The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold

by Tim Moore

  In 1970, the GDR installed 60,000 trip-wired anti-personnel mines along the inner German border, obliging more rational would-be escapees to seek a softer underbelly in the Iron Curtain defences. Some East Germans tried their luck in Hungary; some in Romania. But most, at least 4,500 of them, were drawn to the Bulgarian-Greek frontier.

  Pedalling across those remote hills and valleys, I could easily understand why so many Trabants had congregated down here, purportedly on holiday tours. Of course the all-seeing, all-knowing Stasi understood it too, and invariably knew well in advance which travellers weren’t planning to come home. They tipped off the Bulgarian border authorities with habitual efficiency: more than 80 per cent of runaways were arrested in the 15km exclusion zone, and returned to the GDR for sentencing.

  Nearly all of these were subsequently ransomed to the western Federal Republic of Germany for hard currency, and lots of it. Amid all those tales of heroic, death-defying cross-curtain escape bids, it’s easy to forget – particularly if like me you didn’t know in the first place – that once the Wall went up in 1961, the vast majority of East Europeans who made it to the West were prosaically, though very secretly, sold by their cash-strapped overlords. Ceaus¸escu’s regime kept itself afloat by flogging 424,000 ethnic Germans to the Federal Republic, receiving a more than handy 11,000 deutschmarks for each of them by the late 1980s. For the GDR, the trade was a win-win means of getting paid to ship out potentially dangerous dissidents. Twice a week, a fleet of buses with James Bond-style revolving number plates – GDR for the first leg of the trip, FRG for the second – would ferry political prisoners and recidivist runaways over the border. In the 1980s, for every East German who escaped, ninety-nine were surreptitiously exported: by then whole trainloads were being shipped out, bought by the West Germans for 100,000 deutschmarks a head, equivalent to around 25,000 pounds.

  As their foreign debt mushroomed, the East Germans grew more desperate, and much cheekier. Once they demanded a shipload of bananas be thrown in as part of the ransom deal. Noting that the state earned nothing from citizens who secured visas to visit relatives across the wall, the GDR took to arresting them by the thousand on fictitious charges, then selling them to the West, rebranded as political prisoners. Over 34,000 East Germans were thus traded, swelling the state coffers by an estimated eight billion DM. ‘It was the kind of sum without which the country could not survive,’ concludes Victor Sebestyen, in his pannier-bulging treatise, Revolution 1989.

  But enough of the lucky ones. South of Chepintsi, in the deepest, darkest Rhodope borderlands, I passed close – as close as a bicycle allowed – to a mossy-trunked birch that some locals call the Bone Tree, others the German Woman. For weeks the scent of the Iron Curtain Trail had been slowly fading, but now, at EV13’s southernmost extremity, I caught a potent whiff of its grisliest relic. Officially, thirteen GDR citizens were shot dead along the Bulgarian–Greek border, but many more than that disappeared in the area, and an academic study has suggested an accurate toll would nudge into three figures. All fell victim to a cruel and very deliberate deception: having cleared a raked sand-strip and a 3m fence, they believed they’d made it to Greece. In fact, the border proper lay 2km away, and in crossing the fence the escapees had tripped a detection wire that alerted the nearest border post. Its guards reacted promptly and with only one thought in mind.

  A 1974 ‘friendship agreement’ between the GDR and Bulgaria not just allowed but required the native border patrols to shoot East German escapees on sight, and recent investigations have unearthed detailed evidence that the GDR embassy in Sofia offered guards a bounty. Kill an East German in the death-strip and you would be rewarded with between ten and fifteen days’ leave for ‘neutralising a traitor’, plus a bonus of up to 2,000 leva and a Glashütte wristwatch. Thus incentivised, border patrols became execution squads. An autopsy found that Michael Weber, a nineteen-year-old student from Leipzig killed near the Greek border in July 1989, had been shot at close-quarters in the top of the head. A month later, he could have wandered freely into the West from Hungary.

