Bulgaria’s second city of Plovdiv is proud

of its reputation for doing things its own

way. As soon as you step off the bus
from the capital of Sofia, you can feel the
change in pace of life. People walk more
slowly. They seem to have more time on
their hands. The traffic is less hectic. As
you walk to the city centre through the
park, where old men gather to play chess
and people lounge and chat in the shade
of the old trees, Plovdiv immediately
feels different. There’s a kind of
insouciance to Plovdiv, something that is
both immediately apparent and hard to
put your finger on.

In the downtown Kapana district, people

spill out of bars and cafes into the
pedestrian streets. Under brightly painted
murals on the walls, groups of young
people hang out, flirt and check their
phones. In the cafe by the Dzhumaya
Mosque in the town centre, people sit for
hours and sip cups of Turkish coffee.
Even the cats in the cobbled streets of
 the old town seem more languid than
elsewhere. They stretch and purr, then
they roll over and go back to sleep. If you
ask the people here why the city is so
relaxed, they will tell you: Plovdiv, they
will say, is “aylyak”.

Plovdiv is Bulgaria’s second-largest city and one of the oldest cities in Europe (Credit:
Nataliya Nazarova/Alamy)

The word “aylyak” is not much used

outside of Plovdiv, even though it
appears in Bulgarian dictionaries from
the late 19th Century. It is a loan-word
from the Turkish “aylaklık”, which means
“idleness”, “dawdling” or “vagabondage”,
and it’s rooted in the Turkish “aylık”,
meaning “month”.

According to Yana Genova, director of

the Sofia Literature and Translation
House, the original meaning of aylyak
was somebody hired to work month-by-
month, who consequently knew what it
was to have time on their hands. The
verb that goes with aylyak is “bichim”, a
derivative of the verb “bicha”, which
means to strike, to whip, or to cut beams
and boards from a tree trunk. The idea of
striking, whipping or cutting is a reminder
that aylyak is something active. If you
want to practice aylyak, you have to slice
out chunks of time for yourself. You must
take the initiative to sever yourself from
your daily concerns.

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But whatever the origins of the word, in
contemporary Plovdiv, aylyak has taken
on its own meaning and significance,
something not to be translated so much
as lived. When you ask people to explain
what it means, more often than not they
will tell you a joke. The joke goes like
this. A citizen of Plovdiv is hanging out
with a Spanish visitor to the city. “What is
aylyak?” the Spaniard asks. The
Bulgarian thinks for a few moments, and
then says, “It’s like your mañana,
mañana, but without all the stress.”