Bulgaria
So recently had the yoke of Turkey been shaken off that Bulgaria seemed less the south-easternmost corner of Europe than the north-westernmost limit of a world that stretched away to the Taurus mountains, the deserts of Arabia and the Asian steppes. It was the Orient, and clues to the recent centuries under the Ottoman Turks lay thick and plentiful on every side.
The Broken Road
NOW ILEANA’S WAVING FIGURE, AND THE ROMANIAN PART of my journey, shrank swiftly behind me. The ferry was loaded with trucks shuttling between the two countries, and from the drivers swapping cigarettes on deck I heard Slavic sounds, half-familiar and half-strange, for the first time since leaving the yellow fields of Slovakia. Upriver, the pilings of a half-constructed bridge – intended to connect the two countries but years behind schedule – stuck up from the Danube. As I was soon to learn, a bridge that no one could be bothered to finish was a fairly accurate representation of Bulgaria’s general attitude towards its Latinate neighbour. The ferry turned in midstream, anticipating the approaching quay, the sun went down like a molten ball, and by the time we reached the Balkan shore the land on both sides of the river had sunk into uniform blackness.
Arriving under cover of night only added to the sense that I was entering unmapped territory. Of all the lands of this great trudge, Bulgaria was the most unknown, and I had few preconceptions of its culture, climate or topography. From Artemis Cooper I had a rough route sketched out for the next few weeks – a path running south, north and south, like a low-frequency sound wave, from the Danube border to the Black Sea coast – but without Paddy’s words to lead the way it would be a process of working backwards, imagining where he might have been, what landscapes, architectural oddities and cultural quirks might have caught his eye.
The town of Vidin lay several miles on and the authorities at the port were reluctant to let me walk. Before I knew what was happening, a taxi driver had been summoned, a grizzled man in a sagging vest, who rattled me jauntily into town, past tower blocks, under traffic signs adorned with blocky Cyrillic script, to deposit me at the train station. Policemen, children, station attendants, passengers and dogs were waiting with identically bored expressions. The streets were yellow with sodium lamps, and the loudest sound was the buzz of air-conditioners.
I was met by Lidia, a tall girl with a catlike face, who’d offered shelter for the night in the flat she shared with her mother Sashka. They sat me down on a chintz sofa and served me cool cherry compote, speckled with archipelagos of yoghurt, followed by bean stew. Sashka passed me a chicken leg and, seeing me fumble with knife and fork, reassured me with the phrase ‘Chicken, fish and women you can catch with your hands’, which set them both off giggling. Mother and daughter bombarded me with questions that had an innocent, phrase-book quality – ‘Have you ever spent the night sleeping out beneath the stars?’ ‘Do you often go to disco-clubs to dance the night away?’ ‘What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of living in a big city?’ – and when I could answer no more, drowsy from food and heat, they made me up a bed on the sofa. As I drifted to sleep my head was full of Slavic sounds, but my body was bouncing down a potholed road in the Banat mountains.
By daylight, Vidin revealed itself as a town of boulevards and locust trees, ending at a riverside park blooming with pink roses. There was a holiday feeling in the air and the centre was full of people eating ice cream and drinking Italian coffee. I meandered in a daze, letting the Cyrillic lettering work itself into my brain, quietly stunned, once again, by the immediacy of difference. Grandmothers sold walnuts and herbs from plastic bags along the kerb, and the market stalls were heaped with machine parts and fake designer handbags. People looked darker and beefier, with a certain upper-arm meatiness that set them apart from Romanians, and a few unmistakably Tartar faces – slanted eyes, feathery moustaches and copper-coloured skin – mingled in the crowd.
‘Rough-hewn and tough, shod and swaddled in the same cowhide footgear as the Rumanians, they padded the dusty cobbles like bears,’ was Paddy’s first impression of Bulgarians in The Broken Road, although I wasn’t to read this until after my own journey was done. They were clad in ‘big loose trousers, crossed waistcoats, a short jacket and the waist enveloped in thick scarlet sashes a foot wide in which knives were sometimes stuck’. No sashes or knives were on display now, but asking for directions I discovered that people shook their heads to mean ‘yes’, a sure indication I’d crossed a certain cultural fault-line.
