JEWISH RUSE

Exquisite arches, decorative columns and balconies, fine stucco ornaments depicting prosperity and fertility: Ruse's best known feature is its splendid Secession architecture. Some of Ruse's old houses have been restored, others have been ignored and neglected, but the whole city centre as it stands now is a major tourist attraction and leaves little room for doubt why Bulgaria's largest town on the River Danube used to be referred to as "Little Vienna." 

Take in the small plaques listing these buildings as monuments of culture and you will see some non-Bulgarian names. The truth is that many of the townhouses were commissioned and owned by Jews. Indeed, Ruse used to be home to what was perhaps Bulgaria's most prosperous and Europeanised Jewish community. 

The earliest trace of a Jewish population in what was then Rustchuk dates back to the 1780s. At that time two groups of Jews arrived. They had come from different places and were fleeing different kinds of trouble. 

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One came from Adrianople. Despite its relative proximity to the High Porte, the town had been left to the mercy of brigands and highwaymen. Constantly the victims of crime, the Jews of Adrianople decided to leave. Some went southwards, to the capital Stamboul, but others headed north and eventually reached the shores of the Danube. 

The other came from the west: from Belgrade and Nis. They fled the uncertainties of yet another war between the sultan and the Austrian Empire. 

The newly-arrived Jews were quick to partake of the commercial opportunities Ruse offered, and their communities quickly grew bigger and richer. But ill fate soon befell them: the 1806 war between the Russian and the O toman empires forced them to flee again. After a prolonged siege, the Russians captured Ruse in 1810. Jewish shops were plundered, the synagogue was turned into a stables and was torched soon thereafter. 

Jews would return to Rustchuk in 1812, after the end of the war. In the ensuing years the wealth of the whole Danubian Plain continued to flow through the city, whose importance for the Ottoman Empire grew exponentially, especially as it had already lost a number of markets in the Balkans as a result of the independence of Serbia and Greece. Ruse's heyday came after the 1853-1856 Crimean War, when trade and cultural contacts along the Danube intensified, and the city emerged as a lower-Danube rival to all the other large cities upriver. 

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A Jew is somewhat stereotypically depicted as a money changer in a modern mural at a posh restaurant in Levent Tabia fort, celebrating Ruse's post-1878 multiculturalism. In the first decades after Bulgaria regained its independence, the Jews of Ruse were involved in a wide area of activities from industry to culture