The Ear Neighbourhood

The name of the neighbourhood comes from the railways that mark it out and separate it from the rest of the quarter: “It is the Ear Neighbourhood because it was a bit in the shape of an ear, a quiet neighbourhood with small houses. There were cross ties made of concrete that separated the railways from the quarter and it was like a loop of sorts, the Ear Neighbourhood… Low sagging roofs, small houses: you had to bow into some of them, you could not enter unbent.”

“The first numeration in this quarter went by numbers and the Ear neighbourhood was the only one without numeration simply because it had no streets…” Nevertheless, it was no neglected part of town. It had the oldest school building and it had a water fountain that attracted people from as far off as Skopie Street. From Lazar Lazarov-Mastagarkov’s book, A Little Paris Legend, Plovdiv: Niton, 2016, 133, 175.

Recorded by Ekaterina Merlanova, 2019.