• • •
I was woken next day by the same high-pitched intoning of prayer, the light this time striking the minaret on the opposite flank. How odd, I thought, as I set off, that the relics of the Turks in Europe, to which, after all, they brought nothing but calamity, should be distinguished by so much charm and grace: the architecture of houses, the carved wooden ceilings, the baroque plaster work, the wells and fountains, the pillared loggias and above all, these globes and these elegantly ascending pinnacles that ennoble the skyline of the meanest hamlet. The latter, in big towns, sometimes crowd as plentifully as an asparagus bed; and what about those colonies of shallow cupolas swelling from the roofs of hammams and round the cloisters of tekkes and madressehs? Their architects understood the use of shade and space and trees and the manipulation of water for purposes of ease and repose and pleasure to the eye. It is impossible too to think without delight of those slender, almost semicircular bridges with which the Seljuks and the Ottomans have spanned unnumbered rivers and torrent beds from the Balkans to the Taurus mountains. They float from flank to flank of ravines – away from the plane trees and oleanders and the darting wagtails – as airily as rainbows.
Against all this one must set the fact that the Turks were the only people in Bulgaria, apart from the collaborating Tchorbaji landowners, who had the right or the means, in these subject territories, to build anything more aspiring than a hovel; also that these formulae were adapted from the Byzantine style that they discovered in their newly conquered empire. Byzantine architects and masons, indeed, designed a number of the great mosques; but nevertheless, a separate Turkish style does exist in its own right. The suavity and the ceremony that dignifies their greetings, even among these ragged and dusty survivors, may, like the buildings and gardens and fountains, owe much to their early neighbours; for, when they first arrived from the steppes and slowed down and took root in Asia Minor, these neighbours were, apart from faraway China, the most civilized nations in the world: the Greeks, the Persians and the Arabs. All this is so; but one must rejoice that the Turks had the wisdom to follow these models and later, when they were not ordering the bastinado, the bowstring and the gallows (or, as late as 1876, the Bulgarian atrocities that horrified Gladstone and – no doubt to the Turks’ sincere astonishment – the whole world) they were laying out gardens and fountains, decreeing pleasure domes and plotting the fall of a shadow. The Ottoman Empire has joined the eastern Roman Empire which it destroyed; but a posthumous and perhaps deceptive glow of charm and elegance pervades its mementoes. How apt are these shady gardens for drinking coffee and for meditation, for listening to stringed instruments or the tales of the Forty Vizirs and the loves of Leila and Majnoon!
One of these mementoes lay just outside the town: a cypress-shaded Turkish cemetery with a forest of turbaned monoliths, and among them, tearing with the point of his sickle at the weeds which had been hardy enough to outlive the summer, the hodja himself. He straightened up with his fluttering salute and a wrinkled smile and we stood happily tongue-tied among the stones. Some of the marble pillars were only a foot high and topped by a sculptured fez, some of them nearly as tall as a man, all of them swelling as they ascended. The lower and older ones, chipped, split, tilted askew and leaning at all angles, were crowned with extravagant carved headgear. (The fez, imposed by Mahmoud II in the 1820s and abolished by Atatürk inside the frontiers of Turkey in the 1920s, had exactly a century’s official life.) They expanded like giant pumpkins and vegetable marrows, intricately pleated round a cone, and sometimes a helmet’s point pricked through the bulbous folds; others were coil upon stone coil of twisted linen; yet others, jutting fluted cylinders adorned with broken aigrettes. What pashas and agas and beys, what swaggering bimbashis, what miralais with mandarin whiskers, could have worn these portentous headpieces? I would have known if I had understood Turkish, for their moss-covered biographies, in Arabic script and enclosed in tapering baroque cartouches, were incised on the stelae below. The hodja haltingly read out a few of them: Osman, Selim, Mehmet, Abdul-Aziz, Djem, Mustapha, Omar, Ferid . . . Each inscription ended with the same two melodious words, at which, each time he uttered them, the hodja’s voice reverently fell. There is something haunting, almost Hawaian, about the airy vowels. I only learnt years later, what they mean: it is ‘murmur a fàtiha’. The fàtiha is the first sura of the Koran: ‘Glory be to Allah, the lord of all the worlds.’ It is almost as frequent a prayer as the alliterative syllables from the same sura without which little, in Islam, begins or ends: ‘Bismillah ar rahman ar raheem’: ‘in the name of Allah, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful, whose pity is without bounds’.
