The Broken Road

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  The czars of the second Bulgarian empire, the Asens (possibly of Vlach origin), whose stone mementoes covered this rocky hill, were a fierce and drastic dynasty. Imitators and rivals of Byzantium, these Peters and Ivans and Androniks and Kaloyans are as hard to imagine or to bring to life – so scarce are the records and so formal the chronicles that commemorate their treacheries, magnanimities, massacres and conquests – as the frescoed figures that smothered the walls of all the churches and monasteries, many half ruinous now, with which they so prodigally scattered the surrounding heights. Only one of these monasteries was still inhabited, and this one by a little community of nuns. One of them, a pale pretty girl in a black habit and a black pillbox hat covered with a black kerchief knotted under the chin, timidly offered us coffee and a spoonful of jam in a whitewashed guest room.

  We wandered from church to church. In some of them, every available inch of wall was a painted bible scene or a martyrdom. We saw pale kings and princes too, and pale warriors, splendidly dressed in the robes and the armour of those dim courts and scarcely conjecturable wars. Yet the deeds of one of these shadowy twelfth-century czars, Peter Asen II, who spread the frontiers of the Bulgarian state westwards from the shores of the Black Sea clean across the Balkan peninsula to the Adriatic and in the south as far as the Aegean, have left a legacy of unease in Bulgaria, a dream of vanished empire, which has haunted the minds of Bulgarians ever since. This irredentism is, with the Orthodox Church, the only thing to survive from ancient Bulgaria throughout the all-destroying catalepsy of Turkish occupation. This blow, scattering the crowns and sceptres, the czars and princesses and the furred and brocaded boyars, fell on Tirnovo in 1393, sixty years before the capture of Byzantium extinguished the Christian empires and kingdoms of eastern Europe for several centuries. Bulgaria was the first to be subdued by the Turks and almost the last to be liberated.

  How the Bulgars hated the Byzantines, just as their descendants abominate the modern Greeks today – and how abundantly the hatred is returned! With what relish, in the Church of the Forty Martyrs, Gatcho translated the inscriptions commemorating the victory of Ivan Asen over the Byzantine host and the capture of Theodore Comnene! The hatred is epitomized on either side by the act of one Byzantine emperor, Basil the Bulgar-slayer, who totally blinded a captured Bulgarian army of ten thousand men, leaving a single eye to each hundredth soldier so that the rest might grope their way home to the czar: a spectacle so atrocious that the czar, when the pathetic procession arrived, died of grief and shock. This dark mediaeval deed is still a source of sombre pride to fierce rustic enemies of Bulgaria in Greece and, to judge by history, the Bulgars have been attempting to redress the balance ever since. For one reason or another, the Bulgars have always detested all their neighbours. They have their hate to keep them warm.

  For hours we loitered in the vaulted and painted interiors, gazing at the resplendent walls and craning our necks to peer into the pictorial vaults and cupolas and domes. In one of them Gatcho pointed out a column inserted there by its Asen founder, adorned by an inscription of the Khan Omurtag, an early ruler of Bulgaria in the ninth century. It came from a time before Czar Boris adopted Christianity and made it the religion of the state: a venerable relic of the years when the Bulgars, an Asiatic horde of pagan, shamanistic, fur-hatted mongoloid horsemen from beyond the Volga, first irrupted into the country, conquered and ruled it and, after bestowing their name upon it, were swallowed up by the milder Slavs who had settled there two or three centuries earlier. The rough sounds of their Asiatic tongue, probably akin to the Ugro-Finnish-Turanian branch of the Ural-Altaic, were drowned by the softer Slavonic syllables of the surrounding population and finally lost. The Bulgarian race had emerged with the Czar Krum of the first Bulgarian empire, still of the harsh conquering stock, and his shaggy hierarchy of landowning boyars. Half a century later Czar Boris became a Christian, and the great ruler Simeon I extended and consolidated the empire, and the never-ending strife with Byzantium began.

  The Bulgarian conversion was to leave a lasting stamp on eastern Christendom and the whole Slav world except Poland, Bohemia, Moravia, Slovenia and Croatia, which received the Christian message via the Catholic West with Latin as the liturgical tongue. But the Christianity that SS Cyril and Methodius brought to Bulgaria – and their adaptation of Greek letters to accommodate muffled Slav vowels (and the j and the sh and the sht sounds, unknown to the Greeks) – gave birth to the Cyrillic script which became the alphabet of Bulgaria, Serbia, Russia, and, until it was reformed in the last century, even of Latin (though Orthodox) Rumania. Thus Old Slavonic, a strictly liturgical language closer to Bulgarian than to any other branch of the Slav language group, became the religious lingua franca of all Slav Orthodox (until nationalism replaced it piecemeal with local vernaculars), just as Latin became the universal liturgical language of western Christendom.

