I’m standing on the balcony of one such house which the enterprising owner has turned into a B&B and called ‘The House of the Three Fir Trees’. The three fir trees are strategically placed to disguise the house itself, but not obstruct the view to the crags up above the town, one of which is called The Bride. In local lore, this is where a maiden betrothed to a haiduk (mountain rebel) jumped off before the local Turkish bei could take her for a bride.
The Bride joins a teeming population of ghosts in the busy hereafter that is Rodopean folklore. Rodopean ballads are surreal and existential – dramatic monologues, wrenching farewells, maidens plummeting from rocks, mothers who weep to the grave, shepherds swallowed by mountains, doomed lovers, floating brides, and yet more weeping mothers.
The ghosts live alongside another population in the Rodopean towns and villages. They wear brightly coloured shalvars, and they are the Islamized Bulgarians collectively known as Pomaks. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Pomaks were the first batch of Bulgarian Muslims to have their names ‘voluntarily’ changed.
But the Rodopean story doesn’t begin or end with a medieval clash of civilizations. It begins, and hopefully ends, with a marriage of civilizations. The oldest of those were the Thracians, and the most enduring Thracian is, of course, the mythical singer Orpheus. He came from the Rodopi and his preternaturally beautiful voice haunted these parts, just as his doomed bid to save his beloved dead Eurydice from the underworld has haunted the imagination of the Western world.
Even Mature Socialism couldn’t remain indifferent to Orpheus, and here I am, sitting by a fine specimen of proletarian plastic art at its most romantic. A rudimentary, seated Orpheus is plucking a string-less lyre and gazing to the heavens. An angular-featured Eurydice sits at his feet, leaning on his sinewy thigh and also gazing to the heavens – or is it the Bright Future? They look like Comsomol youth at rest during a dam-building brigade. It’s amazing the artist didn’t replace the lyre with a Russian accordion.
On the bench opposite me sit two old men with felt hats and rolled-up newspapers. It’s late afternoon: gossip time.
‘Do you know,’ says one, ‘there are 250,000 couples in the country who live together, kids and all, and unmarried?’
‘No way!’
‘I swear. Marriage is becoming an anachronism. It’s not important any more. That’s the way of the future.’
‘My word.’ The other one shakes his head.
‘Let’s ask this young lady here. Are you married to your boyfriend?’ The extrovert turns to me. ‘I assume you have a boyfriend…’
‘Stop flirting,’ his friend interrupts, flashing a golden tooth.
‘I’m not married,’ I admit.
‘Ah, there you are,’ the champion of the unmarried triumphs. ‘Marriage is a thing of the past.’
‘It is,’ I agree. ‘It’s love that matters, not marriage.’
‘Ah, thank you!’ He turns to his friend, beaming. ‘Did you hear that? Love is what it’s about, not some stupid paper, rings, vows, all that rubbish. I can’t get my ring off any more, it sinks into the flesh like a slave’s collar.’ He pulls at his wedding ring theatrically. ‘They’ll bury me with this piece of metal, like they used to bury the Thracians with their treasures. Take Orpheus and Eurydice here, were they married? Who cares? That’s not what remains after us.’ He punctuates the air with his rolled-up paper.
‘True true,’ I say. It’s not often that you find octogenarians right on your wavelength. Even if they read that lowest of tabloids Shock. I glance at a headline: PRIEST CONVICTED FOR ARROGANT HOOLIGANISM REFUSED TO OFFER LAST RITES TO A DECEASED MAN AND BEAT UP A POLICEMAN.
‘There you are.’ He nods at me. ‘And I hope that you always have plenty of it.’ I hope he means love.
The other old man grins indulgently at Orpheus and Eurydice, at the dark mountains rising on all sides, at his friend, at me, with a mouth full of golden teeth.
I spend a day with a local taxi-driver who doesn’t even try to rip me off. His name is Angel and it suits him. Angel is thirty-five, single, chubby, his fringe carefully slicked to one side. Diligent glasses complete the choirboy look. The Rodopi might be fitness freak heaven, but Angel mostly treks from his parents’ fridge to the car and back.