In this last stage of my journey, I’d finally stepped beyond the domains of the old Hapsburg Empire and into lands the Turks had ruled for five hundred years. I was in the historical orbit not of Vienna or Budapest, but of Istanbul, and the clues to this gravitational shift were everywhere apparent. A reminder came in the form of a minaret jutting near the river, the remains of a combined mosque, synagogue and church, topped not by a crescent moon but an upturned heart like the ace of spades to symbolise peace between the religions. Nearby stood the angular fortress of Baba Vida, the stronghold of Ottoman pashas as well as Bulgarian tsars, and further on the shell of a synagogue, its roof and ceiling long since collapsed, its floor a jungle of flowers. Graffiti on its walls proclaimed allegiance variously to Nazism, Communism and Led Zeppelin, as if to add to the cultural confusion.
A chance comment of Lidia’s later, as we strolled by the river, demonstrated the great divide I’d traversed the day before. We were gazing across the Danube, towards the darkly wooded and suddenly ominous opposite bank, and I asked if she often went there.
‘To Romania?’ she said, surprised. ‘Of course not! I’ve never been there.’
‘But it’s only half an hour away. Don’t you want to see what it’s like?’
‘I have no curiosity,’ she replied, squinting across the water. ‘The Romanians are not like us. They are different people.’
This was an attitude I’d find again and again among Bulgarians: not so much a hostility towards their northern, non-Slavic neighbour, but rather a profound lack of interest. Culturally and spiritually, Bulgarians looked south to the Balkans, east to Russia, or even – though they would hate to admit it – to their old imperial oppressors on the Bosphorus.
I left Vidin through a derelict industrial zone, past factories gutted or for sale. The shattered tarmac was stippled red with poppies, marking the death of economic progress. Beyond the outskirts the land grew green – a different green, indefinably, from that of Romania – and the roads were lined with wildflowers in yellow, purple, pink and blue, unknown stalks densely clustered with buds, and thickets of wild cannabis.
I followed the Danube all day, through a broad river valley muted by drizzle. An old man on a donkey cart saluted me as he passed; donkeys, rather than horses, were now the preferred beasts of burden. In the riverside village of Simeonovo the cottages were unkempt but the gardens blazed with marigolds; a woman was washing pots and pans in a sink beneath a cherry tree and stacking the dishes to dry in the branches. I kept coming across trees covered in what looked like elongated blackberries, and tentatively tried a few. They had a deliciously sweet, creamy taste. It was the first time I’d eaten mulberries.
Despite the plenty of the land, the fields past which I walked were fallow, growing only weeds. Sashka had told me that under Communism the region exported produce to Russia, Romania, Greece, the Balkans, even to Arab countries, but state-subsidised agriculture, like state-subsidised industry, had imploded after 1989. Now the farmland lay abandoned. Only once did I come across any sign of new investment: a fluorescent-lit concrete barn, inside which hundreds of cows were penned under ceiling fans. The EU flag fluttered outside; I had a vision of future historians pointing it out, alongside Soviet tower blocks, Ottoman mosques and Roman remains, as a relic of another past administrative sphere of influence. My mind went back to Transylvania, to cowbells and communal herds, with an unexpected pang of longing.
Just when it seemed that the drizzle had cleared, I looked around to see swollen clouds gathering behind me, like a child’s painting of a coming storm. It overtook me soon enough. Lightning cracked across the sky and the roadside trees flashed into negative, then thunder ripped apart the air, and within seconds I was drenched. There were no buildings in sight, so I took cover beneath a tree and waited for the downpour to end. The thunder grumbled cathartically on and lightning spasmodically leapt from one horizon to the other, while I squatted under wet leaves with a waterfall running off my hat, inevitably probing its way towards my driest places. Before long I was shivering, so I clambered from the undergrowth and continued down the streaming road.