• • •
Below, the Tunja river meandered eastwards at the bottom of a wide valley. The path I followed on the flank of the Great Balkan range, high above the main road and the river, heaved its way along from dry torrent-bed to buttress, down into the next torrent-bed and out again, in a series of scallops. The side of the Balkans sloped upwards on my left, occasionally showing perpendicular cliffs, then subsided again. Shepherds leaned on their crooks grazing their tinkling flocks across the thorny slant of the middle distance. I waited to see whether they were wearing sheepskin kalpacks or the turban and fez – for both wore the same broad scarlet sashes discernible from afar – and then shouted ‘Dobro utro’ or ‘Salaam aleikum!’ accordingly. It is the duty of strangers to greet first. After a few seconds, back would come their answering hail. Some of the hamlets far below were clustered round the alert perpendicular of a minaret. After one of these affable long-distance exchanges with a Turk pasturing his flock about a furlong up the slope, my interlocutor began shouting something. Thinking that he was asking, in the usual way, where I was going, I shouted back: ‘za Tzarigrad’ ‘and then ‘Istanbul’. He waved the information aside and continued to shout, pointing westwards up the mountainside with his crook. Something unusual was happening there.
An indistinct blur darkened the air above a notch in the skyline: a wide blur that seemed almost solid in the centre. It thinned out round the edges in a fringe of numberless moving specks as though the wind were blowing across a vast heap of dust or soot or feathers just out of sight. The shoulder of mountain passed, this moving mass, continually renewed from beyond the skyline, dipped out of silhouette on our side of the range and began to expand and to declare itself as more comparable to feathers than to dust or to soot; it became predominantly whiter. The vanguard spread wider still as it sank lower and grew larger, rocking and fluctuating and heading for exactly the stretch of mountainside where we were standing so raptly at gaze. It was a slow airborne horde, enormous and awe-inspiring, composed of myriads of birds, their leaders becoming distinguishable now as they sailed towards us on almost motionless wings, and at last, as they outlined themselves once more against the sky, identifiable. Storks! Soon a ragged party of skirmishers was floating immediately above, straight as the keels of canoes from the tips of their bills to the ends of their legs that streamed behind each one of them like a wake, balanced between the almost motionless span of their great wings, the sunlight falling golden between the comparative transparency of their feathers and the dark bobbin-shaped outline of their craned throats. Only their outstretched feathers flickered. The broad black edge of their wings stretched from the tips to where they joined the body in a dark senatorial stripe. The leaders were soon beyond us. A few solitary birds followed, and then all at once we were under a high shifting roof of wings, a flotilla that was thickening into an armada, until our ears were full of the sound of rustling and rushing with a flutter now and then when a bird changed position in a slow wingbeat or two, and of the strange massed creaking, as of many delicate hinges, of a myriad slender joints. They benighted the air. A ragged shadow dappled the mountainside all round us. A number of birds flew below the main stream of their companions, cruising along in their shade, others alone or in small parties were flung out on either side like system-less outriders. One of the low fliers subsided
to the mountainside through the fluctuating penumbra under an inward slanting V of wings, and suddenly earthbound, took one or two awkward steps on its bent scarlet stilts, its wings still outstretched like a tightrope-walker’s pole. After shaking its beaked head once or twice, it levered itself into the air and rose again with slow and effortless beats to the sliding pavilion of feathers overhead. Looking back, the specks were still showering over the skyline as plentifully as ever, then sinking a little way down the mountainside like a steady waterfall and out again almost at once and over the valley in a sinuous and unbroken curve. The leaders, and soon the first units of the main horde, had now sunk just below the level of our line of sight: we could see the sunlight on the backs and wings of their followers as their line lengthened. Their irregular drawn-out mass, rocking and tilting and disturbed by living eddies and with a whirlpool flutter and ruffle round the outskirts, moved beyond the great empty gulf of air between the 6,000-foot watershed of the Shipka Balkan, which they had just crossed, and the lesser heights of the Karadja Dagh. Soon their leaders were dwindling to specks, then all of them began to cohere in a dark blur, high above their long irregular shadow, which followed them a mile below their flight like the shadows of a navy on the sea bed. Gradually the supply began to dwindle; the rope of birds grew thinner, the loose-knit parties smaller, until at last there was nothing but a straggling rearguard gliding eastwards. Several minutes later, when the last of them had winged away over the wide valley of the Tunja, an ultimate stork passed overhead beating a slow and solitary path: Make haste! one felt like crying. They had soon become a long slow swerve effortlessly navigating the invisible currents of the sky, growing dimmer and dimmer until at last they vanished from our straining eyes, leagues away down the Balkan corridor.
