was born in the context of a multicultural Britain and it
blossomed in this context. The Clash incorporated
reggae into their songs and covered roots reggae and rocksteady songs.
Also, John Lyndon’s second band P.I.L. and the Slits were heavily influenced by
dub. Furthermore reggae and punk artists
played together under the banner of Rock Against Racism.
After all the contacts with Nazis I did not
go to a concert in Sofia again until I heard that the New York hardcore band
Madball was going to play. I had never
seen them in New York and I thought it would really fun seeing them in Sofia so
I decided to go. The concert was in a
larger venue and there were 100 punks standing outside. I walked into the bar of the venue. It was
completely empty so I went outside again.
I saw the guy I had seen at the last punk show and I began talking to
him and his friends and hanging out.
Everybody was buying vodka and beer at the mini market and no one was
buying anything at the bar. It was an
hour before the show. Everybody was
drinking really fast and was going back and forth to the minimarket. I was doing my best to keep up but I was
having trouble. I went to see the first
band and they were pretty good. After they finished, I went back to the mini
market. By the time Madball started, my
head was spinning which hadn’t happened to me for years. In the end I just ended up sitting on the stairs
in the concert hall and I tried to listen to Madball even though I couldn’t
really enjoy myself. I learned then and
there that I should never try to keep pace when drinking in a Slavic country.
I had been in Bulgaria for one month and
while it was interesting, I was really uncomfortable with the large Nazi
presence in Sofia. I felt stuck and
lonely. The whole time I was in Sofia I
was waiting for Yaprak to get the info on the squats from Poldi, and when she
finally did I knew it was time to leave.
I decided that on my way to Berlin I would go to Budapest which was a
city that always fascinated me. The day
I got the information I went to the train station and bought a ticket to
Budapest for the next day.
