Sofia Tech Park
Perhaps Bulgaria’s 500 years of
occupation by the Ottoman Empire taught this nation to conceal its true nature.
But the urban landscape of Sofia is a collage of paradoxes.
Most striking is the
construction boom that’s building lots of big, gleaming office complexes – a
spending spree in the European Union’s poorest nation. Why add all these shiny
steel and glass boxes in a country where the population is plummeting? Who are
they for? And why build new offices next to vacant ones full of space for rent?
Capitalism has not been kind to this Balkan nation, so many locals simply shrug
off this construction as money laundering. But that seems overly dismissive,
since these buildings are quickly becoming the new face of the city. So upon my
return to Sofia after a year’s absence, I decided to do some reportorial poking
around and to get a better understanding of this complicated place.
But I’ll
back up and offer a little background on Sofia for all of you not familiar with
Bulgaria:
This is a very ancient country – Thrace in your ancient history text.
But despite its great antiquity, about 7,000 years, Sofia was never a major city
like Athens or Constantinople, not even a capital city until the late 19th
century when the Russians liberated Bulgaria and designated Sofia to be the new
nation’s center.
Bulgaria was on the wrong side of history in World War II – a
sadly recurring theme here – and Allied bombing reduced much of the city,
leaving the architectural face of this very old place mostly post-war modern, with the exception of a 20-block area in the center surrounding the Nevsky Cathedral and a few compact gentrified shopping and residential developments.
The central city’s charming older architecture
is primarily neo-classical style from the 19th century, hardly reflecting Sofia's true age. Because Sofia's residential neighborhoods are uniform, run-down and drab apartment blocks, the city lacks a mood of Old World charm. No grand
archeological edifices that reach back a millennium, and the Roman and medieval
structures that remain are small and visually insignificant.
Most neighborhoods and most of its municipal facilities were built during the large-scale Russian investment during the Cold War, with rows of 10-story Khrushchev apartments standing as a living museum of the development of Eastern Europe in the 1960s. The developments from the 1970s and 1980s are threadbare and unimproved, and it's obvious that landscape maintenance is not a career path in Sofia. Bourgeois civic pride needs a citizenry to financially support it, and Bulgarians have learned to overlook the cratered sidewalks.
In the Cold War
years, the USSR created manufacturing jobs in this agricultural nation. It
instituted public services, greatly improved education, and developed
infrastructure, raising the standard of living dramatically. The breakup of the
Soviet Bloc in 1991 reversed those positive trends, and Bulgaria has been on a
downward slide ever since, a capitalist country with no capital. Standards of
living fell as foreign corporate raiders bought up national assets and elected
officials alike.
When Bulgaria was admitted to the EU in 2007, doors opened and
the country immediately hemorrhaged population. EU identity cards became
passports to race westward in pursuit of opportunity, abandoning the countryside.
Geographically the size of
Ohio, Bulgaria is a series of mountain ranges surrounding fertile valleys. You
can happily live on local fruit, veggies, cheese, salads, nuts and wines pretty
much indefinitely here. Before World War II, four out of five jobs were in
agriculture. By 2019, EU inducements created agribusiness practices that reduced
farm work to less than 10 percent of national employment.
Today, Bulgaria has
the dubious distinction of being the world’s fastest shrinking nation. It has
lost more than 20 percent of its population since 1985, plunging from about 9
million to about 7 million – the kind of collapse generally associated with
apocalyptic famines and wars.
So here is the Sofia paradox: If everyone is
leaving, why build all these glittery new office towers amid the vacant ones?
Poking around in EU reports and business journals, I found an answer that seems
familiar: Globalists feed on fallen economies, scavenging for remaining resources of value.
The population that fled the
countryside for Sofia benefits from one important remnant of Soviet times: A
strong educational system and educational ethos. Secondary and university
graduation rates are significantly higher here than in the U.S., and language
skills are a particular strong point. I can get by speaking English to just
about anyone in Sofia under 40, the demographic group for whom these offices are
being built.
Sofia’s economic future rises with these offices. The developers
call the hands-on computer work to take place here “outsourcing,” even though
it’s in-sourced. The future is imported – imported jobs, jobs where English is
the mother tongue. It all adds up: Cheap land and rents, low wages and an
educated workforce. One countries outsourcing of labor is another’s insourcing
of jobs.
The poorest country in the EU finds its very poverty an asset in the
global economy. More than 600 companies in Bulgaria today are devoted to
fulfilling outsourcing needs for wealthy stakeholders elsewhere. If you hire a
U.S. firm like VMware or a British company such as Scalefocus to revamp your
company’s cloud services, security or data processing throughput, the keyboards
will rattle in Sofia, not Silicone Valley or London. The trend is so pervasive
that Sofia University has developed a masters program in managing outsourcing
businesses.
A vassal state for many centuries, Bulgaria has a fairly complaint
population and agreeable government, posing fewer risks to Western businesses
than the two Asian giants, India and China. This European Christian country has
minimal cultural roadblocks for Western bosses compared to India and China. And
if the Zoom meetings aren’t enough, Sofia is just a couple hours from anywhere
in Europe – and the airport is just 10 minutes from the business districts.
Costs are low, and the weather is great.
The building boom is a race to simulate
Silicon Valley style campuses for both outsourcing firms and tech start-ups. The
real estate industry calls these new buildings Class A office space, though the
definition of Class A is hazy at best. The point of the new structures is to
make long days at the keyboard less grueling and to create as nurturing and
homey an environment as possible amid the glass and steel. It’s an outsourced
emulation of the campuses built by Apple and Facebook and Google, the tech
ideals.
These new complexes are intended to be villages within the city, so the
workers who spend long hours confined in glass boxes will be comforted by
amenities close at hand. Housing, health clubs, dry cleaners, groceries, gyms,
bars and eateries of all kinds – including those SoCal staples with wheatgrass
growing in the windows – complete the village complexes. A sense of open space
and fiber optic connectivity complete this world vision.
The builders tend to
call these business hubs “parks,” an odd word for office complexes, but they are
certainly more parklike than Madison Square Garden is gardenlike. There’s the
sprawling Business Park Sofia in the Mladost area or the growing Sofia Tech Park
just off the central artery of Tsarigradsko Shose.
The sidewalks in these parks
are full of predominantly bearded young men with coffee cups, some on scooters,
some on skates … a familiar sight around tech centers anywhere. The workforce is
almost entirely White Europeans, no doubt another selling point to the
globalists who like to avoid ethnic strife and identity politics.
For centuries
a flyover country between Europe and Asia, Bulgaria has found a comfortable
niche on the border of Asia within the shelter of Europe. It may be unlikely
that future wealth generated by tech firms will remain grounded in Bulgaria, but
for a nation on a downward spiral, these outsourcing jobs can be only a benefit.
They offer entries into a much wider career world.
There may be glass ceilings,
but at least these offer four walls and a seat at the table.