The light was dying and I was far from any village, so I began vainly searching for a sheltered spot to camp. I resigned myself to pitching my tent in the pouring rain, then decided to walk on for another fifteen minutes. After ten, I rounded a corner and came upon a guesthouse, the only one I’d seen all day, with woodsmoke twisting from the chimney. ‘Come in! You can take a hot shower, dry your clothes and then come down to drink a glass of rakiya with me,’ said the owner when I tramped inside, leaving a trail like a slug’s. They were the finest words I could imagine.
The rakiya was deadly strong and knocked the chill straight out of my bones. The manager spoke of the virtues of Bulgaria in the same way Paul and Alexandra had spoken of Romania, extolling its wildness, its lack of repressive – or enforced – regulation, the greater day-to-day liberty that existed in the East. But when I mentioned Romania, he looked perturbed. ‘I don’t know anything about that. I have not been there. In Eastern Europe we are all Slav countries, all similar cultures and languages, apart from those two – Hungary and Romania. They do not fit in.’
His words recalled an ancient grudge: I had spent the last ten weeks crossing the linguistic wedge that Hungary and Romania – united in this, if nothing else – drive through the heart of the Slavic world, separating the West Slavic speakers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia from their southern cousins. There was something amusing in the way Bulgarians lumped them together, those implacable opponents, into one ‘non-Slavic’ whole, reducing their jealously guarded differences to insignificance.
Lom, which I reached before noon the next day, was Bulgaria’s second-biggest Danube port, but apart from a few desultory cranes there was no sense of industry. A vagrant with a greasy beard ambled along the quay, a knotted bag swinging on the end of a stick, a cartoon image of a tramp. Debating whether or not to walk on, to abandon the Danube at last and strike south towards Sofia, I paused for a dose of caffeine by the river. The next table was occupied by a group of rough-looking men, and when they saw me switch from coffee to beer, a look passed between them.
Vesco, a ferrety fellow with the permanent squint of eyes adapted to a never-ending stream of cigarette smoke, pulled his chair up to my table. He spoke good English – he’d picked it up from British ex-pats moving into the area – and, without much preamble, invited me to a party in his village. ‘There’s a spare room. You can stay a few days. Stay as long as you want.’
I did a quick mental evaluation. The man looked like a total scoundrel, but I decided he was the kind of scoundrel I could trust. So within minutes I found myself being driven round Lom in someone else’s car as he picked up essential supplies – meat, vegetables, fresh goat’s cheese, radishes, beer, rakiya, homemade wine, bread, more meat, potatoes, more beer – and soon we were on our way east to his village.
The house was a ramshackle lean-to built by his grandfather, adjoined by various outhouses in an advanced state of dereliction. Grapevine trailed above tangled allotments, and a black dog leapt at the end of its chain, overjoyed at company. Vesco set to work fixing the broken pump in the well, while I and his friend Itso, a bristly hog of a man, heaped the table with chopped vegetables. More friends arrived, Petar and Georgi, bearing jars of wine. They swept out the little tin pagoda, unused since last year’s party, and salad and rakiya were served – in Bulgaria these things always went together – followed by chicken soup with the feet still floating in it. Itso sucked down bowl after bowl with groans of rapture. Vesco hopped around the garden tending to simultaneous barbecues, grilling meat, frying potatoes, wringing water out of what looked like a long white dishcloth.
‘Guts,’ he replied when I asked, flinging a flailing wet lump to the waiting dog. ‘We will fry them later.’
It seemed the guest list was complete. I asked if any women were coming, but Vesco only cackled. ‘This is a drinkers’ party, Nikolai! Women just talk and get in the way. I do have a number I could call later, a very nice local girl. You know the kind of girl…’
‘Drink slowly,’ Petar said as another bottle of rakiya was opened. ‘The first bottle was for kids and ladies. This one is for normal people. There’s another bottle later, and that’s for professionals only.’
