"Hygiene." Or when Drag Zone was still just "Nestor"
4 minute read
Around the Millennium, fate first brought me into contact with the man Drago Kuzov and the place that later became known over the years as "Nestorov's Shop" or simply "The Hygiene."
The reasons for this encounter may not be the subject of this story, but to this day I keep in my mind the memory of the garage full of bicycles and snapshots like lightning from my brief visit to an apartment where everything that later became known as DRAG bicycles Ltd. began to happen.
When in 1971 the Kuzov family moved from Bulgaria to the city of Yaroslavl (then in the USSR, now in Russia), the fifteen-year-old boy probably did not imagine how many bearing balls he would have to sort with a magnet while rolling the entire path from the rough HVZs (as the products of the Kharkov Machine-Building Plants were called) to the dream bicycles of all of us: Bianchi, Peugeot, Pinarello and... to his own brand DRAG.
We talk in his office and among many stories and youthful memories I learn about the beginning, and later about the end of his active racing career after the family returned to Bulgaria. Despite his successes as a student at the Soviet VIF (State Central Order of Lenin Institute of Physical Culture (GCOLIFK)), the master of sports was sent to "fulfill his duty to the Motherland" in an artillery regiment in Pazardzhik.
Two years later, we see him as a coach of the youth at "Levski Spartak," at that time one of the two biggest cycling clubs in Bulgaria. Filled with youthful zeal and ambition, he teaches the young cyclists everything he managed to gather as experience in his career so far. At the same time, he continues to absorb knowledge and subtle technical tricks from "Uncle Stoyan," a person of authority and weight, one of the most experienced bicycle mechanics during those difficult years when you could not just find a hub, trigger, or crank plate in a store...
And so, from the children's bicycles, through the need to maintain his own bicycle and those of his friends as well, little by little the idea of a service-shop was born, or in other words, a place where people and their bicycles would feel "at home."
The year is 1983 – and the small garage on Dimitur Nestorov Blvd. has gradually become one of the preferred places for bicycle repairs in the capital. So much so that when traveling to Pakistan, the Dutch traveler Tom Van Maverick passes through Sofia and is pointed to Drago's garage as the most suitable place for necessary ongoing repairs.
And the work is done so well that thirty years later Van Maverick remembers the events in Sofia and sends Drago the photo they took together as a memento in front of the green door. But besides the memory, the bicycle itself is still alive. The careful owner restored and preserved it as a nice memory of past adventures.
The years pass, filled with the vicissitudes of the nineties – a time of turbulent changes everywhere and in everything. Parts and consumables were hard to find and despite the close ties between the then players on the private cycling initiative scene, the trade was somewhat naive and with minimal turnover, and oriental trading methods were not unfamiliar to anyone.
Suitcase raids to neighboring Turkey and attempts at partnerships with financially more stable companies in the industry were initiatives that had limited success and although they brought useful experience, they failed to truly stabilize things. A carpet wall divided the business into two very different directions, but the sale of ready-made clothing on one side and the demonstrated will and persistence on the other saved the venture through the difficult decade. The new millennium seemed to give a new impetus to the work and again bicycles appeared in the place of clothes and bed linen. Production of a new Bulgarian brand – DRAG – began.
About this time I also first saw the small room full of interesting, shiny, and colorful things. And again the reason was a journey – this time of Vladimir Sorokin, who, although a strange personality, managed to make a round-the-world trip and Drag supported him in the difficult endeavor. A friend had sewn saddlebags and luggage bags for Sorokin and through him I got acquainted with the place and the people thanks to whom it became what it is now – an indispensable part of Sofia’s cycling culture. Somehow, when listing in my mind names like "Kolodrum," "Monza," "Tsutso’s Old Guys," and other cycling landmarks, I cannot omit "The Hygiene," as the small big garage has been known for years. Since then, seventeen years have passed and many people have learned what a bicycle, trade, and mechanics are there. And they managed to make even more people involved in cycling culture, something that has always been a hidden, but actually rather explicit goal of Drago Kuzov and his team.
Now, after four months of renovation, the shop has once again opened its welcoming doors. Although it has "grown" significantly and only the memory remains of the small garage with green doors, I am sure that the new beginning will continue to gather in front of the shop windows and the service stands all of us, passionate about the same passion – the bicycle.
Kamen Kotev
March 23, 2017
