The Broken Road

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  In yet another quarter, the first names would become Isaak, Yakob, Avram, Khaim or Nahum, and inside, presiding among serried bolts of material, or measuring off cascades of cotton or satin, would be Sephardic Jews. Quite unlike my hosts in the Banat,[1] who belonged to the Ashkenazim, the northern branch of Jewry stretching from the heart of Russia to the Atlantic, the Sephardim are the southern branch of this great family. They arrived here, after the destruction of the temple at Jerusalem under Titus, by a long route: they had followed the conquering Moors across North Africa and into Spain. They flourished there for centuries, under the enlightened emirs of Andalusia, as merchants, scientists, physicians, philosophers and poets and reached their zenith in Maimonides. After the reconquest of Granada in 1492 – the year of Columbus – by Ferdinand and Isabella, the Inquisition expelled them again, some of them scattering, like their refugee cousins from Portugal, to those parts of the Netherlands that challenged the might of Spain; or, in the following decades, to the newly discovered Americas; to Pernambuco in Brazil and then to the Caribbean. It is from the Sephardim that Spinoza sprang, and, in England, families with names like Lopez and Montefiore, Mendoza the boxer, and Disraeli. But most of them moved eastward again, back to the Levant; contingents settled on the Tuscan coast at Leghorn and Grosseto as guests of the Medici; the rest of them found asylum in the Ottoman realms, where they were welcomed by the Sultans. They settled in trading ports like Constantinople, Salonika, Smyrna and Rhodes, landing, it is said, with nothing but the scrolls of the law and the massive keys of their houses in Cordova, Granada or Cadiz, which, though I have never (in spite of asking) seen, they are still said to treasure. They spread to the lesser Balkan towns during the reigns of Bajazet II, Selim the Grim and Suleiman the Magnificent. They still spoke, I had heard, a version of fifteenth-century Andalusian Spanish called Ladino. I listened beside the counter and heard with delight: ‘Que’tal, Hozum? Mu’ bien! Y yo tambien.’

  There was one group of supreme interest and rareness: the Uniat Catholic community. Not so much because they were a small atoll of allegiance to Rome in an ocean of Orthodoxy but because of the reasons for this singularity. During the early centuries of Christianity, the Dualist heresy sprang up in Asia Minor, a belief which owed much to Gnostic thought and much to the Zoroastrians of Persia, in which Ormuzd and Ahriman, the powers of Light and Darkness, or Good and Evil, are of equal dignity and evenly matched in a never-ending duel for the souls of mankind. The votaries of this belief were simple and often virtuous folk; but their strange dogmas (which, among many other tenets, included neglect of the Virgin Mary, detestation of the Cross, and a search for salvation through the abhorrence of matter and the eventual extinction of the human race) seemed, understandably, revolutionary to formal Christians, and also wicked and blasphemous. They encountered the merciless rigour of Church and State. Manichaeism, as the heresy is generally called, spread, in time, all over southern Christendom, darkly blossoming under a score of different names. A whole population of Manichaeans, locally known as Paulicians, were uprooted from the Euphrates by the Emperor Alexis Comnene in the ninth century, and exiled to the region of Philippopolis, today’s Plovdiv. Here, under the style of Bogomils – so called from the name of the local heresiarch – an identical belief was already in full bloom. From Bulgaria it spread westwards; the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina are Islamized Bogomils. Eastern merchants, abetted locally, perhaps, by the troubadours, carried the forbidden doctrines yet further west and its votaries, the Cathars or Albigensians, abounded in the towns and castles of Provence and Languedoc. Simon de Montfort put them down with rigour in the Albigensian Crusade and the survivors were burnt alive after their last stand in the fortress of Montségur, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. The last adherents to survive as a coherent group, still – albeit heretically – within the framework of Christendom, were the original transplanted Paulicians of Philippopolis, who were finally won over to Roman submission by Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century. Their church, by the banks of the Maritza, still stands. In spite of its origins in Asia Minor, the heresy in the West has always been identified with Bulgaria. Thus, the mediaeval French styled their own heretics ‘bougres’; and it is from the suspected belief that the Manichaean bias against reproduction misled them into sexual, as well as doctrinal, heterodoxy, that the word ‘bugger’ first came to enrich the English language.