I prepared for a long night. Round of eating followed round of drinking, like bouts in a wrestling match. A Turkish-style narghile pipe went round the table, filling the air with apple-flavoured smoke, followed by joints of local grass. Somewhere in the midst of this, Petar approached me with two long nets. ‘Take one of these, Nikolai, I’ll show you something. I’ve been waiting for weeks for these little bastards, and now, after the rain, they’ve come out. We’re going to catch them and eat them.’
The little bastards turned out to be snails, working their way through the vegetable patch. Georgi already had a whole sack. So we hunted snails by torchlight, climbing into neighbours’ gardens to scour their allotments too, though I felt sorry for the little bastards and let most get away.
Significantly later and significantly drunker, after the third and professional bottle of rakiya had appeared as threatened, everything spiralled predictably downhill. Georgi had passed out in a flowerbed, and Itso was stuffing his face with fried guts, the smell of which made me gag. ‘In the past, every year was a party like this,’ said Vesco in a rare moment of lucidity. ‘All doors were open, there was food and drink, there were beds to sleep in if you needed, so friends were always able to return. But that was thirty, forty years ago. Everyone has left. The villages are empty now. Now it’s just us, drinking.’
A maudlin look had come into his eyes, but the moment didn’t last. Soon he was dancing in shuffling steps around the pagoda, howling with laughter, which descended into a hacking smoker’s cough. They were telling jokes about the folk hero Krali Marko, translated through sobs of mirth, with most of the punchlines centring on the size of the great man’s penis. Vesco was still howling and choking by the time I collapsed in the nearest bed.
There had been something desperate about the night, and I felt sick and empty when I woke the next day. Survivors surfaced after noon, shambling around for coffee, picking through the detritus of empty bottles and half-consumed kebabs. The air was sticky, the sky glaring with unpleasant whiteness. I had the sense it was imperative to move – things would only get worse if I stayed – so after making a cursory attempt to clear the stack of dirty dishes I splashed my face with water and left, despite Vesco’s protests. I knew he was disappointed I was going after only one night, and Petar complained in a hurt tone that I wasn’t even staying for snails. I sloped away with bleary eyes, a pounding head and a sense of guilt, hoping I hadn’t offended them too much.
‘The way lay south through the roll of the Danubian hills and plains,’ wrote Paddy in The Broken Road. ‘Let us stride across this riparian region in seven-league boots and up into the Great Balkan range. This immense sweep – the Stara Planina, as it is called in Bulgarian, the Old Mountain – climbs and coils and leapfrogs clean across northern Bulgaria from Serbia to the Black Sea, a great lion-coloured barrier of lofty, rounded convexities, with seldom a spike or chasm…’ These were the mountains I was making for now, but my boots were less seven-league than second-rate, and I was certainly in no fit state to stride. Instead, I staggered nauseously past lurid fields of rape, under clouds that throbbed with heat, sweating horribly under my clothes; after walking for half an hour I realised I was massively hungover, probably still drunk. My organs sloshed woozily, my heart thumped an irregular beat, and my steps dragged slower and slower until they stopped altogether.
Just as I was contemplating crawling into a ditch to sleep, a car skidded up and the driver gestured me in. It was a lifesaving offer. He was a gendarme, complete with handgun at his side and chevrons on his sleeve, and after I’d croaked something about the mountains I found myself flying down the road as he gestured wildly at the landscape, apparently pointing out local sights, once avoiding a head-on collision with a van by a matter of inches, until, in an absurdly short time, he flung the door open and let me out at the ugly little town of Montana.
From here the road climbed through trees into breezier foothills. The sweltering fields of the Danube Valley, and my underlying guilt at having fled Vesco’s hospitality, fell away below. The hangover shifted with altitude, loosening its grip as I climbed, and the cooler and cleaner the air became, the better I started feeling. I walked long into the evening, running on the momentum of exhaustion, and it was night by the time I came to the mountain town of Berkovitsa.
