By Jane Burner
Jane Burner lived in Bulgaria between 1970-1972 and 1984-1987, during the two postings of her husband Alan Burner to Sofia as 3rd Secretary and Deputy Head of Mission respectively.
Previously, Jane told us about the difficulty and satisfaction of finding and buying food in Bulgaria in the 70s. This time, she shares a fond memory of the first visit of the Royal Ballet to Bulgaria in 1966, which she very much enjoyed, but which also turned out to be a challenging experience after “the curtain fell”.
It must have been in the early part of the 1980’s when we were on our second posting to Bulgaria. The first was in 1970 when I had no idea what I was in for, having married a fledgling diplomat, and had to ask my father what the Foreign Office was actually for and what diplomats actually do. It makes perfect sense now but very little then.
However, there we were, living in a house on Oborishte, number 69 to be exact. A house we knew well from our first posting – it was the Military Attache‘s home at the time.
At our second posting, we learnt that the touring wing of the Royal Ballet was to put on a performance in Sofia. Our excitement knew no bounds. Things like this never happened and we’d only had the Bulgarian State Ballet to entertain us – when I remember Giselle being so huge that the stage shook.
We received an invitation (summons) to have dinner at the Residence after the performance.
The performance was magic and we floated along to the Residence on a tide of Tchaikovsky and I tried to look floaty like the ballerinas. There was an enormous crowd. Not only the dancers but all their back-up, ballet masters, wardrobe mistresses, entire section just for ballet shoes, physiotherapists, the entire works. The Residence was packed and the performers did little dancing warm-down exercises. It was all very fascinating.
However, things did not develop well. Nobody had warned our Ambassador’s wife about the appetites of dancers and their entourage after a performance. Apparently (and we know this now…) they eat very little before the performance, but afterwards they fall on food and pack it away in awesome quantities.
There was a very nice buffet laid out in the dining room, perfectly adequate for normal people but it was fallen upon as if by locusts, and devoured in a matter of minutes. Our poor Ambassador’s wife phoned down to her chef and instructed him to cook everything he could, open every tin and boil every last potato, just get it up there as fast as he could. She even resorted to getting us to dash home, gather up our precious baked beans (which I had been saving for a special occasion, like the celebration when visitors left) and bring them to stem the ravenous hordes. This we did and finally the appetites seemed to be satisfied. It is truly amazing how much pure stodgy can be consumed by those tiny bodies.
We were exhausted and ironically very hungry. There was no buffet left for us. We ended this hectic but (in retrospect) highly amusing evening dining off a boiled egg in our kitchen back in number 69.
*The photo belongs to and was kindly provided to us by Christian Day, daugther of Sir William Harpham, the first British Ambassador to Bulgaria (1964-1966).