  Examples of this beautiful lettering, in blurred and disintegrating calligraphy, accompanied the pictures of the kings and saints on the surrounding pillars and walls in complex epigraphs, and was inscribed on their giveaway scrolls, fulfilling the role of caption balloons in comic strips by setting forth their key utterances in the hands of stylites and martyrs. As we disentangled them, and as Gatcho unfolded their significances in his urgent German, the prophets and paladins and anchorites and holy athletes and headsmen stared back at us through ten thousand unblinking eyes. Odd to think of this battered casket a few years before Crécy. Then it was new and the interior still spun with a web of scaffolding, ladders and sunbeams, in which the spider-like monks were suspended under the half-blank arcs and hemispheres, pounding cinnabar for a burning fiery furnace or the destruction of Sodom and mixing whites of egg for the yet more spidery hands of their celestial sitters, all raised in benediction or warning or rebuke. Fresh from the quarry, the flagstones underneath them would have been littered with eggshells as if a multitude of chickens had just hatched out before legging it.

  The dim light of this vaulted world of interlocking haloes grew dimmer still. Far too dim, in fact, for that hour of the afternoon. The sky outlined in the archway at the end of our last church had turned a peculiar colour. We saw, as we emerged, that it was covered by an electric blue-green lid from horizon to horizon. Shadows were dulled and the air was heavy and windless, but along the canyon below – and it looked almost level with our high vantage point in the amphitheatre of hills – a threatening and solid line of clouds was trooping towards us on its own private breeze like a procession of purple boxing gloves, swelling, as they approached, to the size of bagpipes, wineskins, cattle, a herd of elephants, a school of whales until the sky was filled overhead as though by the huge, sagging roof of a dark and many-poled marquee on the point of collapse.

  Below us, along the twisting course of the Yantra, the motionless trees began to twirl like shaken mops. Raging puffs of dust swelled to the height of elm trees, tiny figures far below scuttled for shelter and suddenly, with a roar, the wind smote us as though it would send us spinning backwards into the frescoes and tear to bits the ancient church in whose porch we were sheltering. With a hiss the dusty, ruin-cumbered hill all round was instantaneously leopard-spotted with giant black raindrops, a rash which in another second cohered in a universal moving glitter, then into a hundred dancing puddles and sudden rushing khaki rivers. In a few moments the raindrops turned to hail: the pellets as big as blackcurrants and gooseberries which bounded and ricocheted among the rocks and rattled on the Slavo-Byzantine tiles overhead with a din like machine-gun fire. Then they vanished and a steady curtain of perpendicular rain spirited us into a submarine region. ‘Regen,’ Gatcho had uttered in an awed voice, when the first drops had fallen, and ‘Hagel!’ with the hail; truthfully enough; and, as the first lightning flash forked through the watery air with a simultaneous splitting crash of thunder which boomed and volleyed along the gorges and grumbled echoing in the church behind us, ‘Donner und blitzen!’

  I suppose it must have rained once or twi
ce that summer and autumn, but I can’t remember it. My impression remains one of endless dry weather and burning sunlight, almost of drought; certainly nothing to compare with this apocalyptic storm. Deafened by those salvoes of thunderclaps, we sat under the twelfth-century archway of the church porch peering into the grey downpour, listening to the swish of its descent, the gurgling of the runnels everywhere, and the clash of pebbles. Each flash of lightning brought us a shuddering vision of the town, the valleys and the mountains in a strangely focussed close-up that defied distance and dimension. We felt isolated and marooned among the ruins of this hilltop, as though the rest of the world were drowned; or rather, we decided, finishing our picnic, passing the wine bottle to and fro and lighting our cigarettes as we peered into the untimely twilight of falling water, as though we were deep sea divers exploring a submerged cathedral or a cave of coral on a pinnacle of the ocean’s floor – or did the domes and cupolas compose a diving bell? – while fleets above our head were smashing each other to bits at point-blank range: Lepanto, Trafalgar, Navarino, Jutland. We imagined, the slow blur sliding past us into the chasm, a flagship foundering heavy with cannon and treasure and drowned men – some of them, if the battle were early enough, still chained to their benches among a geometric chaos of oars – her spiral journey plumed with twining gyres of silver bubbles and froth.

