Русе

Ruse is Bulgaria's window on Europe, and it was built to look the part. When the Danube steamers and the country's first railway (Ruse--Varna, 1866) made the city the empire's, then the kingdom's, front door, its merchants answered with Vienna on the Danube: boulevards of Secession and neo-Baroque façades, the Dohodno Zdanie's theatre crowned with statuary, cafés where seven consulates' worth of newspapers rustled. Little Vienna, Bulgarians still call it, and the city collected an entire catalogue of national firsts — from film screening to chamber orchestra — with the composure of a place that considered novelty its birthright.

Ruse's most famous son heard the city's Babel of languages from the cradle: Elias Canetti, born here in 1905, opened his memoirs with Ruschuk's Sephardic, Bulgarian, German and Armenian voices — the future Nobel laureate's first education. The city returns the compliment with a literary society and festival in his name.

Music is Ruse's second nature. The State Opera Ruse and the Ruse Philharmonic anchor a season that peaks each spring in the March Music Days, one of Bulgaria's oldest and most respected international festivals, when the Danube city briefly becomes the country's musical capital. Choirs of national rank — the Vassil Arnaudov chamber choir above all — complete a tradition in which no Bulgarian city is more naturally at home in a concert hall.