• • •
I wrenched myself away from the pleasures of this capital for a few days and struck across the foothills and valleys of the eastern slopes of Vitosha, and stayed the night at the American School at Simeonovo: a large clean, airy establishment with a fine library and, although it was holiday-time, inhabited by a young and friendly staff who all seemed to be at work on theses. Over the hills next day, to Dolni Pasarel, reaching it after nightfall, I stayed with a friendly peasant I met in the kretchma, the ramshackle tavern in the middle of the village where a number of villagers were drinking slivo, a rough plum-brandy that reeks like a whirled lasso. We staggered to his house and his wife cooked us a mass of herbs and potatoes and young cucumbers over a fire of thorns, which he, she and their children and I all ate out of the same plate, spooning in turn and seated cross-legged on the rug-covered floor round a low circular table, filling in the gaps with great slices of excellent dark bread and white goat’s cheese. His wife had long fair plaits with the ends tied together, below the triangle of her headkerchief. She wore an apron striped in many colours and a red and blue bodice cut low and circular like an old-fashioned dinner jacket waistcoat, and trimmed by many breadths of braid. It ended at her elbows, where, from broad braid bands, pleated lace frills jutted for several inches, all old and worn, but pretty and odd nevertheless. We all five of us reclined on rugs chevroned with purple, yellow, scarlet and green, spread along the ledge that ran round the wall, all fully dressed, and, except for me, still thonged, swaddled and moccasined. Soon, after exchanges of leka nosht [good night], snoring and darkness prevailed except for the oil dip flickering in front of a corner ikon of the Blessed Virgin and another of St Simeon. I went out into the yard in the middle of the night and tripped over something soft and enormous; a struck match revealed the accusing eye of a couchant buffalo.
We rose before dawn with the first donkey’s bray, sloshed off Turkish coffee with a burning swig of slivo and some bread and white cheese. Mirko refused all payment, tilting his head back and clicking his tongue in that odd negative way that runs all through the Balkans and the Levant. I set out with friendly wishes. This generous hospitality to anyone on the road runs all through the Balkans and reaches its highest peak in Greece. Nights like these dotted the rest of my itinerary through Bulgaria. The day was succeeded by an almost identical one the same evening, in the little town of Samokov, after a long trudge along a river valley with the hills growing steeper and a stiff range of mountains looming ahead: the Rilska Planina.
I was in amongst them next day. These were not huge rounded barriers like the Great Balkan range but a sharp and steep sierra zigzagged with shadowy valleys and darkly thatched with fir and pine, and above it, after gruelling hours of climbing, I saw that these were the buttresses of a mass of cordilleras multiplying southwards in chaos. They reached their zenith a league or two to the east of my track, in the tall bare blade of Moussalà and to the west in a lesser peak called, I think, Rupitè, though I have searched maps for it in vain. This massif is the north-western curve of the Rhodope mountains. They swing south-east along the whole southern border, and the watershed forms Bulgaria’s frontier with Greece; then it melts away into European Turkey.
Over the nearest watershed, I dropped into a high enclosed region. It was the wolf and the bear world once more, with eagles drifting on still wings from canyon to canyon. Here and there, under the sunless lee of wild horns of rock, a few discoloured patches of snow still lingered. The rest was a burning wilderness of boulders and dried-up torrent beds that must be a tangled spate in winter. Dead trees, bleached white by the sun, looked like the dismembered bones of prehistoric beasts. My footfall sent a long snake flickering to the shelter of a thyme thicket. All afternoon the valley descended from ledge to ledge in a giant staircase. The sound of a miniature landslide would echo and ricochet from rock face to rock face for many seconds, dwindling along the ravine and dying away in the universal hush. The trees changed from conifers to spreading deciduous shade. In basins of rock, one below the other, two circular tarns reflected the clear blue of the sky. Flocks tinkled out of sight, a pathway began to define itself, and the report of a woodman’s axe hinted that habitation was near.