We drive through Pamporovo, the winter sports resort of the Rodopi, where I learned to ski and later survived a spectacular ski-fall which nearly relieved me of my brain. Now it’s all luxury hotels and fresh construction sites for more luxury hotels gnawing at the flesh of the forest like tumours. One sign at the edge of the forest proudly announces ‘Hotel Extreme’.
‘Extreme greed, that’s what it is. Ever bigger, ever more luxurious. You know that all these hotels are owned by mutri big and small,’ Angel says quietly, without anger. He doesn’t do anger. ‘So-called developers. Like at the seaside. Bulgarian, Russian, Greek, Turkish developers, some Westerners too. Greed, sheer dumb greed will eat the heart out of our beautiful country and then it’ll be too late to be sorry.’
As if to match our mood and the increased elevation, the darkened sky suddenly begins to shed enormous rags of snow. In this fairy-tale blizzard, we reach the deeply fissured Trigrad Canyon. Giant cliffs hang over the road.
‘I avoid coming here.’ Angel adjusts his glasses nervously. ‘I feel hemmed in. These rocks oppress me. The entire Rodopi oppress me. It’s too much for me. I like the sea, more gentle landscapes…’
You definitely couldn’t accuse the western Rodopi of gentleness. The river has dragged all manner of detritus along its distended bed: rags; stones; entire trees. The road has been patched up after the river ripped it up last year.
‘You should have seen the river last spring. It swallowed a whole Mercedes, near the bus station. The owner didn’t move it in time, too lazy. Then one day it just drifted away. He waded into the river shoulder-deep, hanging onto his Mercedes like a madman. They showed him on local TV. Later, the river spat it up, all twisted up like wet laundry. And he was crying like a baby that’s just lost its mother.’
We stop at a deep abyss cave which enjoys not one but two hellish names: Devil’s Gorge and Gate to Hades. And with good reason. Legend has it that this was the gate to the underworld through which Orpheus passed to look for Eurydice. Two divers in a 1970 expedition also passed through here but, unlike Orpheus, they were looking for the bottom of the abyss and, unlike him, they never came back.
Angel has never been to the cave before and he’s not exactly thrilled to be inside a dripping, slimy, tomb-like world, deafened by a waterfall 40 metres high. It enters the cave from one end and comes out the other, and the fact that we hear it but can’t see it makes it even more menacing. The Thracians who lived around here for thousands of years would throw their dead chieftains’ bodies into the river, and since nothing comes out the other end except crystal-clear water, the bones remained inside.
I can’t imagine why anyone who isn’t unhinged by grief would dive voluntarily into this thundering, chthonic darkness, and, judging by Angel’s steamed-up glasses, neither can he. This is simply not a human realm.
And yet, in a dripping alcove, a tiny icon of the Virgin Mary is overlooked by a faint stone relief of Orpheus with his lyre. Coins for good luck have been deposited all over the wet altar, and spring water leaks from the rock beneath Orpheus’ feet. The red and white threads of martenitsi, deposited for health, add to this eclectic altar of paganism, Christianity, superstition, and simple hope in the ante-chamber of Hades.
Our next cave, the Yagodina or Strawberry Cave, is more cheerful. It’s 10 kilometres long, but to Angel’s relief, only one-tenth of it is accessible to sedentary bums like us. We are treated to an hour of brisk walking and talking through dripping galleries by a handsome, deadpan cave guide with a face wilted by cigarettes and sunburn, and terrible facial tremors. I wonder if he has Parkinson’s or is simply a nervous wreck.
‘See the Cyrillic alphabet here?’ The guide points shakily to a shallow pool with strange formations. ‘
This is evidence that the cave is Bulgarian and not Greek.’
We are only a few kilometres from the Greek border, after all. Which is presumably why he sees fit to tell us a nationalist joke.
‘Now, Turkey, Greece and Yugoslavia had earthquakes. They went to God and said, Dear God, can you arrange for the Bulgarians to have an earthquake too, it’s only fair. God said, I’ll see what I can do. And Turkey, Greece and Yugoslavia kept having earthquakes. They went back to God and said, Dear God, we asked you to visit earthquakes on Bulgaria, not on us again. God said, Hold on, let me check which map I was using.’