This was a neat and self-possessed place with a definite whiff of wealth in the air – it was a ski resort in the winter – with roses growing along its streets and a plaza dominated by a mural of Marx and Lenin above a line of unstereotypically camp-looking workers. Convoys of recent high-school leavers were parading noisily, leaning out of car windows blasting whistles and air horns. I hurried to the sanctuary of a cheap hotel, dragged myself out for a plate of kebab, then returned for a shower and merciful collapse.
Twelve hours later, I awoke to the ominous drumming of rain. The bloated skies had returned, and the mountains above the town were swaddled in cloud. Groggy with sleep and aching all over, I pulled on my inadequate waterproofs and plastic-bagged my feet, knowing it would make no difference in a downpour like this. Feelings of deep anxiety had settled in the night, somehow linked to the lingering sense I’d given offence with my premature departure; I caught myself muttering out loud as I crossed the rain-washed square, suddenly feeling old and battered, my sense of adventure depleted. The only cure for this was walking.
My muscles took a long time to get going. The rain hammered ceaselessly and the water from overflowing drains lapped around my leaky boots, effortlessly seeping through my plastic-bag defences. But as I left Berkovitsa behind, switchbacking with the road through oak, beech and pine, past cascading brown rivers, up to the crest of the Old Mountain, my mind emptied and the pains in my body withdrew. Walking, as so often before, became less a means to an end than an end in itself. Like an act of meditation, it answered its own question.
It was two days’ walk to Sofia, and the rain never faltered. Cloud suffocated the valleys, water bucketed from the trees, and my boots went up and down in slapping two-tone rhythm while thunder lazily rolled beyond the mountains. Pairs of cuckoos answered each other from dripping wood to dripping wood, and water buffalo swung their heads to watch me pass, amphibious beasts with snuffing nostrils, regarding me curiously from under crescent horns. The first night I camped in the woods on a carpet of wet leaves, and by the evening of the second day the Stara Planina was behind me; I was a few hours’ walk from Sofia.
The thought of wandering the streets of a capital city after dark, as sodden and footsore as I was, was even less appealing than another night camping in the rain. Just as I was trying to decide what to do, there appeared a tin sign announcing the monastery of Архангел Михаил, Archangel Michael – the Cyrillic letters clumsily resolving themselves in my brain – and I followed a path to a tiny church, hoping Bulgarian monks would be as friendly as Romanian nuns. No one answered my knocks on the door, but a glimpse through the window of lined-up slippers convinced me that someone lived there. I sat down to wait, and after a while a man puttered up on a motorbike. His name was Ivo, and he was a caretaker for the absent monks; a small, tough man with a humorous face, who showed remarkably little surprise to see me loitering there. After I’d explained myself with a couple of carefully memorised phrases, he showed me into an empty room where I could stay the night. But first he insisted, in what was emerging as true Bulgarian style, on taking me to eat and drink in his village.
Sheltered under a plastic awning from another monsoonal drenching, a table was laid with stuffed peppers and salad leaves pulled fresh from the garden. His family and neighbours gathered round, and the neighbour’s daughter was summoned to handle the translations. The monastery, I was proudly informed, was where the patriotic hero Vasil Levski had hidden from the Ottomans, though later I was to discover that many Bulgarian monasteries made an identical claim. Ivo pointed at me and said something that made everyone laugh. The neighbour’s daughter translated: ‘When he saw you outside the monastery, with that beard, he thought you were one of the monks!’ My glass was filled for the third or fourth time. A nightingale sang in the rain. It was dark by the time he dropped me back, and early next morning, under clear skies, I was on the road towards Bulgaria’s capital.