• • •
A twist in the valley and a leaf-fringed glance through a clearing brought my destination into sight. This was a fortress-like building, almost a small towered city, embedded in fold after fold of beech trees and pine. The southern ramparts sank into the gorge, and the five tall walls and the tiled roofs formed a lopsided pentagon round the deep well of a courtyard, lined within by many ascending tiers of a slender-pillared gallery hoisted on semicircular arches. In the centre of this courtyard, the great metal dome of a church, poised on a slit-windowed cylinder, floated above a bubbling swarm of shallow satellite cupolas, all of them gleaming and softly shadowed under the westerly sun. Sunbeams glittered in the intricacies of the topmost cross and lay the shadow of a yew tree across the wall-girt flagstones. As I descended from my hawkish height, the gold patches of light inside the walls shrank and faded and shadows accumulated in the well of walls. Suddenly a metallic tattoo struck up from the enclosure as though a musical smith were hammering out a rhythmic pattern on his anvil. The tempo gradually waxed to a brisker and still brisker pace and by the time I reached the dark archway of the barbican, the walls were reverberating. The noise stopped abruptly and left the dusk humming. A black-robed monk replaced his summoning hammer on a gong-like sheet of metal hanging from a cloister arch. Other monks, with black veils floating from their stovepipe hats, were entering the church which was already filled by a horde of laymen in all the costumes of northern Macedonia, hailed thither by the clangour from the trees under which they were camping. These rough gongs or semantra – klapka, I think, in Bulgarian – are sometimes replaced by long beams of wood; they play the part of bells in most Orthodox monasteries, as now for the feast of Sveti Ivan Rilski.
St John of Rila is only surpassed in venerability by SS Cyril and Methodius, the inventors of the Cyrillic script, and by St Simeon, in Bulgarian hagiography. The great monastery that he founded near his hermitage in these lonely mountains is, in a sense, the most important religious centre in the kingdom. The church, burnt down again and again in the disturbed past of Bulgaria, was rebuilt in the last century. The poor quality of the frescoes which smothered every inch of interior wall space and the brazen proliferation of the ikonostasis was mitigated by the candlelight. The Slav liturgy of vespers boomed out by a score of black-clad and long-haired and long-bearded monks, all leaning or standing in their miserere stalls, sounded marvellous. It continued for hours. Afterwards, charitably singled out as a foreigner, I was given a little cell to myself, although the monastery was so full that villagers were sleeping out with their bundles all over the yard and under the trees. Many more arrived next day and the inside of the church virtually seized up with the pious multitude. There were an archbishop and several bishops and archimandrites besides the abbot and his retinue. They officiated in copes as stiff and brilliant as beetles’ wings, and the higher clergy, coiffed with globular gold mitres the size of pumpkins and glistening with gems, leaned on croziers topped with twin coiling snakes. They evolved and chanted in aromatic clouds of smoke diagonally pierced by sun shafts. When all was over, a compact crocodile of votaries shuffled its way round the church to kiss St Ivan’s ikon and his thaumaturgic hand, black now as a briar root, inside its jewelled reliquary.
For the rest of the day, the glade outside the monastery was star-scattered with merrymaking pilgrims. At their heart an indefatigable ring of dancers rotated in the hora to the tune of a violin, a lute, a zither and a clarinet, ably played by Gypsies. Another Gypsy had brought his bear with him; it danced a joyless hornpipe and clapped its paws and played the tambourine to the beat of its master’s drum. A further castanet-like clashing came from an itinerant Albanian striking brass cups together, pouring out helpings of the sweetish, kvass-like boza[7] from a spigot in a
tasselled brass vessel four feet high, shaped like a mosque, its Taj Mahal dome topped by a little brass bird with wings splayed. Kebab and stuffed entrails were being grilled in culinary tabernacles as bristling with spitted and skewered meat as a shrike’s larder. Slivo and wine were reaching high tide. The lurching kalpacked villagers offered every newcomer their circular flasks of carved wood. (Elaborate woodwork plays a great part in the lives of Balkan mountaineers from the Carpathians to the Pindus in Greece, where it reaches its wildest pitch of elaboration. The same phenomenon applies to the Alps: the conjunction of harsh winters, long evenings, soft wood and sharp knives.) Under the leaves, a party of bright-aproned women sat round the feet of a shaggy bagpiper pumping out breathless pibrochs.