  But the forensic and investigative diligence that followed Weber’s death was conspicuously absent in the 1970s and early ’80s. East Germans killed in the death-strip back then were relieved of their documents – you needed proof to claim your bounty – and dumped in shallow forest graves. These were routinely dug up by scavenging wildlife, and Chepintsi locals spoke grimly of remains left strewn across no man’s land. But it was only in 2014 that a German TV crew confirmed the darkest rumour of all: a tree, deep in the old killing zone, decorated with human bones nailed high up the trunk. A warning to other escapers? A trophy shrine? It’s a fair bet that the truth will never be known, though analysis of a shoulder blade and fibula showed they belonged to a woman born around 1955. This, along with the tree’s more ominous nickname, suggests that whoever put them there tells the time with a Glashütte.

  With Greece looming on my forward and right-hand horizons, everything began to look hotter and crispier. The balding brown hillsides were dotted sparely with tufts of gorse and the sky was a stern, hard blue. Hens darted out for a roadside dust-bath; cows hid from the sun in bus shelters. I baptised myself at every life-saving water shrine and squeezed breakfast jam sachets into my hot gob, like rubbish energy gels. EV13’s route from here to its conclusion was agonisingly dilatory – so much so that as I wended my very weary way over the Rhodopes’ scorched foothills, I never once bothered to consult the wind forecast. Long gone were all those due-south and due-west weeks, when a day could be made or ruined by having half the Beaufort scale in my face or up my arse.

  I passed a fat man riding a donkey, and a Moskvich straining desperately up a gentle hill with a sofa on its roof. Two gangs of village kids throwing stones at each other interrupted hostilities to jog alongside the MIFA, whooping like over-excited spectators on a Tour climb. Their elders, hoes in hand out in the dusty fields, tracked me with familiar stares of amused bewilderment; work-weary, weather-beaten labourers who would never, ever understand why anyone would do what I was doing in the name of fun.

  Late one day I barrelled into Ivaylovgrad with the weary negligence that always infected the final descent, avoiding a twilight tortoise but not half the potholes, to the great detriment of my liver and testes. A snake coiled up on the central white line reared up and struck cobra-style in my general direction as I shot past; a speed-trap policeman at the town-limits sign waved his little lollipop stop-stick at me in jest. I freewheeled to a halt outside a glitzy new hotel just beyond the town’s scabby tenements, and found that my right shoe had melted fast to the pedals. Or so at first it seemed; after 144 baked and rolling kilometres, even the most basic physical task demanded a deep breath and a focused effort. Then one more alarmed and faintly disgusted receptionist; one more stairwell sleep for the MIFA; one more vacant congress with my blistered reflection above a sink full of frothing, laddered Lycra: ‘You did it. You did it again.’ Days like this seemed a month long, a ten-volume saga of hot hills and peasants, of flaky concrete partisans with their inscriptions crowbarred off, of grumpy grocers and Strong Hell. But with the lonely Rhodopes now behind me, those days were at an end.

  19. GREECE, TURKEY AND BULGARIA

  Nation number nineteen barely troubled the scorers. A brand-new little border crossing, just two Portakabins and a couple of uniformed smilers, allowed me to trim an irksome 50km loop off EV13, leaving no more than a cloudless, three-hour corner of north-eastern Greece to traverse. It was flat and arable and utterly deserted. I saw my first ripe peach, and because there was nobody around, stole and ate it. For the first time in a month, Sunday felt like Sunday: in the godless ex-Communist countryside I’d ridden through since Austria, these fields and orchards would have been generously dotted with hunched toilers. The empty farms were vast and well-maintained, every sleek new barn fronted with a rank of shiny machines; I had seen my last beast of burden. The villages, when at length they came, seemed equally trim and prosperou
s: a parade of white concrete homes with roller shutters and wrought-iron balconies, like mid-range Spanish holiday villas.

  This Greece seemed to share very little with the one I recalled from my admittedly distant previous visit. As a student Interrailer, I had trundled lethargically through the scraggy realm of walnut-faced goatherds, in an airless carriage full of black shawls and grey stubble. It was, in fact, very reminiscent of the country I had just left behind, and with a small internal sigh I realised that quite soon, perhaps after another two decades of EU membership, rural Bulgaria would look like this: an agro-industrial landscape free of donkeys and sickles.