The Turkish shepherd shrugged his shoulders and raised his arms and then let them drop in an ample outward sweep that seemed to say, ‘Well, there we are. They’ve gone’, but shouted nothing, as though, like me, he felt too overcome for speech. Perhaps, like me, he was saddened in the thought that these beautiful and auspicious birds, the companions of the spring and the summer, were abandoning Europe.
I wondered where they were coming from. Judging by the direction, it would be Transylvania and Hungary, perhaps from Poland. They settle in summer as far north as the Baltic. The storks of Eastern Europe, western Russia and the Ukraine usually congregate more to the north and the east of the line these had been following. The Dobrudja is their meeting place. Then they follow the Black Sea coast to Constantinople, across the Bosphorus and along the shores of the Levant to Egypt, keeping in sight of land all the way. (Unlike the cranes: these, undaunted by the open sea, fly across the Greek archipelago and Crete and the empty expanse of the Libyan Sea until they strike the desert.) When the storks reach Egypt, some of them head south-east to the Arabian oases, but most of them continue southward, heading for the Equator and often beyond. A minority of them spread westwards as far as Lake Chad and the Cameroons: some have been found, on their return to Europe, with arrowheads embedded in them of a kind only made by the tribes of those regions. Here they must encounter the eastern-spreading fringe of their West Europe relations – from Alsace-Lorraine and Spain and Portugal – who cross into Africa at Gibraltar and fly southwards across Morocco and the Sahara. As all the storks of Europe cross by one of these two narrows – the Bosphorus and the Pillars of Hercules – the two bird communities might be conveniently classified as the Byzantine and the Herculean.
I don’t know the exact date of the passing I had just witnessed, but it must have been well on in September. Nothing had indicated a change of season: no hint that the autumn equinox was not far off. Everything in that charred landscape still spoke of summer; everything, that is, except a slight truce from the wringing heat of solstice and a scarcely perceptible advance of sunset. Everyone had been remarking on the phenomenally long sojourn of the storks this year. The birds too must have been deluded by the amazing summer into thinking that warm days would never cease. What subconscious intimations of the shift of the earth’s axis had told them that it was time to go? A drop in temperature, moisture in the air, an assembly of vapours, the warning formation of a distant cumulus, or a faint breeze from an ominous quarter? A syndrome of hints: Worthies away! The scene begins to cloud!
• • •
It was a great surprise, in the town of Kazanlik, after a long day’s trudge, to be led by a boy in a café, with an insistence that was not to be withstood and as though it had been prearranged, to the house of a compatriot. Really, an Englishman, I asked the boy? Da, da Gospodin! Anglitchanin! And he was quite right, for there, under the trees in his garden, at the head of a table, with spectacles and thick white hair, sat my unmistakeable countryman, Mr Barnaby Crane. I displayed becoming confusion about bursting in on him at a meal. ‘Don’t be soft, lad,’ Mr Crane said jovially. ‘Sit down and have some supper’; so I did as I was told. Mr Crane, who was from the North Country, had settled and married in Bulgaria countless years before and sunk deep roots. So deep, indeed, that I noticed several times during the evening that his discourse, scanned by the leisurely click of the green tasselled string of amber beads in his right hand, was halted by the search for a word which would have come more readily to his lips in Bulgarian. His memories of England, dormant for many years and silted over by the decades of his Balkan sojourn, were becoming dim and effaced. Mild homesickness pervaded the Laurentian scenes of his youth: horse-buses in Manchester bristling with billycock hats, Sunday rambles by bicycle against a skyline of Satanic mills. He had come to Bulgaria in connection with the beginnings of the textile industry and was now, as he deserved to be, a loved and respected figure in Kazanlik. I felt, when we said goodbye, that he would never see Lancashire again. The Stara Planina and Karadja Dagh had stolen his heart away.