From a distance, Sofia’s suburbs soared into view monolithically, a windowed wall of tower blocks rising from nothingness. The scrappy fields in the city’s orbit quickly gave up being fields as the urban clutter began, bleeding into industrial lots, factories and auto-repair shops, the post-industrial mycelium spreading through every part of modern Europe. Once I’d passed through the edgelands, the nowhere regions ringing the core, I found myself inside the city with bewildering suddenness: there were trams and fast-food stalls, kiosks and mobile phone shops, people waiting in line for buses, commuters and baby supply stores, Sofians going about their lives unremarkably all around me. Soon I was barrelling through the earth on a metro among city people with their private faces and non-muddy clothes. I’d been around country people so long I’d forgotten what they were like: a preponderance of shiny jackets, primary colours and stone-washed jeans. The sensation was deeply familiar as well as being acutely strange. I had the most peculiar feeling I had returned home.
I got off at Vasil Levski Stadium without quite knowing why, and then remembered the hero of the previous night’s monastery. Two-storied buildings surrounded me, pigeons and trees and statued squares, social-realist effigies of wheat-clutching socialist mothers. Along Graf Ignatiev Street the market was heaped with apricots, and tramlines gleamed in the sun. From a vendor I bought a tub of sweet-corn dusted in parmesan cheese, and watched the long coats of women and men swish flappingly by.
‘The aspect and atmosphere of the little capital is rather captivating,’ wrote Paddy. ‘The light, airy ambience of a plateau town reigns here, and above it all rises the bright pyramid of Mount Vitosha, throwing the sunlight back from its many facets, a feature as noble and inescapable as Fujiyama.’ I could see the mountain from the room I stayed in, on the fifth floor of a weather-scabbed tenement block in the centre of town, hosted by a melancholy woman called Katlem who warned me about the thugs and prostitutes teeming the streets these days. Assuming the dual role of tour guide and guardian, she took me on a meandering walk around the same sights Paddy had seen – the parliament building, the state theatre, the crouching mass of the golden-domed St Alexander Nevsky cathedral – delivering a tragic history of the country on the way.
It was a litany of displacement, a palimpsest of five thousand years of migrations and colonisations. The ancient Celts were conquered by the Thracians – the southern cousins of Romania’s Dacians – the Thracians by the Romans, who later became the Byzantines, and the Byzantines by the Bulgars, a Central Asian warrior tribe led by the magnificently named Khan Krum. The victorious Bulgars mixed with the Slavs filtering in from the north, and this melting pot produced the Bulgarian nation.
In medieval times Bulgaria was the heart of the Slavic world, an empire that touched three seas – Aegean, Adriatic and Black – the cradle of the Orthodox faith and the birthplace of the Cyrillic alphabet. But it also endured brutal conflict with Byzantine Constantinople, and at the end of the fourteenth century the region fell to a new superpower, spending the next five hundred years under Ottoman rule. By the time the Ottomans pulled out in 1878, after the Russian liberation prompted by Vasil Levski’s uprising, Sofia was thoroughly Islamised, with over fifty mosques. Precious few were left today: according to local legend the Communists mined the minarets and dynamited them all one night, under cover of a thunderstorm. But later the Communists, in turn, witnessed the destruction of their own holy relics: in 2001, Lenin’s statue in the former Lenin Square was replaced by a golden statue of Sophia, the classical goddess of wisdom, itself opposed by the Orthodox, who condemned it as paganism. For thousands of years colonising regimes had been tearing down each other’s symbols and replacing them with new ones, trying to stamp their own mark on Bulgaria’s soul.
Katlem’s narrative went some way towards explaining the discombobulation I’d felt since leaving Romania; the feeling of not quite knowing where I was in the world. Every time I attempted to resolve this country in my mind – to compartmentalise what I saw as Eastern, Southern, Slavic, Balkan, ex-Soviet, ex-Ottoman – it would slip its definition and surprise me with something new.
