Sofia, Bulgaria

Sofia stopped using the lev on January 1, 2026, and that single fact changes more about visiting this city than any list of cathedrals. Bulgaria became the eurozone’s 21st member that day, locking the old conversion at roughly 1.956 lev per euro, and while a one-month dual-circulation window let both currencies circulate, only euros are legal tender now. If you’re planning around old guides quoting lev prices, throw those numbers out.

Sofia is a city most travelers use as a two-day layover between Belgrade and Istanbul, and that’s underselling it. It’s compact enough to walk end to end, cheap by Western European standards even after the currency switch, and it has one of the more unusual religious skylines in the Balkans: a working mosque, a synagogue, an Eastern Orthodox cathedral, and a Roman-era rotunda all standing within a few blocks of each other in the city center.

Landmarks worth your time

Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, completed in 1912 to honor the Russian soldiers who died liberating Bulgaria from Ottoman rule, dominates the skyline with its gilded, dark-green domes, and the crypt beneath holds one of the largest collections of Orthodox icons in Europe. It’s free to enter the main hall; the crypt museum charges a small separate fee. St. Sofia Church next door, the building that actually gave the city its name, dates to the sixth century and sits atop a genuinely startling excavated necropolis you can walk through beneath street level, layers of Roman, early Christian, and medieval graves stacked on top of each other.

Skip the outdated advice about Tzaritsa Elena’s Museum-Estate, which isn’t a Sofia city-center attraction at all; that museum sits in Ruse, several hours away, and conflating the two wastes a planning afternoon. What’s actually worth the trip out of the center is Boyana Church, a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the lower slopes of Vitosha dating to the tenth century, holding frescoes from 1259 that are considered a pivotal moment in the shift from rigid Byzantine style toward something more naturalistic and expressive. It’s a fifteen-minute taxi from downtown and consistently overlooked by people who only budget one day in the city.

Vitosha Mountain, correctly

Vitosha rises to about 2,290 meters right at Sofia’s southern edge, the oldest protected nature area in the Balkans, and it’s genuinely rare to have serious hiking and, in winter, skiing this close to a European capital. Here’s a correction worth making: the old main cable car up the mountain has been out of service since 2017, tangled in reconstruction delays that show no firm resolution. What actually runs today are the Simeonovo and Dragalevtsi gondola lifts, smaller lifts on the mountain’s lower slopes that operate year-round, though Simeonovo especially leans toward weekends, holidays, and ski season rather than a reliable daily schedule. Take the M2 metro to the Vitosha terminus, then bus 66 toward Aleko Hut if you’re hiking rather than relying on a defunct gondola that older blog posts still describe as functioning.

Where to eat

The Central Market Hall (Halite), a restored Vienna Secession-style building from 1911, is a better bet for an honest Shopska salad and banitsa than most of the sit-down restaurants aimed squarely at tourists along the main pedestrian strip. For a full meal, look a couple of streets off Vitosha Boulevard rather than on it; the boulevard’s frontage restaurants charge international-city prices for food that’s more competently made two blocks over. Banitsa specifically is worth eating for breakfast the way locals do, from a small bakery window, not a hotel buffet.

Getting around

Sofia’s metro has been expanding steadily; a new station separating the M2 and M4 lines is due in 2026, and an M3 extension into the Levski area was targeted for completion around mid-2026, so check current maps rather than relying on an older diagram, since station counts have shifted meaningfully in the past two years. The metro runs roughly 5am to midnight and is the fastest way to cross the city, especially to reach Vitosha or the airport, which sits about 10km from downtown and connects by metro directly, not just taxi or shuttle as older guides suggest.

Money and prices

Everything is now priced in euros. Bulgarian law required dual display of both lev and euro prices through August 2026 to ease the transition, so you’ll still see both figures on receipts and menus for a while, but only euros will be accepted at the register. Card payments are widely accepted in the city center; smaller vendors and market stalls still lean cash-preferred.

Language, corrected

One persistent error in recycled travel content: “hello” in Bulgarian is not “Zdrave” and “thank you” is not “Khvala,” those are Serbian and Croatian, not Bulgarian. In Bulgarian, hello is “zdravey” (здравей) and thank you is “blagodarya” (благодаря). It’s a small mix-up but the kind that makes locals wince, Bulgarian and Serbian are related but distinct South Slavic languages, and getting the greeting wrong is an easy first impression to avoid.

A local favorite and an honest gotcha

Skip the overpriced rooftop bars near Nevsky Cathedral chasing a view; a better evening is a beer at one of the unmarked garden bars tucked into the residential streets north of Vitosha Boulevard, where prices are lower and the crowd is actually Bulgarian. As for the gotcha: taxis waiting directly outside the airport terminal or right at Nevsky Cathedral are disproportionately the ones running inflated meters or flat “tourist” rates. Walk a block, order through an app, or ask your hotel to call a specific company instead of hailing whatever’s parked closest to a landmark.

Sofia rewards slowing down more than it rewards checklist tourism. Two unhurried days beat four rushed ones, and the euro switch, whatever inconvenience it causes with old price references, has if anything made the city easier for visitors carrying a currency they already understand.