Fernando Gimeno

On the grades, 20,000 football fans played their own game while the blue Levski hooligan sector was on fire. Many scarves were burning and the referee was only about to start the match. Blue, white and yellow smoke rose. The field was impossible to see from the stands. The Eternal Derby of Bulgaria, CSKA versus Levski, was about to begin.

The smoked audience screamed and covered their eyes and mouths with black and blues T-shirts, revealing neo-Nazis and skinhead power tattoos. It was Sunday, April 30, and the two biggest football teams of Bulgaria were on the field, almost ready to start, waiting for two impressive troops of supporters to occupy the Sofia National Stadium. A cloud of recycled confetti and balloons with the colors of the teams flew at one time. The match must have started because one muscled man, shaved head, turned his face red to sing on a microphone, for the crowd to follow, but the crowd wasn’t ready yet. Ten thousand Levski fans could barely breathe through the blue smoke.

Blagoevgrad is not a small town in southwest Bulgaria. It’s Capital of its province, with 70,000 inhabitants (at least 100 of them in Sector B, the most extreme fans of PFC Levski Sofia football club).

Everyday, they walk down those valley city streets and sleep inside any of those Soviet-era apartment buildings uptown. But their second home is in Sofia. There, they own the south stand in the Georgi Asparuhov Stadium, home of the blue hooligans, the Sector B, the most violent and respected supporters in the club.

Two hours by bus separates their workplaces, family and responsibilities from their passion. “A guy can change anything,” an Argentinian movie says, “his face, his home, his family, his girlfriend, his religion, his God. But there’s one thing he can’t change. He can’t change his passion.”

The powder smell in the stadium is bitter and it would fill the air for 90 minutes of fanatic football demonstration. “My life without Levski is lost, my life without Levski is a failure,” the Hymn of the Blue Fans, not the referee’s whistle, had started the game. In the north side of the stadium, Sector G, something similar was happening on CSKA’s red colors. It didn’t matter until now that the smoke was blown by the wind, and the fans from both sides put their eyes to each other for the first time, and the time to sing arrives. And just then, the match had started.

The weather was perfect as it was for the whole week. No clouds, only a merciless sun made car’s windshields shine and Levski fans sweat. There were 50 guys standing, waiting in a dead end street. It was Sunday afternoon in Blagoevgrad and some of them wore black T-shirts with hooligan logos and some others different blue gear. Most of them were young, some under 18 years old, and two fathers with their boys. The old guys were drinking beer while they were talking about the Real Madrid versus Seville match, which was being played at that time. A close and dirty terrace showed the Spanish competition on a brand new flat-screen TV. Four boxes of special blue Christmas edition of Shumensko beer appeared from the trunk of one car and four big guys, shaved heads with black sunglasses, unfolded a huge banner.

The bus that would take them to Sofia was coming, but first, group picture. Fifty guys from the Blagoevgrad Sector B crew stood behind an ultra Levski image. Most of them were singing, jumping, and making the Nazi salute. The two fathers carried their two sons on their shoulders to appear on the photograph. The football skills of Mussolini were mentioned in one of the songs. Then, nine police officers appeared at the scene.

“Last time, it didn’t happen like this,” Dimitar Todorov said. He is 20 years old. Even though he was proudly born in Beograd, Serbia, he had organized this trip to Sofia for his fellows. “Fuck the police,” he added in Serbian, while the officers were checking water bottles looking for those refilled with vodka. Even beer was confiscated. The sun was still high and heating.

Todorov’s hands are big and tough, a stark contrast to his short body. Sporting a hooligan black T-shirt, his eyes took quick looks at the officers. Last time, the crew got a car following the bus all the way to Sofia. That car was full of booze, Todorov said. But this time, the solution to the hooligan thirstiness was even more obvious. About 30 minutes after leaving the town, the vehicle stopped for supplies. The Blagoevgrad Sector B bought some sandwiches, a couple bottles of whiskey, vodka, and at least two liters of beer per guy. The two policemen sitting at the front didn’t notice it, or they didn’t want to.

