Literary Walks

In 2019, the official beginning of the “Literary Walks” – the name by which the format became known – was launched. By 2024, the Walks have a total of 6 seasons, which include 65 original walks, 32 guides, 4 restored or newly created memorial plaques, 2 exhibitions and an audience of over 6,000 people.

“Literary Walks map the city through the literary perspective chosen by the narrator. It is the precisely the authorial work that makes them so special. The city tours, led by writers and poets, theorists in different fields and literary historians, are not repeated and every year the Reading Sofia Foundation creates a programme of completely new routes that present authors and details of our literary history. The walks mark different points in the city to tell and show key spaces; known and unknown facts about significant Bulgarian writers or the different faces of Sofia described in the works of fiction.

There have been “Literary Walks” around different parts of the city, though there are many places left to be told. In 2023 and 2024, even walks in the mountains began to be organised.

“Literary Walks interweave the personal experience with the opportunity to share impressions, visual interpretations, and encounters with people with a similar passion for discovering stories. The Walks often include spontaneous stories from people who live in the area or under whose balconies the large group on a given walk has arrived. Some Literary Walks culminate in special events – exhibitions, readings, screenings, museum and gallery visits.
This inclusive role of the Walks is particularly important for the Reading Sofia Foundation. It is in this registry that the Foundation’s team tries to contribute at least a little to the documentation and archiving of parts of literary history. The creation or restoration of memorial plaques is linked to this same aim. So far, such plaques have been made for Nikolai Liliev, Konstantin Konstantinov and Georgi Rupchev, as well as the re-creation of the letter-bench Ш in memory of Marin Bodakov.

In recent years, a video archive has been created for some of the routes, preserving some important moments from the tours. It also exists on the Literary Walks website in the form of interactive maps.
Creating places of literary memory is among the causes of the Reading Sofia Foundation.