With the advent of drone photography it is easy to find aerial photographs of our favourite places in the city. But what about seeing what the centre of Sofia looked like in the 1920s, seen from above? The blog “Old Sofia” recently posted just such a photograph of the heart of the city – the space enclosed by the boulevards Tsar Osvoboditel, Evlogy Georgiev and Alexander I.

The photograph shows some elements of the central part of the city which have been preserved to this day – like the Sveti Sedmochislenitsi (seven saints) church where it still stands in Graf Ignatiev Street, but there is no garden in front of it as there is now, instead there is a…prison. It was for convict labourers and was pulled down in 1926.

An emblematic place where people in Sofia meet, the monument to Patriarch Euthymius at the intersection between Graf Ignatiev Street and the boulevards Vasil Levski and Patriarch Evtimyi, is difficult to recognize in the photo. What can be seen clearly is the house that once belonged to engineer Momchilov, now known as the notary’s office. Slaveykov square is also a far cry from what it looks like today, while the Sofia University Rectorate was, at the time, no more than a pit.