  There was much to wonder at. I loitered for hours in this labyrinth, and sat outside a coffee shop under a trellis, ears wide open – in spite of the dog-eared smack of cards resounding from the beamy shadows within and the clash and rattle of dice and backgammon counters – for the many languages and dialects which sounded in these corridors of shade. This total was now increased by the murmur of Romany from two Gypsy women squatting nearby on the cobbles, smoking cigarettes held in slender steel-ringed fingers. Gypsies were numerous on the outskirts of this moving throng, adding the yellow, orange, scarlet, mauve and purple hues of their many-tiered skirts and headkerchiefs to the colours which already abounded there. A monk, in a patched black habit and rimless stovepipe, hobbled past with a melon under each arm; a Gypsy smith opposite hammered a flat petal of steel to the hind hoof of a donkey. I drank in a composite aroma which seemed the substantive essence of the Balkans, compounded of sweat, dust, singeing horn, blood, nargileh-smoke, dung, slivo, wine, roasting mutton, spice and coffee, laced with a drop of attar of roses and a drift of incense, and wondered whether Alexander, as a boy, had ever seen this town which his father fortified on the eastern march of his kingdom against the Thracian tribes. It was enlarged by Trajan and Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius. Rather sadly, it was believed to be the place where Orpheus, breaking his vow by looking at her on the way back from Hades, lost Eurydice.

  How odd to think that of all the races now assembled here only, possibly, the Greeks would have been present here when it was founded, unless their own theories of the origins of the Pomaks are correct. The Bulgars would have still been far away between the Volga and the Urals, and the Slavs, whose country and language they took over, were still far to the north, between the Vistula and the Dniester, in the Pripet marshes perhaps. The Turks would have been wandering about somewhere on the Mongolian steppes, the Kizilbashi in the Iranian plains or mountains, the Sephardim still settled in Judah or Babylon, the Vlachs in the Dacian highlands across the Danube, the Albanians in Illyria or the Acroceraunian mountains, the Armenians under Mount Ararat or by the shores of Lake Van, the ex-Paulician Catholics by the Euphrates, the Gypsies on some burning Dravidian plain near the frontiers of Baluchistan. And that Negro saddler, in what Nubian valley or lion-haunted and leafy kingdom of the upper Nile or in Ethiopia were his ancestors living then? And, for that matter, what shaggy loins, in what Hibernian bog, druidical forest, sunless fjord, Saxon settlement by the Elbe’s mouth or the dismal Jutish coast, were ultimately answerable for me?

  Time for another slivo and a couple of roast paprika-pods. A shadow appeared on the awnings further up the lane, gliding across each rectangle of canvas towards my table, sinking in the sag, rising again at the edge, and moving on to the next with a flicker of dislocation, then gliding onwards. As it crossed the stripe of sunlight between two awnings, it threaded the crimson beak of a stork through the air, a few inches above the gap; then came a long white neck, the swell of snowy breast feathers and the six-foot motionless span of its white wings and the tips of the black flight feathers upturned and separated as fingers in the lift of the air current. The white belly followed, tapering, and then, trailing beyond, the fan of its tail and long parallel legs of crimson lacquer, the toes of each of them closed and streamlined, but the whole shape flattening, when the band of sunlight was crossed, into a two-dimensional shadow once more, enormously displayed across the rectangle of cloth, as distinct and nearly as immobile, so languid was its flight, as an emblematic bird on a sail; then sliding across it and along the nearly still corridor of air between the invisible eaves and the chimneys, dippin
g along the curl of the lane like a sigh of wonder, and at last, a furlong away slowly pivoting, at a gradual tilt, out of sight. A bird of passage like the rest of us.

  • • •

  There were the Larousse XIXème Siècle and the many volumes of Meyers Konversations-Lexikon in Nadejda’s house, and plenty to look up in both; also numbers of French books from Constantinople, including a tattered translation of the Odyssey, from which, lolling on the divan as she did her ironing, I read great fragments out loud to Nadejda in the sunny upper room. I heard her French recitations again, and introduced her to Baudelaire. My French was a bit better than hers, which redressed the balance of her twenty-four hours seniority in age. She pined, she admitted, to look like a girl student at the Sorbonne. She cut her hair in a fringe and wore a white shirt and black pleated skirt and, whenever she got a chance, a beret at a terrific angle, and succeeded in her ambition very well.