  Or suppose this hill were Mount Ararat, as in the many frescoed floods on narthex walls, and the rest of the world were lost in this second flood, and only this sacred summit, with its two denizens spared – the waterline halting at the battlement’s foot? Yes, but what about the repopulation afterwards? After a pause for this baleful thought to take root, we turned to each other simultaneously and said with an identical note of accusation, ‘Schade, dass du nicht ein Mädel bist.’[9] The fact that neither of us was a girl condemned the race to extinction. What about mermaids, Gatcho suggested, uncorking a second bottle with a pop; suppose a beautiful shoal should slither ashore with their harps and settle all round us in a watery harem? Ah, but how to tackle them, lay siege to those scaly and inviolate loins? Surely there were some with double tails, like divided skirts? Were they viviparous or oviparous? And what would the offspring be? Human to the knee? Then laminations to the calf and, with our granddaughters, to the ankle. But given long life and unfaltering vigour – surely this would not be denied us – there was hope. Perhaps some great-granddaughter would approach our twin death-beds on cautious fin-tips and proudly display to our old eyes the longed-for toenails on their squealing burdens, a boy for Gatcho and a girl for me, or vice versa: and we would breathe our last in the knowledge that we had set mankind on its feet again: a beautiful amphibian brood of subnereids and crypto-tritons with nothing to betray an aquatic streak except, perhaps, a giveaway but not unbecoming greenish light in their blond locks: skilled cliff-scalers, anglers and harpists, living – as no ark had rescued the world’s animals or its tree-dwelling birds – on a healthy diet of gulls’ eggs and their own distant kinsfolk of the deep.

  With as little warning as its outbreak, the storm stopped. The lash of the falling water was hushed, and the veil lifted. The clouds, threadbare and empty now, fell to pieces and fluttered away in tatters across a laundered and peaceful sky of turquoise. All was changed, the sharp faceted mountain ranges had taken a long stride forwards, the roofs and walls of the town below flashed the slanting sunlight back, the windowpanes kindled, and diaphanous belfries rose. Washed clean by the long downpour, hundreds of temporary brooks swished downhill to join the swollen Yantra. The summer’s monochrome had gone under a winding garland of steam. These curling vapours turned the clumps of trees, for a quickly dwindling moment, into Mesozoic spinneys. Dun-coloured slants of ploughland were deep chocolate now, the vineyards a stormy green, the rocks and loose stones that the rains had scattered were multicoloured nuggets and polyhedra and pyramids of gleaming mineral. The bushes and flowers and herbs had shaken off a long trance: a confusion of scents, stifled since spring by the dry months, roved the air. The trees were made of metal, the glittering leaves were wired to them with silver, and across the canyon, like a Hispano-mauresque archway in a circle which was all but complete, hung a rainbow of sufficient solidity and brilliance to make the boldest and least circumspect of painters flinch.

  Perhaps it was an illusion that the stripping of the rain had altered the resonance of these ravines and sharpened their echo. The revival of each sound – a bell round the neck of a goat or hung in a tower, a bleat, a bray or the voice of a herdsman ricocheting up from the chasm – sent up a clearer note. As we returned, a prismatic property in the air, like a million suspended needlepoints of water, cast a deceptive spell of transparency on this post-diluvian landscape, peopling the gleaming slopes with diamond donkeys and goats chipped out of crystal. The lane to the perspicuous town was a circling turmoil of glass dogs, drunk on mixed smells.

  • • •

  As in Plovdiv, the social hub of Tirnovo was an open-air restaurant-bar and dance-floor combined, a circle of cement surrounded by tables and tired acacias on a jut of the cliff on which the town was built, so that from the railing at the edge one could peer down at the lower world through swooping layers of kestrels and swifts and pigeons. But, unlike the more metropolitan Plovdiv, there were seldom any girls. A few shopkeepers and countrymen who had come into market were here, but mainly the dashing young men of the town, the older students of the gymnasium and groups of young officers in their white Russian shirts, red-banded caps and spurs, nursing their tasselled and twirly-hilted sabres, as they sat over their minute coffees or their slivo, listening to trim military tangoes and foxtrots. I used to write my diary here in the late afternoon, or to read, sometimes haltingly piecing out the text of Vasil Levsky or Ivan Vasoff[10] while Gatcho slowly read their poems aloud, or expounding to him my very immature ideas on English literature. The only authors he had heard of were the same ones who seemed to have gained a unique foothold throughout Central Europe, in German translation or Tauchnitz: Dickens, Wilde and H. G. Wells, then, after a gap, Galsworthy, Somerset Maugham, Charles Morgan and, rather surprisingly, Rosamond Lehmann. Their bugbear, because of Arms and the Man, was Bernard Shaw.

