Tsar Osvoboditel Place in Sofia

Tsar Osvoboditel Place in Sofia It was the Cold War era, and in Sofia we felt as if we had walked into a John Le Carre novel. Sofia is a typical European city, with familiar features such as trams and telephone kiosks, and yet the next person you might bump into on the street might be wearing a Russian military uniform.

But the demonised images of the Soviet Bloc commonplace in the West were quickly displaced when confronted with reality. The only person wearing a Red Army-style uniform in this photograph of Tsar Osvoboditel Place is directing the traffic.

View photograph taken at the same location in 2004