  The second morning of my stay she pulled out of an old chest quantities of marvellous costumes, both Greek and Bulgarian, some of them well over a hundred years old: blouses with great stiff oblongs of embroidery, multicoloured aprons, skirts of bottle green and plum-coloured velvet, and turquoise silk bodices heavy with braid and gold and silver wire with hanging sleeves, stomachers clinking with Austrian and Turkish gold coins, belts which clasped over the midriff in two enormous plates, shaped and arabesqued like Persian flames, of chased silver; silk headkerchiefs and shallow scarlet fezzes with long black satin tassels, and pretty embroidered slippers of velvet and soft red leather. Some of the clothes were barbaric, others wonderfully elegant and romantic. I persuaded her – not too hard a task – to try them all on. She made a series of magnificent entries, rustling and clinking about like a mannequin, standing with her arms akimbo, twirling round on one toe, subsiding on the divan like an odalisque – a Georgian or Circassian one with that mass of fair hair – in languishing postures.

  At the bottom of this treasure chest we discovered a number of chibooks – those obsolete Turkish pipes with cherrywood stems several feet long, small earthenware bowls and amber mouthpieces – and a small arsenal of old weapons; heirlooms, like the clothes: long chased silver flintlock pistols, powder horns, semicircular scimitars, ivory-hilted yataghans and khanjars with Turkish, Greek and Bulgarian inscriptions damascened or incised along their blades. We drew these from their silver scabbards, and, seeing we each had a yataghan in one hand and a scimitar in the other, suddenly launched ourselves with common accord into a fierce mock fight, clashing the blades together overhead, closing corps à corps with grating steel until the hilts were interlocked in front of our snarling faces, breaking loose again, leaping from floor to divan and back, spinning round, groaning and collapsing spread-eagled in feigned death, resurrecting with shouts and a fresh clangour, until Nadejda’s grandfather, alarmed by the shouts and stamping and clashing, called quavering from his room to know what on earth was going on.

  In the back of my notebook Nadejda filled about three pages with phrases in Bulgarian that might come in useful on my travels, printing them in neat Cyrillic capitals which, unlike the cabbalistic tangle of the common script, I could decipher by now. The list began with ‘Sir, I am an Englishman and I am walking on foot from London to Constantinople’: ‘Gospodine, az sum Anglitchanin i az hodya pesha ot London za Tzarigrad.’ Tzarigrad? Yes, Nadejda said, that’s what Constantinople was called in Bulgarian, the City of the Czars, the Byzantine emperors: Caesartown, in fact. Kolko ban? How much money? Mnogo losho, very bad; tchudesno, marvellous; Cherno Moré, the Black Sea; ‘How much does that melon weigh?’ ‘My bed’s full of insects, you scoundrel!’, and so on. I read them slowly out loud and she corrected the pronunciation.[2] They ended up with some splendidly extravagant compliments. ‘You never know when they’ll come in handy,’ she said: ‘Your eyes shine like stars!’ ‘Your hair and your eyes make me weak at the knees.’ ‘You are the most beautiful girl in the world’ and ‘Fly with me!’

  • • •

  Nadejda was a knowledgeable and spirited guide. We gazed at the old Thracian objects in the museum: plaques with warriors and huntsmen on horseback and strangely masked women and a wonderful silver death mask of a young Thracian prince. The beautiful and astonishing treasures of beaten gold that have emerged since the war, and which I have seen only in pictures – the glittering dishes patterned with a radiation of faces, the ewer shaped like a woman’s head, the deer’s head rhyton, the amphorae with handles of prancing centaurs – were still deep underground.

  We visited a little cluster of monasteries on a hill north of the town. Here – for one can’t count the rebuilt church and the modern iconography of Rila – I saw old Byzantine churches (as opposed to their recent imitations) which cover the whole of the Orthodox world, for the first time in my life. Enclosed in walls and surrounded by mellow-slabbed courtyards or cobbles, embowered by trees and masted with cypresses, these walls of grey and russet or honeycomb-gold brick and, poised on window-slotted cylinders, these cupolas of faded tiles curving to their low summits with the loose overlap of pine cone chips when they are just beginning to expand, or encased in steel or in ribbed and fluted lead, were the forerunners of hundreds of churches that I was to explore during the decades that followed. The small domed concavity within, with the soft golden light falling from high windows in the drum, so dark at first, after the blue outside; the semicircular arched doorways through the donjon thickness of the walls of the pronaos into the narthex; the transepts, the apses, the massive ikonostasis – all these were the background for a painted troop of momentous figures: unearthly, etiolated saints and angels, crowned kings and queens, interlocking swarms of haloes, Last Judgements and martyrdoms, each wide-eyed head between its Greek descriptive legend in intricate and flaking Byzantine calligraphy. These astounding frescoed saints were, had I known it, on that particular afternoon, the sentries, the lonely heralds and harbingers of a vast army, scattered in hundreds of churches, that I have pursued ever since for many years, and with deepening delight, from Bukovina, in northern Rumania near the Polish and Russian borders, to Egypt, and from Sicily to Cappadocia.