On the edge of this vast Balkan wassail I fell in with a party of students from Plovdiv. Like me they had come over the mountains, and were camping out. The most remarkable of these was an amusing, very pretty, fair-haired, frowning girl called Nadejda, who was studying French literature at Sofia University: a nimble hora dancer and endowed with unquenchable high spirits. She was staying on at the monastery three days to do some reading, which was exactly the length of my intended stay. We became friends at once. Apart from the stern rule of Mount Athos, women are just as welcome guests as men in most Orthodox monasteries. Bestowing hospitality seems almost the entire monastic function and the atmosphere of these cloisters is very different from the silence and recollection of abbeys in western Christendom. With its clattering hooves and constant arrivals and departures and the cheerful expansiveness of the monks, life was more like that of a castle in the Middle Ages. The planks in the tiers of galleries and catwalks were so worn and unsteady that too brisk a footfall would set the whole fabric shaking like a spider’s web. The courtyards are forever a-clatter with mules. The father Abbot, the Otetz Igoumen, a benign figure with an Olympian white beard and his locks tied in a bun like a lady out hunting, spent most of his day receiving ceremonial calls: occasions always ratified, as they are everywhere else south of the Danube, by offering a spoonful of sherbet or rose petal jam or a powdery cube of rahat loukoum, a gulp of slivo, a cup of Turkish coffee and a glass of water, to help along the formal affabilities of the visit.
The place relapsed into comparative quiet next day. The great company of pilgrims, after dancing and snoring the night through on the grass, reloaded their beasts and carried a thousand hangovers down the valley.
• • •
Nadejda turned out a splendid companion. Each morning we would take books and drawing things, buy cheese, bread, wine, purple and green figs and grapes (which arrived from the plains in immense baskets) from a canteen outside the walls, and then set off for the woods, passing on the way the slab under which J. D. Bourchier[8] is buried. (The passion of Bulgarians for this ex-Eton master and Times correspondent earned him a position in the country and a memory which is similar, in a lesser degree, to that of Byron in Greece.) We read and talked and finally picnicked on a shady ledge. Most of Nadejda’s homework seemed to be the learning by heart of Lamartine’s Le Lac – ‘He stayed in Plovdiv,’ she said, to my surprise, ‘I’ll show you his house one day’ – and, rather inappropriately, Théodore de Banville’s Nous n’irons plus aux bois. I had to hear and correct her again and again. Then she would return to her books, putting on a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles that looked amazing and incongruous on that rather wild face, until she got bored with it and suggested something else like climbing a tree, which she did with great speed and skill, or, on the last day before she left, bathing in one of the pools in the canyon, or merely lying and talking on the grass. We discovered to our delight that we were within one day of being twins.
These delightful forest days sped fast in this comic and charming company. When the semantron began to clang from the cloisters the evening before she left, we set off down the hill to the monastery. She told me that it commemorated Noah calling the animals into the ark by beating on the lintel with his hammer: ‘that’s why they are usually made of wood.’ I asked her what animals there were. She thought for a second, then bared her teeth and fixed me with scowling brown eyes and said, ‘Wolves’, and after a pause, ‘young ones’, and we charged down through the trees howling.
• • •
I left soon after Nadjeda, following the gorge downhill until it joined the deep valley of the Strouma. This great river, the ancient Strymon, flows into the heart of Macedonia between the Pirin mountains and the ranges of the Yugoslav border. (These mountains roll away westward across Yugoslav Macedonia until they reach the vastnesses of Albania and Montenegro and plunge into the distant Adriatic.) Then the road and the river corkscrew south through the baleful gorge of Rupel and into Greece under the battlements of Siderokastron: Demirhissar in Turkish times, the Iron Castle. All this is a hotly debated region, which all three countries claim should be theirs and they glower at each other from range to range with implacable hatred. This whirlpool of mountains has always been a theatre of strife. During the last decades of the Ottoman Empire until the Balkan wars, deadly warfare was waged here between the Bulgarian Comitadjis – the partisans of the dissident Bulgarian Exarchate, revived from mediaeval times – and the Greek Antartes of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the nearest equivalent to the papacy in the Orthodox Church. These religious factors were as crucial as race and language in supporting claims to territory and in the ruling of frontiers when the Turkish power in Europe collapsed. It was destroyed for ever by the massed onslaught of the Balkan kingdoms in the brief concord of the First Balkan War: concord which turned into savage fighting over the spoils in the Second. The frontiers have changed again and again in all the subsequent conflicts, and each step in these struggles has been marked by horror: ambush, assassination, burnt villages, uprooting and massacres leaving behind them the curses of fear, hatred, irredentism and thirst for revenge.