My understanding got flipped once again the night before I departed the city, when her daughter Antonia took me to her favourite bar. The place was arty and Western-feeling, full of poets and students talking earnestly about truth and beauty – a disarmingly familiar scene that could have been found in any major city on the continent – but just when I’d got comfortable, a bizarre throbbing emanated from a smaller chamber. Before an enraptured audience, two young men were playing goatskin bags with pipes that protruded like broken limbs. One maintained an ominous drone while the other undulated on a weird scale, half Celtic reel and half Arab wail, filling the room with the sound of fucked-up trumpets and nameless dread, accompanied by ragged handclaps and whoops of joy. This was my first encounter with the gaida, bagpipes from the Rodopi mountains where, according to myth, Orpheus was born. It was unmistakably mountain music, a lonely keening that could never originate in any field or farm; it stayed with me as I journeyed on, a premonition of further mountains to come.
They came soon enough. By early afternoon the next day I was in the green shadow of Rila, the highest mountain range of the Balkans, which rises like an island from the flatlands south of Sofia. Paddy had taken a side trip here to visit the famous monastery, and I travelled the sixty miles by bus, believing he had done the same; later I found out he had walked, and felt a small ache of regret. My initial impression of the place differed little from his – ‘a fortress-like building, almost a small towered city, embedded in fold after fold of beech trees and pine’ – but history had almost ordained otherwise: the Communists intended to flood this valley to create yet another hydroelectric dam, a plan abandoned only months before the regime fell.
A quadrant of four-tiered cloisters, carved wooden galleries striped in red, white and black, surrounded a domed Orthodox church painted with phantasmagoric scenes of beak-faced demons herding sinners into rivers of fire; with the mountains jagging on all sides it had an oddly Himalayan look, as if it should have been populated not by black-bearded priests but by lamas in saffron robes. ‘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,’ wrote Paddy. The monastery may have been saved from drowning, but the throngs of pilgrims he had seen were replaced by tourists now; luxury coaches jostled for position in the overspilling car park, and the frescoes on the walls were strobe lit by camera flashes.
I’d vaguely planned to seek accommodation here, as he had done, but the crowds dissuaded me. Instead, I struck out uphill, making up for my laziness on transport earlier; instead of returning to Sofia, my plan was to cross the range northeast and pick up Paddy’s path on the far side of the mountains. It was late in the day to start the ascent, and I barely allowed myself pause for breath, passing swiftly through the pines and emerging after an hour’s steep climb into wild-flowered alpine meadows.
The meadows gave way to broken rock, and the rock yielded in turn to unexpected snow, a silent and secretive mountainscape hidden from below. The trail was marked by metal poles that ran like acupuncture needles along the smooth back of the ridge, and as the snow turned blue with twilight I reached what I’d been hoping to find: a hiking lodge with stout stone walls, where ice-hardened washing hung from a line, snowshoes were propped outside the door, and a bearded, weather-beaten man ushered me in to sit beside the fire.
The monastery below was dedicated to the hermit Ivan Rilski, and this could have been his reincarnation. The man served lentil soup and bread, and I supplemented the meal with my own meagre rations – spaghetti, cheese and sardines – which sent him into raptures of delight. I was his first guest for weeks, and he had the manner of someone estranged from human interaction: quiet or talkative as the mood took him, when he talked he talked too much, as if he found the balance hard to gauge. I wanted to learn about the mountain and its stories, but shyness overcame him when I asked. We finished our dinner in mutually understood silence.
After dark we stepped outside to see the sky ludicrous with stars, the full moon turning the slopes of the mountains bright as tin. Even though he lived up here for solitary months on end, my host seemed as awed as me at this vision of frozen beauty. He gestured, tried to say something, and couldn’t find the words. He tried again, screwing up his face, and eventually simply spread his hands and whispered: ‘Everything.’ My predecessor, with all his verbosity, could not have expressed it better.