  I can’t remember the details of these fateful paintings. My virginal and uninstructed eye failed to record them – only the delayed-action vibrations they unloosed; or, rather, only one still sticks: St John the Baptist bearing his head in a dish and strangely winged, and perhaps only this one because he adorned the walls of the monastery of Ivan Preobajenski and I asked what the name meant. Nadejda told me: St John the Forerunner, or, in Greek, Ioannes Prodromos. These peculiar and delible frescoes performed their quiet task of introduction and discreetly withdrew. For that matter, were the domes tiled or were they sheeted in steel or lead – or both, as I boldly set down a moment ago? Or is it the intervening years that have tiled and leaded and metalled them so arbitrarily? Doubt springs. It doesn’t matter, but it is odd that memory should be so evasive about the faces and the scene of this momentous interview and so crystalline about irrelevances: the green shade of the overhead vine outside, for instance, and, on the slabs beneath, the random stars and diamonds of light; and, a bit later, sitting under a huge plane tree talking about Les Fleurs du mal. One is only sometimes warned, when these processes begin, of their crucial importance: that certain poems, paintings, kinds of music, books, or ideas are going to change everything, or that one is going to fall in love or become friends for life; the many lengthening strands, in fact, which, plaited together, compose a lifetime. One should be able to detect the muffled bang of the starter’s gun. This journey was punctuated with these inaudible reports: daysprings veiled and epiphanies in plain clothes.

  • • •

  In a garden in the modern centre of the town, among the civic flower beds and the avenues and the trim public buildings and the banks, there was a concrete disc of dancing floor and a band prettily embowered in trees strung with coloured lamps where the flower of the Plovdiv intelligentsia assembled at night. I was taken there by Nadejda and a
party of students, some of whom I had met at Rila. To the ones I hadn’t met, I was introduced, with offhand ease, as ‘my twin’ – the day’s time-lag had been quietly suppressed. The tunes the band played were even more out of date than they had been in Transylvania. There were a few foxtrots, but old-fashioned waltzes from Central Europe were more popular and, above all, tangoes, which I had scarcely ever danced. I attempted them now in a terrible pair of brown tennis shoes bought in Orșova; rather unfeatly at first, then passably, modelling myself on the passionate gravity of the Philippopolitans who crowded the floor. A woman singer dashingly delivered the words in German from the bandstand: ‘O Donna KLA-ra,’ she sang, as we slunk scowling along, ‘Ich hab Dich TANZen – geSEHN, O Donna KLA – RA – Du – bist – WUNDerschön!’

  After a couple of hours, prompted by the moonlight, our group sneaked away, armed with a bottle of wine, to a boat in the Maritza, and rowed out on to the wide river singing and drinking in turn from the same glass and moored under a clump of trees. This mild mixed party, it seemed, was in the nature of a tremendous escapade for Bulgaria, even though two of the girls were sisters of two of the boys and a third was almost engaged to another, a young officer cadet. We began challenging each other to drink a whole tumblerful of wine at a single draught and at high speed. The girls hung back from the ordeal, and returned the glass after spluttering, niminy-piminy sips; all, I observed with admiration, except Nadejda. She cried, ‘za zdrave!’ and threw a tumblerful down her throat at one long gulp and then shuddered like a dog, tossing her fair mane amid applause. When, as always happens on such occasions, it was the stranger’s turn to sing one of his native songs, I fell back, as I had learnt to by trial and error, on There is a Tavern in the Town, which I strongly recommend for those in a similar predicament. It can be sung con brio or adagio, depending on the prevailing mood, and it is soon over. Either this or Those Endearing Young Charms. I was impatient to return to their own tunes. At last, and with great delight, I heard, and finally learnt the words, of that strange wavering song the women had sung in the bus from Radomir. I got the students to perform it by humming what I could remember of the tune: ‘Zashto mi se sirdish, liube?’ (‘Why are you angry with me, my love? Why do you shun me? Is it that you have no horse, or that you have forgotten the way?’)