The site on which Sofia developed enjoyed many natural advantages. It is located on a fertile plain, watered by streams from Mount Vitosha to its south and the Balkan range to its north. Additionally, numerous thermal springs attracted human settlement to what would become the city’s core since Antiquity. On the negative side, however, Sofia lies in active earthquake zone. Stefan Peychev sets out in this well-researched and highly readable account to highlight how the Ottomans sought to manage these natural phenomena to put their unique stamp on the city’s physical structure. His evidence and arguments confront two different schools of Balkan history. He takes to task Ottoman urban historians whom he feels have neglected the cities of the Balkans for not being Ottoman enough in contrast to their Middle Eastern contemporaries. Peychev also challenges the nationalist narratives of the Ottoman successor states. These characterize Balkan urban history as a continuation of their Byzantine legacy with the Ottoman “yoke” serving only as a disruptive force that allowed once flourishing cities to fall into “Oriental” languor.

Sofia’s history as Ottoman city began in the late fourteenth century when Ottoman forces conquered the Sofia plain, but its full-scale development did not begin until after the Crusade of Varna in 1443–44, during which much of the city burned. The city’s fortunes rose dramatically after the conquest of most of the Balkan Peninsula by Sultan Fatih Mehmed (d. 1481). Taking advantage of its location on the major trade routes across the Balkans, its fertile hinterlands and abundant water resources, the Ottomans transformed the site into the primary administrative and economic center for the region they called Rumeli (the land of the Byzantines). Sofia retained its primary position among the cities of the empire’s European provinces until the late eighteenth century, when political conditions in the Balkans severely damaged its continued prosperity. The administration of the region shifted south-west in 1808 to Monastir, present-day Bitola in the Republic of North Macedonia, and to other smaller provincial cities.

The strength of Peychev’s contribution lies in his detailed account of Sofia’s emergence as an archetypical Ottoman city in the middle period. One of the most ambitious urban engineering projects was the construction of a system of pipes to carry fresh water from the base of Mount Vitosha to the city in the sixteenth century. These conduits consisted of clay pipes covered in plaster and placed in a triangular bed of bricks that distributed water to a fast-growing city. In addition, individual Ottomans constructed at least eleven public baths, making use of the region’s thermal springs. The baths were at the core of Sofia’s Ottoman cityscape, surrounded by mosques, fountains, covered markets, and caravansarays to house travelling merchants. Sustaining the construction and maintenance of this urban infrastructure were pious foundations, the vakıf, that most quintessential of Ottoman institutions. Individual Ottomans, both locally and in the capital, financed the building and maintenance of these public buildings with the revenues produced from Sofia’s agricultural hinterlands and its markets. With his detailed description of the city’s infrastructure that the pious foundations maintained, Peychev sets to rest any doubt that in its prime Sofia was a model example of an Ottoman urban center.

The city seemed secure in the heart of the Ottoman-controlled Balkans, and so there was no construction of a system of urban defense. The lack of foresight opened Sofia to a series of raids by regional warlords in the eighteenth century. Adding to its steep economic and demographic decline, the city suffered two catastrophic earthquakes in the nineteenth century causing further devastation to the city’s infrastructure. When the Russian army “liberated” the city in 1878, Sofia was in a state disrepair. Symbolizing that decline, wooden pipes had replaced the technologically advanced water system of the sixteenth century by the early nineteenth century. The new Bulgarian regime erased most of the city’s Ottoman architectural past by the start of the twentieth century. In the name of progress, the state demolished old urban quarters and rebuilt the bathhouses to resemble those in central Europe. Only one of its many mosques survived the destruction to remain functioning as a religious space to the present and thus serve as a reminder of the five centuries of an Ottoman presence in the city. Peychev’s insightful study helps to restore that history.