Vegetable Market in Sofia (The Pottery Market)

He painted this market in 1917, the third year Bulgaria spent in the First World War. The country had been fighting since 1915 alongside Germany and Austria-Hungary, the men were at the front, and in the towns people were learning what shortage felt like. A market square is where that pressed on ordinary life most directly, in the price of food and the gaps on the stalls. Mitov had spent his whole career among scenes like this one, the sellers, the crowd in their town and village clothes, the wares spread on the ground. Look for the rows of cheap earthenware standing among the vegetables. Those pots gave the place its second name, the pottery market.