This chapter explores the making of Sofia as an Ottoman city. The central thread in the narrative is the functioning of the system of pious foundations, which played the most decisive role in the expansion and transformation of the built fabric and the provisioning of public services. The main theme is the city’s relationship with the natural environment and the construction, functioning, and maintenance of its water supply system. The chapter specifically aims at bringing attention to the fact that the upsurge of building activity and the Ottomanization of the built environment that were experienced since the mid-fifteenth century, and especially in the sixteenth century, were accompanied by the establishment of a water infrastructure. Yahya Pasha’s water supply system was established at the turn of the sixteenth century, the beginning of a period that witnessed the biggest advances of the Ottomans both in the construction of water facilities and in the institutionalization of water management. Chronologically, the narrative encompasses the entire early modern period in Sofia’s history, shedding light on Ottoman water supply both in terms of its technical aspects and in terms of the role that it played in the construction of the local eco-community.

The Epilogue picks up the story that this book begins with, the story of the demolition of the last symbol of Ottoman Sofia’s water culture, the city’s main thermal bath, elaborating on the construction of the modern Bath Square as a showcase of the young Bulgarian nation’s resolve to join the modern world. I argue that the making and imposition of national space in the post-Ottoman period led to the creation of an entirely new place in Sofia’s historic center by the beginning of the 1910s. The modernization of the street network replaced the old naming system that reflected the streets’ natural and social environments with a new one that employed the already large arsenal of national heroes and events. The efforts of urban planners and architects to create Sofia’s image of a capital city of a modern nation-state converged in the project for the construction of Bath Square whose key features would be monumentality and representativeness. The new buildings represented not the environmental characteristics of place but the success of the nation-state and the steadfast pursuit of modernity.

This chapter explores the ways in which the Sofia plain’s hydrothermal wealth influenced the local human communities and their relationship with the natural and built environments. How did the abundance of thermal water impact the daily routine of life on the plain? How did the ubiquitous presence of springs shape the locals’ perceptions of settled and wild space? In a city whose center was designated by a hot spring and occupied by bathing facilities, to what extent did participation in the rituals and practices rooted in the use of thermal water lead to the formation of a sense of place? What was the place of thermal waters and public baths in Ottoman and foreign observers’ perceptions of Sofia’s urban form and space? Taking issue with the confused, stereotyped, and biased popular idea of Ottoman Sofia’s built space, this chapter attempts to localize the bathing facilities in the city’s historic center and at least partially reconstruct the area of the thermal spring. The chapter sheds light on the roles that Sofia’s baths played as pillars of urban culture, key constituent parts of the image of the city, and important anchors for the achievement of a sense of place.

The conclusion brings together the argument of expatriate social mobility with the historiography of British imperial benefits and costs, advancing the case for expatriate influences on British social structure. It links this larger account to the complexities of upward mobility abroad, underlining the tensions incurred for Edgar especially, and, with reference to Lambert and Lester’s work on ‘imperial careering’, notes the relevance of the book to the history of emotions, establishing the connection between imperial history and love. It stresses the ways in which the love story was shaped by expatriate life, with relevance to the history of heterosexuality, and to the concept of companionate marriage between the wars. The Wilsons return in England was bound up with their expatriate identity, coloured by nostalgia, but for Edgar an idealisation of domestic settlement, contrasting with Winifred’s father’s adherence to an expatriate masculinity preoccupied with global wanderlust. The succeeding generation of this mobile ‘expatriate clan’ followed their parents’ mobile habits but gradually returned to England, adopting Edgar’s model of the domestic ideal, enhanced by the prosperity and social status generated by Edgar, Winifred and William’s expatriate ventures, illustrating the power of expatriate social mobility.

In this chapter, the contrast between two models of expatriate masculinity developed earlier is brought to a head, with a fresh twist on the history of masculine identity. In retirement William Cooper indulged his passion for global wanderlust at the expense of his family, whereas Edgar Wilson happily abandoned his expatriate frustrations for a conventional model of settled suburban domesticity with his wife in England, spurning the mobile attractions of the cosmopolitanism they had long nurtured, but with Winifred continuing to exercise her public activism and independence. Ironically, the domestic model, rather than William’s continuing mobility, was most closely associated with the lower middle class, recalling Edgar’s origins and early white-collar labours. The disparity is underlined by a tragic account of William’s last years, interned by the Nazis in wartime Paris after an ill-advised excursion across France. Wartime domesticity for Edgar and Winifred was a struggle, only relieved by a comfortable inheritance from William. Winifred’s Will reflected her long commitment to chosen causes like the Mothers’ Union, a statement of her lifetime priorities.

Between 1921 and 1924 Edgar was in Baghdad, and Winifred in St Albans. Through Edgar’s eyes, we see Baghdad during the tense early years of the British ‘mandate’ in Iraq. Now a company director, Edgar’s talents were exploited by Baghdad elites, co-opting him as an ‘agent of imperialism’, as Britain dominated the new Iraqi constitutional monarchy, while the Baghdad Anglican church used him to run its new parish. Through Winifred’s eyes, her public profile flowering, we see her expatriate adjustment to middle-class suburban life, with two stepsons and two daughters occasioning stepmothering anxiety. Immersed in the local Anglican church and feminist organisations such as the National Council of Women, alongside the local Conservative association, her conservative politics co-existed with progressive and cosmopolitan social attitudes. The love correspondence is integral to their expatriate identity, with insights into early twentieth-century middle-class marital sexuality, explicit details of a playful sexual relationship underpinned by spirituality, and a description of consensual birth-control practices. Winifred’s sudden departure to join Edgar in Baghdad, placing two young daughters, unhappily, in a small, boarding school, marked the urgency of their passion, but also the strength of a companionate marriage, a product of shared expatriate experience.