• • •
The entire valley is covered with rose bushes, hundreds of thousands of them, all despoiled now by the long summer and the fingers of rose-harvesters; for Kazanlik is one of the chief places in the world for attar of roses, that powerful distillation of rose oil which was so highly prized in the courts and harems of the Orient, especially in India and Persia. The deep crimson, yellow-centred Damascus rose, famous for the sweetness and pungency of its scent, is the favourite flower for attar, and armies of men and women toil in the valley gathering the petals, culling them soon after dawn, before the high sun can drain them of the dew and the perfume which the night hours have been storing up. Then in Kazanlik, these showers of petals are poured into enormous vats, the oil is collected and the grey slush of petals, stripped of colour and scent, is thrown away. The precious remainder, then, like Calvados in autumn in Normandy, is distilled through a battery of alembics and so concentrated in the essence which finally emerges that it takes over three thousand pounds of rose petals to produce a single pound of attar. The valuable elixir is then bottled in tiny gilt and cut-glass phials, a mere thread of attar to each, and sold, understandably, for enormous prices. The smell is captious, overpowering and a little cloying. The perfumes of Arabia that, in spite of their power, failed to chase the reek of Duncan’s blood from the hands of Lady Macbeth, were probably exactly this. At the height of the rose harvest, everything in Kazanlik smells of it. The valley is aswoon, and the petals, bursting out of their sacks on the carts and wagons in which they are piled, scatter the dusty roads with crimson like the lurching retreat to his cavern of a mortally wounded ogre.
Ahead to the north lay the Shipka Balkan, and I was soon climbing through woods of walnut and oak and beech, empty except for an occasional swineherd and a swarm of razor-thin pigs: dark hairy creatures rootling for the beech nuts and acorns which crackled underfoot. The trees died out and the bald and ragged side of the mountain soared steeply, scaled by the road which led to the pass in a succession of long loops that I bisected with scrambling short cuts, reaching, in the afternoon, a wooded ledge of the mountains, where, before my unbelieving eyes, stood a lesser version of the C
athedral of St Basil in Red Square: a cluster of tall and tapering onion domes covered with a glittering and fish-like reticulation of green and gold scales. On these twirling pinnacles gleamed a Russian cross with its three crossbars (the shortest and highest symbolizing the INRI label, and the lowest, placed diagonally against the shaft, the footrest). The monastic buildings gathered about this strange fane were dotted with solitary figures or little groups in those attitudes of rather sad listlessness that accompany penurious and unwanted leisure. Most of them were middle-aged or old; many walked with sticks; their features differed from the Bulgarian cast, and the snatches of Slav conversation contained a greater range of modulation and flexibility than is detectable in the vernacular. Their patched and threadbare clothes were worn with an attempt at self-respecting trimness. The only clerical figure among these lay monastics was a tall benevolent Rasputin with his habit caught in by a wide buckled belt and his fair bobbed hair hatted with a tall velvet cone adorned over the brow by a triple cross.
They were veterans and invalids, about two hundred of them. They had subsisted here, on a pittance from their ex-enemies, ever since the disintegration of the Imperial Russian armies after the Bolshevik Revolution. One of them, an ex-artillery lieutenant who had served in Kolchak’s[2] counter-revolutionary army, conducted me round the buildings. The church and monastery were built after the Russian victory over the Turks in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8. My guide, who spoke perfect French with a captivating Russian accent, explained the campaign over a map as though he had fought in it himself. He described the advance of the Russian armies across the Danube, drew with a stick the dispositions of Generals Skobeloff, Gourko, Prince Mirsky, and the Czarevitch – later Alexander III – and of Suleiman, Osman and Vessil Pashas. He recounted the siege and fall of Plevna, and, above all, after a murderous stalemate of many months, the terrible slaughter in the midwinter snows on the Shipka pass immediately above us. The words of Skobeloff’s despatch at the end of the action, ‘Na Shipke vseo spokoino’ – ‘All quiet over Shipka’ – became famous, and the phrase, to Russians and Bulgars alike – for Bulgarian volunteer battalions had played a brave part in the action – came to epitomize the whole war, which, at the Treaty of San Stefano after the Russian armies advanced to the walls of Constantinople, secured the liberation of Bulgaria from the Turks.
The Broken Road Page 7