  Suddenly, one evening, the mild hum of talk was interrupted by a shot from the entrance. We saw the nearest tables rise and cluster excitedly round a paper-seller who was bearing his wares ecstatically. The band stopped and everybody joined the group. A student I knew was reading out loud from the columns under the giant headlines in tones of breathless glee. Intent, beaming faces surrounded him, and now and then one or other of his listeners interrupted him with a cheer or an incredulous admiring laugh until hushed by the rest so that the reading might continue. Mouths were agog, eyes opened wider and the glow expanded unmistakeably as the eager cataract of syllables flowed on. What had happened? I could only pick up a word here and there: Serbski Kral, attentat, Marseilles, Frantzuski, Trianon, Malko Entente, Makedonski again and again. When the page was finished, a great cheer went up and everybody was talking and laughing and stamping, hugging and kissing their neighbours and thumping each other between the shoulder blades. At last I managed to ask Gatcho what had happened. His face shining with delight and grinning widely, he said, ‘Man hat den serbischen König getötet! Heute! In Frankreich! Und es war ein Bulgare, der hat ihn umgebracht!’ ‘They’ve killed the Serbian King! Today, in France! And it was a Bulgar that did him in!’

  In disjointed fragments when I could extract him from the hubbub, I learnt that King Alexander of Yugoslavia[11] had arrived in Marseilles that morning on a state visit to France. Louis Barthou, the Foreign Minister and thus, ex officio, his partner in the Little Entente[12] and the Treaties of Trianon and Neuilly, which had reduced the frontiers of Bulgaria after the war, had received him. During the ceremonial procession from the quay an assassin had sprung from the crowd toward the open car and emptied his revolver into the two passengers, killing them both. And as though this were not good news enough, the assassin w
as a Bulgarian, a Macedonian; it is true that he was killed by the police on the spot, but what a deed! (There was a rumour in the papers later that the assassin was not a Bulgarian at all, but a member of the Ustasha, the westward-looking and Catholic separatist group in Croatia, bitterly opposed to the inclusion of their province in the new and more backward Balkan kingdom of Yugoslavia – a rumour which reduced the Bulgarians to fury; after all, one of them told me with indignation, the assassin had svoboda ili smert tattooed on his arm – Liberty or Death, the old motto of the Macedonian Revolutionary Committee. His name was Vlado Chernozemski and he came from Strumitza – Croatian indeed!) Gatcho’s disjointed account was silenced by the singing of Shumi Maritza, the fierce national anthem of Bulgaria. They bawled out the chorus till the veins stood out on their brows: ‘Marsh! Marsh! S’generala nash! V boi da letim, vrag da pobedim – dim – dim – dim. Marsh’[13] – and so da capo.

  The tables round the concrete disc were filled with outbreaks of cheering laughter, excited talk and shouts for more slivo. Was this the sort of atmosphere that reigned in Belgrade, I wondered, when the pro-Karageorgevitch party assassinated Alexander Obrenovitch[14] and Queen Draga and threw their bodies out of the palace window; or, for that matter, when Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Duchess Hohenberg in Sarajevo? The tinkle of a thrown slivo glass on the dance-floor evoked a cheer. Soon they were whizzing and smashing all over it. Tumblers and wineglasses followed until a full carafe sailing through the air and exploding in the centre with a crash and a dark star of spilt wine brought everyone to their feet and sent them jostling on to the floor, their forearms flying round each other’s shoulders until a giant hora, with which the musicians tried to keep pace, was whirling them round in a ring. Even the officers’ corner was deserted, a tangle of abandoned sabres; their spurred boots were crossing and stamping with the rest, grinding the fragments of glass to smaller fragments as the dance revolved. The tables were empty except for an old priest smiling benignly in the serene spiralling nest of his beard and beating time with his umbrella, and for me, discordantly skulking long-faced at the bar. Somebody had written on the wall in bold capitals, the stick of chalk grasped in the middle to make the letters larger, ‘The Serbian King is dead!’