A country we are taught to fear
There are countries we are taught to fear long before we know anything real about them.
Not through experience, but through tone. Through suggestion. Through the small, repeated signals of what is considered civilised, modern and safe — and what is not. For many Swedes, Bulgaria belongs to the latter category. It sits somewhere in the imagination between post-communist residue, corruption, rough edges and unknown dangers. A place one might visit, perhaps, but not necessarily trust. Certainly not a place one instinctively associates with safety.
And yet that is precisely what I have come to feel here.
Safety as a bodily feeling
Not as ideology. Not as a contrarian gesture. Not even as a conclusion drawn from statistics, though those have their place. I mean something simpler, more intimate and, in many ways, more honest: the feeling in the body.
The sense one has walking through a city at 10pm, moving through a shopping centre, crossing a square, watching other people move around you. The quiet question that sits beneath all public life is always the same: am I at ease here?
In Bulgaria, surprisingly often, I am.
More than I was in Sweden.
The Swedish self-image
It is an awkward thing to admit, because it cuts against the Swedish self-image. Sweden has spent decades telling itself a story of order, rationality and social trust. It is the country of systems, procedures, polished public space and institutional competence. It is, or was, supposed to be the place where safety could be assumed.
Bulgaria, by contrast, often appears from the outside as less finished, less tidy, less stable. A place of improvisation rather than certainty. A place where the edges show.
But safety is not always where appearances suggest it should be.
The difference between order and security
The more time I spend in Bulgaria, the more convinced I become that one of the great mistakes made by comfortable societies is to confuse administrative order with lived security.
The two are not the same.
A place can look organised and still feel tense. It can be heavily managed and still leave ordinary people with the sense that something is off, that the atmosphere has shifted, that the room belongs less to everyday life than to the maintenance of control.
A shopping centre in Sweden may be cleaner, brighter and better regulated than one in Bulgaria, but that does not necessarily mean it feels calmer. Sometimes it feels quite the opposite.
The guarded shopping centre
In Sweden, especially in larger commercial spaces, there is often an unmistakable charge in the air: visible security, clustered guards, alertness built into the architecture of the place.
You see it in the way entrances are watched, in the posture of staff, in the unspoken understanding that these are not simply sites of commerce but zones of supervision. The shopping centre is no longer only for shopping. It is also a transit point, a shelter, a stage for friction, a place where the public realm has thinned enough that order must be constantly, visibly upheld.
And the more visible that effort becomes, the more a visitor senses the fragility beneath it.
When safety becomes theatre
There is something unsettling about walking through a place where the instruments of security have become part of the scenery.
One begins to understand that when safety must be displayed so insistently, it is often because it can no longer be taken for granted. Guards stop feeling like a precaution and start feeling like evidence. Their presence tells a story before anything has even happened.
This is not merely about crime. It is about atmosphere. About what the body reads before the mind has fully processed it.
Bulgaria’s rougher calm
In Bulgaria, I have often noticed the absence of that theatrical layer. Not the absence of problems, certainly, and not the absence of roughness. Bulgaria can be untidy, uneven, improvised. But many everyday spaces still feel inhabited in a different way — by families, older people, couples, ordinary adults who behave as if public space belongs to them.
That matters more than policy language tends to admit.
Because safety is not only produced by law, policing or infrastructure. It is also produced socially, through signals, boundaries and a thousand tiny acts of mutual correction that tell people how far they can go.
The adult who still says something
This, perhaps, is where the difference becomes most revealing.
In Bulgaria, adults still say something.
A child or teenager behaving badly in a public place may well be reprimanded by a stranger. Not gently, not always elegantly, but clearly. Someone intervenes. Someone marks a line. Someone acts as if the public realm is a shared moral space and not an empty corridor through which everyone is expected to drift in silence.
That alone changes the temperature of a society.
Sweden’s culture of stepping back
To Swedish ears, this can sound old-fashioned, even intrusive. Sweden has moved in the opposite direction for many years. There, adults increasingly hesitate. They avert their gaze. They do not want conflict. They do not want to be accused of overstepping. They do not want the parents, the scene, the discomfort.
Better, often, to look away.
This withdrawal is usually framed as tolerance, restraint or respect for personal boundaries. Sometimes it is all three. But it has also created a more brittle public culture, one in which too much is allowed to pass unchallenged in the moment, only to be handed later to institutions.
From culture to institution
What the ordinary adult no longer dares to interrupt, the system must eventually manage.