  Yet this Greece also seemed nothing like the desperate, angry nation depicted in so many news reports over the previous half-dozen years. I had half expected to find people gnawing the bark off trees or auctioning elderly relatives in the street, but the only evidence of national strife was an unusual preponderance of political graffiti and some angrily ripped election posters. Kastanies, the first and only town I would go through, was thronged with well-presented Sunday moochers, crisp-shirted husbands clustered convivially under one café awning, crisp-bloused wives under another. The Turkish frontier’s flags and barriers stood in plain sight at the end of the road, but even the startling proximity of two of the world’s worst enemies hadn’t put a damper on the mood.

  Tim Moore

  @mrtimmoore

  Into country 19/20. Spot a stork & a watchtower & win all my leftover Serbian dinars.

  Indeed, when I rolled up to the border gates, I found no man’s land clogged with joggers wearing numbers on their vests: a cross-frontier fun run was apparently in progress, and the guard told me to go away and come back in an hour. Thus I joined the ouzo-loosened husbands, spending my forgotten euros on feta and chips, and leafing through yet another alien menu. For the last time I marvelled at little Europe’s astonishing diversity: in a 10-mile radius from my shaded seat, three separate alphabets were in use. And the only wholly familiar letters would shortly, though not that shortly, be welcoming me into the Asia-straddling nation that was last on my list.

  ‘What dis?’

  It was my second encounter with the Turkish border guard in the mirrored sunglasses. The first had ended an hour before with a demand for a visa fee that required more euros than I had left; I’d ridden back across no man’s land and returned with the fruits of a Greek cashpoint. Several passages through back-to-back gauntlets of automatic weaponry and menacing stares had put me straight on the fraternal co-existence implied by that feet-across-the-border mini marathon. And now a man with a big gun and a sweaty top lip was asking me about the police-grade anti-personnel weapon I had inexplicably left on open display, threaded through the elastic strap of my front carrier.

  ‘Pfeffer KO? It’s incredible stuff. Pop those shades off and I’ll give you a demo.’

  I didn’t say that, of course. In fact, every explanation that now scrolled rapidly through my head, not least the true one, seemed open to the sort of misunderstanding that might land me in a windowless cell with a dozen sobbing joggers, so I didn’t really say anything.

  ‘Well, it’s for . . . ah . . .’

  ‘For bicycle, yes?’

  I looked up but he’d already lost interest, waving me through and looking past my shoulder at the long queue of cars I had pushed in front of. Once again the MIFA’s childlike innocence had saved me a strip-search. And so, after paying my visa fee at one window, and queuing for my change at another, and standing at the last for a full half-hour while my passport was stamped and returned, I entered my twentieth and final country. What a terrible pity, from the perspective of narrative progression, that my journey’s end lay back in the seventeenth.

  On the Turkish side they were clearing up after the fun run. There was a water station just inside the border, and beyond it the road was carpeted with plastic bottles. Young men were sweeping these into giant bin-liners, knotting the tops and gaily tossing their harvest over a fence into the wasteland behind. An old man was burning stuff on his doorstep, beside a cabbage patch fenced off with barbed wire. Muscular wafts of human waste swept across the road. The thought that I would stay in Turkey for just a single night seemed steadily less dismal. Until, that is, I rattled over an ancient, many-arched bridge into Edirne, and at once found myself engulfed by chaos and colour and towers and domes and very restless decibels. I pushed the MIFA through a log-jam of horns, chatty pedestrians streaming between hot metal: in two minutes flat, this drive-through Game of Thrones marketplace in the one-time Ottoman capital out-bustled anything I had yet experienced. But it took me an awful lot longer than that to break through into the calm of Edirne’s mirror-glassed commercial outskirts, and as thrilling as it was to find exhilarating novelty still being flung at me 8,381km down the line, on those thronged and manic streets a dream died.

  For three months, I had been painfully hauling my overall average speed back up from its ignominious Finnish depths: 9.9kmh after two days, 10.5 after two weeks, 11.9 by the Russian border. Those hateful little digits goaded me all day, the cad’s moustache on my Garmin’s info-slathered face. All I wished for, and it didn’t seem much to ask, was a final average speed of 16.0kmh, better known to those of a certain age and with any sense of basic human pride as 10mph. When I rolled into Germany with 14.5 on the clock, imperial double-digits seemed inevitable, but as I’m told is generally the way with long-term averages, the numbers grew ever harder to shift. My fitness reached a plateau but the roads did not; I wondered what speed a man of my age might be reasonably expected to maintain riding up mountains all day on a shopping bike. The Czech Republic, 15.2; Hungary, 15.4; Croatia, 15.6; Romania, 15.8. Through a superlative effort that will forever be spoken of in hushed tones whenever men gather to discuss feats of small-wheeled endurance, in the mighty Rhodopes I had somehow endeavoured to bring up the 15.9. But a mere 150km now remained, and shuffling through the Edirne crowds I sensed that decimal place being anchored for good. I’m sorry to break the news just like that. It must be harder for you than it was for me.

