Aleksandrovska Street

Worth a detour

Burgas is laid out so that a first-time visitor cannot really get it wrong: come out of the railway or bus station, walk north up Aleksandrovska, turn right down Bogoridi, and you are in the Sea Garden. The locals call the stretch the Largo. It is where the street musicians, the ice cream, the corn sellers and the whole evening promenade are, and it costs nothing to join in.

Story

Background

Aleksandrovska has been the main street since Burgas was a small Black Sea port, and the covered market halls went up on it at the start of the twentieth century. It was pedestrianised and rebuilt in recent years, and the result is conventional — benches, planters, chain shops, cafés with awnings — but it works, because the city actually uses it.

Halfway along is the square everybody knows as Troykata, with the Soviet Army monument the city calls Alyosha standing over it. Concerts, markets and sporting events happen on the square through the summer. Two fountains along the street throw water at passers-by on hot afternoons, which children treat as the main attraction.

The short arm, Aleko Bogoridi, runs east from Aleksandrovska to the parapet above the beach, and is the better of the two: wider pavements, more tables, and the Archaeological Museum at number 21 in a nineteenth-century school building. Walking the whole L from the station to the pier takes about twenty minutes without stopping, and roughly two hours with. Almost everything a short visit to Burgas needs — the four museums, the art gallery, the opera, the theatre, the market — is within a few hundred metres of this line.