There’s something wonderfully disorienting about Sofia. Reflecting on my recent visit, I can best conclude that it is a city poised between worlds – ancient and modern, East and West, melancholy and rebirth.

There is a feeling of being forever caught in that subtle twilight where the past and present mingle like dusk and dawn, sharing the same horizon.

As I walked through Bulgaria’s capital it feels a bit like stepping into a living ever-changing history drama, where layers of history have been written over each other but never quite erased. Beneath your feet, Roman ruins lie quietly beneath the glass walkways of Serdica Station. Above them rise Ottoman mosques, Orthodox domes, and the stoic geometries of Soviet-era architecture. Each era leaving its own unmistakable fingerprint on the city’s skin. Sofia is, quite literally, built on its past.

And yet, it’s what is being written, and more evidently drawn, now that truly gives the city its pulse. Bulgaria’s long shadow of post-Soviet recovery still stretches across its streets, with the faded murals of socialist heroes, the concrete apartment blocks, the lingering sense of collective endurance. But within those same grey walls, colour has returned. Quite literally, with an undercurrent of liberated graffiti art.

Similar to previous blogs I have written (Bogota, El Salvador, and even London’s Brick Lane), the evidence of a steady explosion in graffiti art gives the city its modern day soul of rejuvenation.

Graffiti – once seen as a mark of dissent – now splashes Sofia’s façades with restless creativity. Street artists reclaim the brutalist surfaces with swirls of expression: political commentaries, surreal portraits, spontaneous poetry. What was once propaganda, appears to have now become personal. You can sense the city shrugging off its old uniform, revealing an identity both self-aware and irrepressibly young.

Stroll along Vitosha Boulevard, where café culture hums under the gaze of snow-tipped Mount Vitosha. Pause at Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, its golden domes gleaming like a resurrection of spirit. Then turn a corner, and you’ll find an abandoned warehouse transformed into a gallery or a bar filled with students debating art, politics, and the price of hope. This is the Sofia of today. Neither East nor West, neither past nor future, but something thrillingly in between.

In my mind that is the city’s modern-day charm really. Sofia doesn’t rush to impress; she reveals herself slowly, through contradictions. A place where the echoes of empire meet the laughter of street musicians. Where ancient saints share alleyways with skateboarders. You can feel the resilience here, along with a quiet pride that endures despite, or perhaps because of, its turbulent history.

As twilight falls and the streetlights flicker on, Sofia seems to exhale. The old and the new blur into one another. The gold of the cathedrals reflecting off glass towers, the scent of incense mixing with cigarette smoke and roasted chestnuts. You realise then that Sofia isn’t just emerging from her past, she is negotiating with it, gracefully, stubbornly, creatively.

And in that delicate, in-between light, I found that she shines.