  *

  The road out of Edirne led me across a bare, beige landscape that seemed to have been bullied flat by the sun. It was so brutally hot that the tarmac began to boil, swelling into little bubbles which popped and crackled beneath my tyres like space dust. Pick-up trucks shimmered up out of the heat haze and flew past at crazy speeds, parping horns and trailing yelps of raucous derision. Such at least was my assumption before I rode into a dusty little town, and was borne past the concrete shacks and bus shelters on a wave of exuberant but very genuine encouragement. Children ran alongside, whooping and clapping. ‘Hello mister!’ cried one. ‘HELLO MISTER!’ chorused a dozen more. A woman in a glittery headscarf and a smart red trouser suit held out a tray of pastries she was mysteriously crossing the road with. Three young men by the petrol station pointed me to the horizon in stirring unison, like Soviet sculptures: ‘Go forth to your destiny, hero cyclist.’ Turkey meant me well. In fact, it meant me better than anywhere else I had been, and in doing so brought a premature tear to my eye.

  My final staging post was considerably larger than I had expected, but Kirklareli only had one hotel and I couldn’t find it. After a circuit of its lively principal thoroughfares, I squeaked to a halt at the edge of the main square, a fittingly totalitarian public space accessorised with giant military statues, fighter jets on plinths and a mural of flag-planting soldiers that filled the side of a facing apartment block.

  I didn’t have any native money and the blue sky had begun to darken at its edges. It was a predicament I had regularly endured on this journey, and with unfailing distress. But this time I didn’t panic. Indeed, I barely cared. Perhaps, now that it had come down to it, I didn’t really want to find my last bed, because that would mean this – all this, my purpose on earth, life as I knew it – would be over. The French once called Tour cyclists ‘convicts of the road’; my sentence was almost served. Like an institutionalised old lag finally
given parole in The Shawshank Redemption, I wasn’t at all sure how to deal with that eventuality, though ideally not by hanging myself from a doorframe. Or perhaps I just knew that if I stood here long enough, helmet unbuckled by a taxi rank, Turkey would sort me out.

  ‘You make EV13, I think?’

  The first and only cyclist I met in Turkey was also the first and only cyclist I met anywhere who expressed familiarity with the Iron Curtain Trail. My journey’s final Samaritan was a sprightly chap of about my own age, riding a smart new tourer that he would, the very next day, be sticking in a plane bound for Prague. ‘With three friends I make EV4, we ride to Paris.’ It all seemed fairly extraordinary. When I asked about the hotel, he hopped back on his bike and beckoned me to follow him; several mad roundabouts later we pulled up outside a big new box on the ring-road. I offered him my heartfelt gratitude and we wished each other luck.

  ‘Tomorrow EV13 for you is Istranca Mountains,’ he said, as we shook hands. ‘Not easy, I think, on this bicycle.’

  I smiled, thinking that even on downhill velvet the day would overwhelm me. My parents and daughters had already landed in Bulgaria; we had arranged to meet for lunch at Malko Tarnovo, close to the Turkish border. It was 50km from Kirklareli to there, and another 56 onwards to Tsarevo, EV13’s Black Sea conclusion.

  I went through the last rites with a light head and a strangely heavy heart. The toothpaste I had cracked off in frozen chunks on my first night oozed blood-warm onto the brush. The fear-blanched, frosted face I had stared at in that Finnish motel mirror was now the chestnut head of a very odd lollipop. I’d shed 10kg and striped myself silly, an unusually shy stickman who went for a mahogany spray-tan in his pants, vest and socks. Somehow it didn’t seem plausible that this figure before me would never again drape wet kit all over a hotel bathroom, or sluice out a CamelBak with a sachet of shower gel, or shuffle off down strange streets in a town he would never see again, on the hunt for mysterious life-giving calories.