Bulgaria: October 2022

with Friends of Southwark Cathedral

17-26 October 2022

“Why are so many people flying to Bulgaria?” a fellow-pilgrim asked me as we waited to board the plane. “I know why we are going, but why are they?”

I didn’t know why we were going, but I hoped that, sooner or later, someone would tell us. Perhaps it was because a previous pilgrimage, with the same group leader and the same tour company, had enjoyed a visit to Romania, and Bulgaria is just next door.

I thought it might be envisaged as the first stage to establishing a link with Christians there, to mutual benefit. But the only encounter with a local Christian community was with the small Anglican congregation in Sofia whose Reader welcomed us to the chapel they share with Roman Catholics – are they also an English-speaking congregation? – in a country where 78% of the adult population identify as Orthodox.

Anyway, we assembled at Heathrow Airport at 5:15 am, too early for the first trains of the day. Not wanting to hang around Terminal 5 overnight, I left home at 2 and travelled by night buses: one to Lewisham, another to Charing Cross, and a third to Heathrow. An unexpected blessing was that the second bus followed, in the opposite direction, part of the first stage of the Pilgrims Way, from New Cross to London Bridge, passing the mosaic of Chaucer’s pilgrims and other travellers through history on the Old Kent Road in Peckham.

This was Day Zero. For, on arrival at the hotel in Sofia, all I wanted to do was catch up on sleep. A short walk might have helped me to feel orientated, in a way that sitting in a coach in the middle of traffic jams did not.