The Balkan races overlap and dovetail in Macedonia with haphazard geography; ethnological rock pools and minorities are scattered in hostile regions far from their parent masses. These ancient hatreds burn as fiercely today as ever they did: one has only to hear the virulence with which the word Grtzki is snarled by a Bulgar, or the word Voulgaros by a Greek, to grasp their intensity. On the walls of many of the cafés in this region hung coloured prints of Todor Alexandroff, a Bulgarian Macedonian who had attempted, by propaganda and guerrilla warfare, to hack out a semi-independent state of Macedonia with the capital at Petrich (now in Yugoslavia) and himself at its head: a formidable black-bearded man he looks in his picture, scowling under a fur cap, slung with bandoliers and binoculars and grasping a rifle. Like many prominent Bulgarians – Stambouliski,[9] especially, springs to mind, who was hacked to pieces with yataghans in the main street in Sofia – Alexandroff was assassinated, in 1924. But his secret society, the Vatreshna Makedonska Revolutzionerna Organizatzio – the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization – still, it was darkly whispered, flourished clandestinely. Also prominent on many walls were maps illustrating the terra irridenta that Bulgaria claimed from her neighbours: lumps of Yugoslavia, the Dobrudja in Rumania and, preposterously, Greek Macedonia including Salonika.
Leaning over the Strouma bridge and gazing along the river, I had no inkling how strongly, later on, I was to feel on the Greek side in these questions. I would have been still more surprised if I could have foreseen that five months later, I would be pounding across another bridge over the same river, at Orliako, a hundred miles downstream, alongside a squadron of Greek cavalry with drawn sabres, in the Venizelos Revolution. As it was, I dropped a vine leaf in mid-stream and wondered whether it would ever reach the Aegean Sea.
• • •
The way back to Sofia lay through the western foothills of the Rilska Planina: rolling dun-coloured country that turned red at sunset with prehistoric wooden ploughs drawn by buffaloes or oxen. In the villages, the houses were looped with festoons of tobacco leaves drying in the sun, the size, colour and shape of kippers. I slept in a rick, the first
night, reached the little town of Dupnitza on the next and got to Radomir the following dusk. I was drinking a lonely slivo and feeling tired and a bit depressed when a bus stopped opposite with СОФИЯ inscribed across the top, and a roof laden with a host of roped baskets and bundles. Inside, it was a Noah’s ark indeed, for, in every inch not occupied by my kerchiefed and kalpacked fellow passengers, were trussed chickens and ducks, a turkey and two full-grown lambs that bleated shrilly from time to time. We rocked and clanked through the darkness. The half a dozen passengers next to me sang quietly all the way: sad fluttering patterns of sound in the minor mode, quite different from the robust strains I had heard so often lately. I listened entranced. I asked for a particular one over and over again – ‘Zashto ti se sirdish, liube?’[10] the first line ran – and determined to try and master it later.
After this brief absence in the mountains, the lights of Sofia glittered as brightly as those of Paris, London or Vienna, so resplendent and metropolitan did they seem. I must have been an uncouth spectacle with long, unkempt and dust-clogged hair bleached to a shaggy tow and a face burnt to the hue of a walnut sideboard by the sun; rumpled clothes, a rucksack and a carved Hungarian walking-stick; also – I blush, now, to set it down, but honesty compels it – a scarlet and yellow braid belt bought in Transylvania, a steel-hilted dagger and a brown kalpack from the fair in Berkovitza. I had even taken off my heavy nailed boots to try out a pair of those cowhide moccasins they call tzervuli, but after a mile I found them – without the swaddling the peasants use – tormenting except on grass. This hybrid pseudo-Balkan guise was made all the more nightmarish now by a spectral envelope of white dust, and, no doubt, by a less palpable but far-flying aura of earth, sweat, onions, garlic and slivo.
The Broken Road Page 3