The majority of Sofia's inhabitants are of Shop descent - the Shops being the original peasant population from the surrounding countryside who have migrated to the city in vast numbers over the past hundred years. Although you can still tell a Shop by his or her accent, which is flatter than standard Bulgarian - they say desno instead of dyasno for "right", levo instead of lyavo for "left" - the other ethnographic features that made them a distinct group a century ago have now all but disappeared.

At the time of the Liberation many Shops - especially those living around the foothills of Mount Vitosha - still lived in an extended family community known as a zadruga , an arrangement once common to the entire South Slav area. In a zadruga , several married brothers and cousins pooled their lands and lived together under the rule of a domovladika (literally "head of the household"), who would apportion tasks and look after the accounts. Zadruga members tended to specialize in different jobs (one may be a miller, one an innkeeper, another a priest, and so on) in order to keep the community self-sufficient. The growth of Sofia disrupted the traditional rural economy, signalling the end of the zadruga system. It was perhaps the sudden impact of urbanization that earned the Shops a reputation for being the nation's heaviest drinkers . Writing in the 1880s, the Czech observer Konstantin Jireced remarked that "Sofia is the one area of the country where you can actually see drunken Bulgarians on a regular basis". Indeed the expression "to drink like in Sofia" was in common use in late nineteenth-century Bulgaria.

Some of the villages around Sofia still preserve age-old Shop Lenten customs . Voluyak, 10km northwest of Sofia on the Berkovitsa road, still celebrates the Dzhamala festival (forty days before Easter on odd-numbered years), when a camel (actually a wooden sled dressed in skins) is hauled through the streets before being symbolically killed and returned to life again, in what is essentially a Dionysaic death-and-rebirth ritual of ancient origins. The neighbouring village of Mramor is the Sofia district's main centre for celebrations linked with Todorovden (St Theodore's day, the first Saturday of Lent), when people from all over the Shop area congregate - usually bringing their horses and carts - for a day of feasting and carousing.