That is an expensive substitution, and not merely in money. When adults stop correcting the small things, the burden shifts to guards, police, schools and social services to deal with the larger consequences. Everyday order is no longer carried by culture but outsourced to professional response.
The trouble is that institutions always arrive later than the stranger standing two metres away who could have said, calmly and immediately: enough.
Not nostalgia, but presence
This is not an argument for nostalgia or for harshness dressed up as virtue. Bulgaria is not some moral idyll. Strangers can be rude; reprimands can be unfair; authority can shade into aggression.
But the underlying signal remains significant: adults are still present in public life as adults. They have not entirely ceded the ground.
And that changes the atmosphere more than many reformers seem willing to admit.
The world still responds
It means that children learn something simple and durable: the world responds.
There are limits beyond the home and beyond school. Public space is not neutral territory but shared territory. Teenagers testing boundaries encounter resistance before behaviour hardens into habit. Ordinary people do not feel wholly abandoned to the choice between private discomfort and official enforcement.
That may sound like a small thing. In reality, it is civilisational.
The vacuum in public life
In Sweden, by contrast, there is a growing sense that the adult world has retreated. Not disappeared entirely, of course, but stepped back just enough to create a vacuum.
Into that vacuum comes noise, swagger, performative disruption and the low-grade intimidation that makes public life feel thinner, harder, more conditional. The immediate victims are not always those on the nightly news. More often they are families who leave early, older people who change their routes, ordinary citizens who stop using certain places at certain times.
Public space becomes less common, less shared, less relaxed.
The paradox of the polished country
And this is where the paradox begins to bite.
Sweden still often looks safer. Bulgaria still often looks rougher. But a polished surface tells you very little about whether the social fabric of a place still holds. Safety, in lived terms, is rarely a matter of how modern a country appears.
It lies in whether people can move through ordinary life without their nervous systems slipping into alert. Whether the evening walk feels like part of life or like a calculated decision. Whether shopping centres are merely shopping centres, or fortified islands of managed calm.
A more socially intact everyday life
For all its imperfections, Bulgaria can still feel more socially intact in these small ways.
Not because the state is stronger, but because everyday society has not fully withdrawn. The stranger’s glance still carries weight. The adult voice still exists. The room is still, to some extent, collectively held.
That is not a minor cultural difference. It is the architecture of everyday trust.
When tolerance becomes surrender
Sweden, for all its admirable instincts toward fairness and personal liberty, may have pushed one particular ideal too far: the idea that not interfering is itself a public good.
Freedom came to mean, in practice, that no one should tell anyone else what to do. Yet in any shared space, that principle quickly runs into a problem. The less willing ordinary adults are to draw lines, the more freedom accrues not to everyone, but to the most disruptive.
What begins as tolerance ends as surrender.
People or systems
That, perhaps, is the real contrast I feel between these two countries.
Not that one is civilised and the other not. Not that one has crime and the other does not. But that one still seems, in some everyday settings, to believe that society is something carried by people as well as by systems — while the other has come to rely too heavily on systems after people stopped carrying so much of it themselves.
This matters because systems, however necessary, cannot replace culture.
What systems cannot do
Institutions can contain damage, respond to incidents, regulate behaviour after the fact. But they cannot generate the quiet ease that comes from being among others who still act as if the public world belongs to them and is therefore worth defending in small, ordinary ways.
No camera, no guard patrol, no strategy document can create that feeling on its own.
It has to live in the people.
The troubling insight
So when I say that Bulgaria feels safer to me at 10pm than Sweden, I do not mean that Bulgaria is a safer country in every measurable sense.
I mean something more specific, and perhaps more troubling for Sweden: that the texture of everyday life can feel more secure in a place with fewer illusions about itself than in one still living off an old reputation.
A country may be poorer and yet richer in social presence. It may be rougher and yet calmer. It may be less polished and more human.
The feeling that adults are still awake
Another country may have all the right language, all the right structures, all the right intentions — while losing the one thing that makes public life bearable: the feeling that adults are still awake.
That is what I have found in Bulgaria, unexpectedly.
Not perfection. Not order in the Scandinavian sense. But presence.
Where safety begins
And presence, in the end, may be where safety begins.
Not in the official story a nation tells about itself. Not in the shine of its surfaces. Not in how many guards stand at the entrance to a shopping centre. But in the deeper question of whether public life is still being carried by the people inside it.
That is the real test.
And sometimes the country that looks rougher from the outside turns out to feel calmer from within.
By Chris...
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