Angel and I laugh politely.
‘This here is the wedding hall,’ the guide runs ahead. ‘We sometimes marry couples here; look, this is the celebrant’s table. Out of nearly 300 weddings, we haven’t had a single divorce. Those who want a divorce are sent straight to the Devil’s Gorge. Now, see this stalagmite and stalactite? We call it the Incomplete Kiss. That’s because they need another 150 years to meet up and form a stalactone. You’re welcome to pop in then and see it.’
We’d rather pop out into the world of the living, and when we do, there is no trace of the snow. It’s warm and sunny as we arrive in the protected village of Shiroka Laka.
Shiroka Laka was built by Christian breakaways from seventeenth-century conversions, and became a National Revival stronghold with its fortress-like houses and church schools. Last time I stopped here, I was trekking in the Rodopi with Michael. Actually, we weren’t so much trekking as getting hopelessly lost in the hills and we stumbled into Shiroka Laka by mistake, all scratched by brambles, sunburnt, and delirious with thirst. The locals looked at us as if we were devils, or Turks at the very least. We only stayed for a few hours, to admire the fortified, whitewashed houses, but by the time we left, the locals were practically waving strings of garlic and crucifixes in our direction. There were no buses at the end of the day, and we hitched, desperate to get away from the bad vibes. A young army officer from the Alpine division in Smolyan saved us from our predicament and enlightened us.
‘The locals are jumpy these days,’ he explained, ‘because so many foreigners and new rich Sofianites buy up the houses here for a song. They come with their jeeps and arrogance and prance around like they own the place. The locals are proud folk. They feel like they’re being bought out of their own village. They like visitors, but not property buyers. They just want to be left alone.’ We wondered how anybody could mistake bedraggled tourists for property sharks, but it wasn’t that amazing. Most property-buying foreigners first come as tourists, and then return as owners. The most handsomely done-up house in the village bears a wooden sign saying ‘Jack’s House’.
Perversely drawn to the hostility of Shiroka Laka, I have decided to stay for a few days. I’m determined to see at least one person smile.
Angel and I arrive at siesta time, and the only people on the main street are a red-faced policeman fattened by too much rakia and too little work, and two local men with crumpled faces and distended bellies. They’re discussing important matters: the long weekend. More eating and drinking. Angel and I sit down to a meal of smilyanski beans, famous in the Rodopi for their buttery texture. Except they taste like they were genetically engineered and transported from China in the hull of a very slow, damp ship.
‘They probably were,’ Angel says. ‘This is what happens when small producers are bulldozed by big businesses.’ He adjusts his glasses. ‘No more authentic smilyanski beans. But let’s not ruin your short visit. Just breathe in the pure air of the Rodopi because you haven’t been here for ages. Recharge yourself. I haven’t been outside Bulgaria, and I’m sure Scotland has nice air too, but there’s nothing like home.’
And nothing like old-fashioned chivalry. I have hired Angel for the day and expect to cover all expenses, but he insists on paying for lunch. We argue over the bill until I surrender and he proudly picks it up. Only hours ago, he’d told me all about his expenses with the car, the high price of living, the meagre taxi custom in a small town, how he still lives with his parents because he can’t afford his own place. But paying for lunch is another matter altogether.
After the bean soup and saying goodbye to Angel, things begin to go downhill. I discover that instead of the ‘golf course’-sized apartment I was promised by the guesthouse owner on the phone, I’ll be sleeping inside a roomy cupboard. The price, on the other hand, is the same. I politely ask for a cupboard discount, and the guesthouse owner politely tells me that if I’m not happy with the price, he can show me the door. But he knows, and he knows that I know: it’s a long weekend and there isn’t a free bed in the village. Not even a free cupboard. I decide to calm myself with a piece of sweet pumpkin pie in the folk-themed restaurant downstairs.
‘No.’ The dessicated waiter nods negatively. ‘We don’t offer it by the piece. You can order it for the next day and our chef can make you a tin of it.’
‘Do I have to eat the whole tin?’ I joke. But he isn’t laughing.
‘Well, you don’t have to eat it all if you don’t want to. But you have to buy all of it.’
