The Women’s Market – an introduction

The Women’s Market is a lively food and wares street market and one of the landmarks of Sofia of a century-long existence. It became an iconic place for the 1990s post-socialist city. At that time it was attracting a daily pedestrian flow equivalent to 1/5th of the metropolitan population, as well as generating its very own share of urban folklore. Today these developments have subsided but the Women’s Market is the last area in the central city that still caters to the needs of the poorest groups of Bulgarian society. They bring here some 70 thousand visitors per day. However, since 2006 the Women’s Market has been gradually reframed as a problem for the city.