“Wait to see the show that we have been preparing,” Todorov said, almost smiling. The previous day, two Levski fans were arrested carrying 46 smoke grenades, according to Reuters.

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Levski or just Levski Sofia is one of the five professional football clubs based in the capital of Bulgaria. It was founded on May 24, 1914, by a group of young students who named the club after Vasil Levski, a Bulgarian revolutionary renowned as the national hero. To date, the club’s biggest rivals are CSKA Sofia, and matches between the two capital sides are referred to as The Eternal Derby. It is not strange to read about hooligan violence and vandalism after the most expected match of the league. Last derby ended with23 people arrested and three police officers seriously injured while taking “extreme measures during half-time” to remove by force the CSKA fans from the stadium, according to Novinite, the Bulgarian news agency.

But the story of these two teams, and their mutual hatred, doesn’t come only from football battlefields. CSKA’s abbreviation stands for Central Sports Club of the Army, and the Soviet star is in the logo. If we take in consideration the Levski ultras webpage, CSKA were “created with a communist party decree,” and they are “the ones supported by the communist regime for 45 years, the ones who made a satellite system of military teams in 50s-80s, and the ones who stole many good footballers threatening them to do military service.”

To Levksi fans, CSKA supporters are the Turks, the gypsies, and they deserve all contempt. The Hymn of the Blue Fans ends saying, “Turkey is your motherland, your stadium is a pigsty, your children are Turks too, CSKA is dead ale ale…”

The Sofia National Stadium has two main parking lots, two main ticket cabins and two main entrances, in order to keep the two hordes of fans separated. The south plain of the arena was blue and black on Sunday. The blue color standing one thing: if you were CSKA’s fan, you were at the wrong place. The black came from the numerous police forces. The traditional blue march, Levski fans walking down together to the entrance, started one hour and a half before the game. A blue avalanche went down the Boulevard Dragan Tsankov to the stadium plains. They could be heard from far away. In front, masked and hooded, the most violent of the most violent were singing fascist songs and holding flags with German eagles.

“Those ones have their own place in the stadium,” Dimitar Todorov remarked. “They don’t miss a match; and no, they don’t come to watch a football show.”

One of those men showed his tattooed chest proudly. On his right arm, a peace dove was being stabbed by a German bayonet. On the upper chest, a huge swastika shared the skin space with three faces of uniformed Nazi soldiers and “white power,” on the top. The left arm was reserved to a portrait of a military commander, again uniformed in vivid brown and red. 

Georgi Donchev, 29, works as a folk musician in one of the best-known folk taverns in Blagoevgrad. A permanent half smile crosses his tanned face. Short and fat, he stands out in the muscled and tattooed crowd. His parents live in Barcelona, that’s why he can speak some Spanish, but his wife and his football team are in Bulgaria. “Levski is now third on the chart, nothing won’t change that CSKA is going to win the league,” he said waiting at the line to the get into the stadium. ”But we are going to smash those pigs anyways!”

The tickets for the most expected match in the Bulgarian league cost two Euros and a half. After purchasing them, the Blagoevgrad crew, and Donchev with them, got ready to watch the blue march. There were many liquor stores around, he said, but they didn’t sell alcohol on match days, police orders. So, the kebab places and their two liters and a half bottles of beer are the next logical stop. They drank and yelled to the police cars with already two or three arrested at the back. “Drink fast!” Donchev repeated, “because the game is about to start!”

The Sector B was the first to enter the stadium and the last one to leave it. At the entrance, volunteers gave away balloons and song sheets with instructions to tie the balloons in a correct way (blue, blue and white in the middle). “The song is the ancient Bulgarian Anthem, to sing it all together,” Donchev explained. Through the grade, some guys carried huge boxes full of paper slips, recycled confetti made out of office documents and accounting books. The big flags were already there, waiting for the fans to wave them. One had the American Confederate flag inside a blue frame. Another one represented the red star, symbol of CSKA, as a vagina to be penetrated by a blue penis.