I stare at the ‘Rodopean pumpkin pie, 300 g, 3 lev’ in the menu. How much for the whole pie, then?
‘Let’s see,’ the waiter calculates. ‘There are about five pieces in a tin. So that’s 15 lev.’ And no discounts for ordering in bulk? No, this is not ‘bulk’, he explains, this is just a tin. Just a tin with 1.5 kilograms of pumpkin pie that I must eat by myself. To hell with it, I’ll take it.
‘OK, I shall tell the cook to start hunting for a pumpkin,’ the waiter says, and I almost get my first smile. Almost.
My cupboard looks out towards the local culture hall which has proudly hung out two flags from its windows: Bulgaria and the EU. In the evening, its windows light up and the squeal of bagpipes lures me in. All the locals under the age of fifty are on stage, rehearsing for the hall’s grand opening at the end of the week. Those over fifty are in the audience.
‘It’s been derelict for twenty years,’ a flushed old woman tells me, and hands me the script for the play, like a menu. I almost look for the price. It’s a folksy comedy written by a teacher in the 1930s and based around a village gathering. ‘It’s being played by several generations of locals,’ the woman informs me, as if she’s running me through the specialties of the house. ‘And we’re finally opening our doors again. I didn’t think I’d live to see it!’
During the rehearsals, a few Gypsy kids sneak into the hall to watch. They are well groomed but their faces are prematurely stamped with dejection. They smile at the slapstick and watch in awe the young women in jeans singing folk songs and the chubby young bagpipe player squeezing his goat skin to release Olympian sounds. A couple more kids come into the hall, and what they do takes me aback: they hug the Gypsy kids. It’s an unusual sight, to see a Bulgarian and a Gypsy holding hands, even if they are twelve. Later, I learn that they are all from the local orphanage.
Over the next few days, I see the young faces from the stage at cafés in the morning and cheap mehanas at night, smoking in tight-knit cliques. They are here for the public holidays, otherwise they all work out of town. The orphans are too young to work, and hang around the single main street, looking bored and lost already.
‘We’re the only village in this region which has been 100 per cent pure Christian Bulgarian for ever. We have two Gypsy brothers, builders. But they’re completely integrated,’ the retired old nurse in the new pharmacy briefs me sweetly while selling me some mountain tea that treats everything from dry coughs to menstrual cramps. And, presumably, intolerance.
‘You know in the seventies when I was a nurse at the local Mother and Child Home—’ the generic name for orphanages in Bulgaria has always struck me as odd ‘—conditions were so basic that we’d sometimes have to ride a mule through the snow to reach Gela village six kilometres up the hill. Those who couldn’t ride walked. Even so, in the old days, under Socialism, there was no ethnic distinction. Turks, Gypsies, Bulgarians, eve
rybody got the same deal. We cared for everyone. Nobody suffered privations like today. There was no hatred. It was a more humane system. Today it’s man eat man.’
I’ve heard this one before, but who am I to contradict her? She is telling the truth, or some version of it anyway.
‘Take me, for example. I’ve given forty years of my working life to the State. What did I get when I retired? A 100 lev pension. That’s why I’m working here. This would never happen in the old system.’
She asks me where I live. I tell her the truth, some version of it anyway.
‘See, you and your family, you too are victims of the new system. If it hadn’t been for this man-eat-man society, you would’ve stayed. But you’ve been deprived of a homeland.’
I don’t point out that it was the previous system, the humane system of man spy on man, that had made me want to leave in the first place.
‘One teaspoon per litre of boiling water,’ she instructs me with care. ‘And don’t forget Bulgaria. It needs you.’
Does it? Shiroka Laka doesn’t give the impression of needing anybody. It would be easy to feel that even if no tourist set foot here again, the village would plod on and endure, stubbornly, ox-like, as it has always done. But the difference between now and when I visited three years ago is everywhere: in the revived culture hall; the spruced-up houses; the new mehanas; even this new pharmacy. Shiroka Laka needs me and other tourists despite all appearances.
And appearances are of an enclave bookended by small bridges arched like the backs of cats. Beyond each bridge is a densely folded land of canyons, caves, mosques, and women in baggy trousers. I decide to rent a car and explore.
Street Without a Name Page 21