Until the mid-20th century, the city of Sofia, Bulgaria was home to a sizable Jewish community.
During Ottoman times, Sofia’s Jews lived in the very center of the town and are known to have
maintained at least four synagogues among other communal structures. With Bulgaria’s
independence from Ottoman sovereignty in 1878, Sofia became the capital of the young state.
Therefore, the Ottoman era urban fabric including the Jewish quarter were dismantled to make
way for a European-looking capital city. In consequence, the Jewish population was pushed
out of the representative part of Sofia and resettled to a new makeshift neighborhood, Yuch-
Bunar. Forming the heart of Jewish life, Yuch-Bunar became home to a dense network of
personal, institutional, and communal spaces that shaped the reality of Jewish life until the
1940s.
While it is possible to trace these two layers of Jewish life in the urban fabric of Sofia
historically, neither part of this Jewish topography has been preserved nor has it ever been the
focus of scholarly attention. Research has rather focused on the building of the Sofia Central
Synagogue, the proud monument to Jewish presence in the city. Standing in the very center of
the Bulgarian capital, it neighbors other places of worship for Orthodox Christians, Muslims,
and Catholics, thus carrying the symbolic importance of representing Jews’ belonging to
Bulgarian society as a whole. This prominence of the Central Synagogue, however, underplays
the absence of a tangible historical presence of the Jewish community within Sofia’s urban
context and masks the loss of the great majority of the city’s synagogues, schools, hospitals, or
other communal institutions, and ultimately Jewish communal and family life. The Bulgarian
narrative of having ‘saved’ the country’s Jews during World War II further negates the troubled
history of the Sofia municipality and its large Jewish population well into the mid-20th century.
DH methods and technologies provide suitable approaches for tackling the historical presence
of the Jewish community within the urban context of Sofia and can help identify, research, and
represent the city’s historical Jewish topography. This project, which is in its early stages,
envisions to establish a map-based digital framework that will help regain an understanding of
the pre-World War II Jewish topography of Sofia.
The necessary methodological steps for this endeavor are: 1. collect data comprised of relevant
resources (archival descriptions and/or digitized material) made available through key
repositories or through research in traditional publications; 2. identify and determine an
appropriate metadata structure and categorization that adheres to established standards while
also doing justice to the complexities and uncertainties present in the sources; 3. develop
suitable controlled vocabularies for greater discoverability, accessibility, and interoperability;
4. transfer data onto and customize an appropriate open source GIS-platform, which allows for
the integration of temporal or agent-driven visualizations, as well as georeferenced historical
maps; 5. integrate data sets and map into a collection driven web publishing platform with the
aim of sharing with related projects and platforms and enabling further scholarly research.

Towards a Jewish Topography of Sofia

The international conference #DHJewish - Jewish Studies in the Digital Age will bring together more than 60 scholars and heritage practitioners to discuss how the digital turn affects the field of Jewish Studies. The conference is organised by the [Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH).](https://www.c2dh.uni.lu/) 

[For more information, and a PDF download of the program, please see also here.](https://www.c2dh.uni.lu/events/dhjewish-jewish-studies-digital-age) 



In order to meet other participants and for informal chats in the breaks, join us in our [wonder.me room](https://www.wonder.me/r?id=73a12756-8d93-4871-9374-143253bfbf59).