The first song started: “Bulgaria gives birth to Levski fans, millions, countless Levski fans, for the blue national flag, we’ll sacrifice our lives, because Levski this is Bulgaria.” And 10,000 people jumped at the south stand, screamed, breathed the blue and yellow and white smoke, showed their backs to the enemy stand, burned some scarves, and sang together.

At the beginning of the second half, Levski scored one goal, the first and last one of the evening. At that moment, the league had finished. Levski didn’t win the war, but the fans were happy to have won this important battle. It wasn’t a violent night, only 15 arrested and nobody seriously injured.

Meanwhile, the Blagoevgrad part of the Sector B were riding back home. The two police officers, too. Getting out from the city, many cars honked horns to show their respect. Inside, everybody was happy and drinking again. The children, long after their bedtime, were trying to sleep, but the guys suddenly felt like singing.

“With a peaked cap, a baton and a pistol, he gives a head to the blues, he’s A.C.A.B (Policeman), policeman-fucking gay, give him, give him, and give him to us!” The officers had just decided not stop at the McDonalds on the outskirts of Sofia, Donchev explained. Everybody went crazy singing anti-police songs. One of the oldest guys was especially angry. Red faced, he was screaming through an old Nokia and singing at the same time. Song after song, the policemen took every insult quietly, while few guys were trying to calm things down.

Then, the bus passed by the restaurant and the Blagoevgrad Sector B crew exploded. There, parked outside of the yellow and red painted building, they saw a bus. It was a fan bus of the CSKA Hooligans. The enemy was eating burgers. The old guy hung up the phone. The crew kept screaming. He knew that those CSKA fans were eating at the McDonalds restaurant, Donchev said. A friend had just called him, believing that the Blagoevgrad guys should know about something like that, something that important, to make a quick stop perhaps.

Instead, it was all the way back to Blagoevgrad where, upon arrival, the crew went all together to have pizza.

Edited by Mark Wollemann

“The team of the Erasmus people,” David Cartagena said with a smile. The captain of the Macarios football team was deligthed. The place those students had been calling home for one year was prepared to remember them, and not only for the Sangria. They became the two times winners of the American University in Bulgaria Cup.

The final match started and ended in powder, literally ;)

      “When, in the Spring of 1937, I ransacked the files of Columbia, Victor and Decca record companies for anything that had a folk flavor, I found not only the early Blue Grass, not only urban blues tradition, I found scores of songs of protest and social comment by urban and country folk singers. Some of these recorded topical songs praised the new deal, some damned it; some recited the woes of the poor, some bitterly protested, - but, considered as a whole, they proved again that American topical folk song tradition was alive and productive”

Alan Lomax, Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-hit People, p.366, 1967

(picture at Vidin, Bulgaria, of a nice park at the Danube shore)

Four years ago this month, on a cold, gray night, a 16-year-old Bulgarian boy fell on his knees to accept Jesus in his heart. He had contacted the U.S. Marines Corps for an application, but has since given up every military dream. Now he faces a new challenge: college.

“I didn’t really want to kill anybody but I kind of wanted to,” said Ilia Panayotov, now 19 and a freshman at the American University in Bulgaria. 

Admirably willing to share his experience, and totally confident, Panayotov exposed an obsession with violence in his early youth. He had read every military and weapons article that he could find. Memorizing caliber sizes became a habit. Then, a new idea started to control him. Supported by his best friend, they decided they should go to the United States and get into the Marine Corps.

“OK, I know it’s bad, I don’t want to kill anybody,” Panayotov said. “But if I go to the Marine Corps … I want to go to the field. If I stay there for like a year and I come back and I haven’t killed anybody… means that I haven’t really done much!” 

