Serdica's mineral springs became Bulgaria's wisdom capital
Sofia, Bulgaria's capital beneath Vitosha, shows habitation from at least 7000 BC and enters texts when Rome seized Serdica from the Serdi in 29 BC. Its modern name honors Saint Sofia Church—Greek for wisdom—unlike most Slavic Bulgarian toponyms.
The ancient name came from the Serdi, a tribe of Thracian, Celtic or mixed stock, and the emperor Trajan styled the town Ulpia Serdica. As Rome weakened, Huns, Visigoths, Avars and Slavs raided it. Khan Krum folded it into the First Bulgarian Empire in 809 as Sredets; Byzantium held it from 1018 until the Second Bulgarian Empire regained it in 1194, after which it flourished as an administrative and literary centre. The name Sofia first shows up in 14th-century sources, including a charter of Tsar Ivan Shishman and a Ragusan merchant's notes of 1376, although locals were still called people of Sredets for a long time afterwards.
Numbers shrank badly before modern growth. The town had about 70,000 people in the late 18th century, 19,000 by 1870 and only 11,649 in 1878. Today some 1.28 million live within 500 square kilometres, nearly 18 per cent of Bulgaria's population, and about 1.5 million in the wider urban area, making it the 14th-largest city in the European Union.
Mountains ring the Sofia Valley, with the Balkan range on its northern side, Lyulin westward and Vitosha rising directly south. At an average of 550 metres, Sofia is the EU's second-highest capital after Madrid. Unusually for a European capital it has no big river running through it; shallow streams such as the Boyanska and Perlovska cross town, while the Iskar, rising in Rila, skirts the east past the airport runways. There are 49 mineral and thermal springs, and quakes in 1818 and 1858 did serious damage.
Religious coexistence is a point of civic pride. Sveta Nedelya Church, Banya Bashi Mosque and Sofia Synagogue stand near one another, a cluster nicknamed the triangle of religious tolerance. The medieval Boyana Church joined the World Heritage List in 1979, and institutions such as the National Palace of Culture, the Ivan Vazov National Theatre and the Museum of Socialist Art, with its communist-era posters and statues, draw visitors.
Source: Sofia
