FORMER JEWISH NEIGHBOURHOOD

Little remains of Sofia's former Jewish neighbourhoods. One of them used to be around the place of Sofia's mineral springs, to the side of the Banya Bashi Mosque. Some of the poor houses were built around a large open-air courtyard known as La Haggadah. The residents there were unable to even read the Pesach texts in Hebrew, so they usually summoned a chacham to do it for them. This neighbourhood was one of the first to be demolished as part of the grand project to modernise Sofia. In its place now stand the Sofia Central Baths (the Regional History Museum Sofia occupies the building) and the Central Department Store. 

After the massive construction of the city, which started in 1889, the residents of La Haggadah were relocated to Üçbunar, a relatively new neighbourhood in the western reaches of modern Pirotska Street, which was an authentic working-class area. Infamous for the huge quantities of mud in its streets, Üçbunar was shared by impoverished Jews and Bulgarian immigrants from Macedonia and Thrace. The well-to-do Jews lived in their own neighbourhoods. One of them is roughly in the area between Maria Louisa Boulevard, Ekzarh Yosif Street, Vasil Levski Boulevard and Slivnitsa Boulevard. Many of these sometimes gorgeous houses were damaged during the Allied bombings of Sofia, and what remained was nationalised by the Communists after 1944. Some of these properties were returned to their rightful owners in the 1990s, but many were demolished to make room for the construction boom of the 2000s. In the 2010s the former neighbourhood of the richer Jews attracted some long overdue interest. Sofia City Council spotted the potential of the frayed yet very centrally-located area as a would-be arts neighbourhood. As a result, hip bars, small arts shops, galleries and boutique restaurants have been sprouting here and there, with varying success. In recent times, Sofia City Council has even commissioned graffiti artists to spruce up the area. 

Dondukov Boulevard is a division line in Sofia's Jewish past. A well-to-do Jewish neighbourhood existed north of it, while in 1942-1944 the infamous Commissariat for Jewish Affairs was located on its southern side