It was religion that kept Panayotov away from a military career, he said. He was raised in a well-educated and wealthy religious family (although his parents didn’t became Christians until the end of the socialist period). But it was an online pamphlet that drove him to a new direction. A pastor writing “how to be saved” was the spark, Panayotov said, but it wasn’t a change of a night but a step by step process.

However, he said, coming to the university was “a slap in the face.” Freshman life features plenty of craziness, but Panayotov still practices his beliefs at a tiny Baptist church downtown.

“A lot of people in our age have traveled around the world, they’ve been in plenty relationships but they are always looking for something big,” Panayotov said. “The biggest thing you can get is a relationship with God.”

In the Church he gathers, he listens to the sermons and sings some songs, mostly gospel melodies. But for Panayotov, a crucial moment begins when the ceremony ends. Then the congregation talks, checks if everybody is doing well, and people share their concerns. One friend from the community offered to be a volunteer coordinator for a welfare project to help Roma children. And he accepted. The project actually has more than 40 members, most of them college students.

Far from home, and starting a new life for a second time, the guy who described    himself as “young, shy and asocial” now enjoys the place he has found and its people.

“My life has changed, he said. “I never thought I’d be working for a project for example. But that’s secondary. The friendships I found here, that’s what I care most (about).” 

Edited by Mark Wollemann

One could live in a place for a long time and don’t know anything about it: who are those people around you? Blagoevgrad  is small, sovietic and almost totally Bulgarian speaking, so, why should one leave the walls of an american campus? 

These guys are all random people.

It’s a windy snowed evening in Blageovgrad. The only salesperson at Forte Music, a moderate modern 500-square-foot music store uptown, is playing the guitar and drinking cold Coca-Cola from a plastic glass. The last client of the day has left, only then does Georgi Arzumanijan, 45, consent to discuss his life drumming in the former Soviet Union.

“I play drums, that’s what I do the best,” Arzumanijan said, calmly strumming his guitar. His older brother, a Soviet Army soldier assigned to the Bulgarian border, sparked his curiosity with a few Turkish cassettes and a Walkman when Georgi was 15 years old. “I remember those songs by heart,” he said with a smile. “I still do. I played them 24-7, all day with the earphones!” Arzumanijan wanted to make clear how it was very hard to find information or cultural stuff about everything because, “everything was just illegal.” In one calculated movement, the guitar is definitely hanged onto a hook on the wall and Arzumanijan continues with his weak tone. “They could, they could put you in some interesting places,” he said.

As the soft glow of twilight gave way to the dark of night, streetlights shined through the store windows, illuminating the part of the back office not touched by the white light of the tiny desk lamp. Arzumanijan sat down again, close to the guitar section in the bottom right side of the store. He said something about nobody ever feels really happy, especially musicians. Asked why he started playing, “Do you have any easier questions?” he answered, picking up one of the instruments from its hook.

Edited by Mark Wollemann

New song! Cheers to all the musicians, especially the unsuccessful ones!

(picture at lake Ohrid, Macedonia)

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This is how was the city where I come from, after leaving it for Christmas… Do like it? 

Not a nice night stucked in my room. Thats probably why “Madrid” sounds darker that I had in mind. 

(picture at Madrid, España)

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That’s Almería!

I want to place together the best song I have ever recorded, with a pretty thing I can’t get out from my head tonight.

The song it is just about birds coming out from unexpected places.

La Alcazaba de Almería (muslim old castle) in the south of Spain, and hide more than one thousend and one stories, but all about love and the desert. 

Pajaros [birds] by Fernando Gimeno Hermoso

I broke a string yesterday trying to get some sleep. So much violence in mind remembering the amazing film “Facing Ali”. In my head, Sonny Liston was going to sleep in the first round, that second time he lost a fight against Muhammad Ali. 

I just needed a few minutes more, I went KO right after this tune came out from the five strings.

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