The next day’s trail wound down Rila’s northern slope, past the famous Seven Lakes, skirting the whale-backed peaks of Damga and Zeleni Kamak. After that the snow became patchy and soon vanished altogether. Tiny villages and roads took shape in the valley below, and to pass through the lower pines was to make a transition between the mountains and the human world, a limbo separating one reality from the next. I camped beside the Cherni Iskar river, and a footsore hike along roads the next day brought me to the town of Belovo, where I had an invitation to stay with a couple called Veny and Gary – a Bulgarian and a Bristolian – in the guest apartment underneath their house.
My first glimpse of Belovo wasn’t promising: the town was dominated by the chimneys of a paper mill, the road lined with stalls selling discount toilet paper. But wooded hills surrounded it, the Maritsa river gurgled through, and my hosts had a garden full of geese, a cherry tree outside their gate and a little girl waving from the window; it was every welcome a traveller desires. Soon after I hobbled in we were toasting my arrival with rakiya, followed by bowls of bean stew flavoured with mint from the garden.
I stayed with them for several days. Karavansarays was the name of their guesthouse, after the regular caravan halts that dotted the Ottoman Empire; I later discovered Paddy had stayed in a ‘caravanserais’ in nearby Pazardjik, Veny’s home town, one of those morphic resonances that now and then deepened the journey.
Gary was a lanky, ponytailed man with one silver tooth, Veny was tattooed and stout, and their little daughter Ellie clomped happily around in a pair of orthopaedic boots; her feet were partially paralysed from a brush with Lyme disease. Veny had grown up in the area, and possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of local plants and flowers. During long walks in the hills, the pages of my notebook filled with forageable medicinal recipes: linden flower tea cured colds, wild garlic soothed wasp stings, the powder from puffballs could staunch a wound, and hay fever could be alleviated by patting an ants’ nest and rubbing your face, as the mixture of pine needles and ant acid stopped the sneezing. She had an avaricious eye for mulberries and porcini mushrooms. My sojourn was full of leisurely meals and picnics in the mountains; it was a time to rest and fatten up, before the three-hundred-mile haul to the Black Sea coast.
It was the beginning of June and true summer had come. The schizophrenic weather of the weeks before ended in one last dramatic deluge, a lightning storm, and an earthquake that rattled the walls one evening as we were sitting down to eat – it felt like a train going through the house – and after that I was hardly to see a cloud for the rest of my journey. Sunshine came to define Bulgaria as rain had defined the Rhine, and snow and ice the bitter nights of the Wachau Valley. People spoke of a coming great heat, just as in Bavaria they’d spoken of a coming great cold; imagining the dehydration ahead, I found myself, if anything, more nervous.
One afternoon, driving back from a picnic on nearby Belmeken Mountain, we stopped to buy honey in a village in the Rila foothills. The women at the stalls wore head-scarves and long skirts, the men were somehow leaner and darker, and I thought they were Roma until I saw a minaret in place of an Orthodox dome. They were Pomaks, Bulgarian Muslims whose ancestors had converted to Islam centuries before. Paddy had seen them ‘hatted with grey or white felt skullcaps that came to a point like an Arabian dome in miniature, or a Saracen’s helmet stripped of its chain mail’, and even without the fantastical headgear it was impressive they were still here, tenaciously clinging to their difference, considering the persecution they’d since endured. The Communist regime of Todor Zhivkov had attempted to wipe them out, forcing them to change their names from Turkish to Slavic – and murdering many who refused – which prompted the flight of thousands over the southern border. But thousands more had stubbornly outlasted state campaigns of ethnic cleansing, and their villages were still scattered across the Rila and Rodopi mountains; unlike the island of Ada Kaleh, these remnants of the Ottoman Empire had never been washed away.
Not so the thriving Turkish population Paddy had seen in Plovdiv, forty miles further east. Here my predecessor had encountered not only Bulgarian Muslims but Bulgarian Turks, still inhabiting the lost provinces of their collapsed empire. ‘They were sashed with red like the Bulgars, but they wore baggy black trousers and slippers and scarlet fezzes, often faded or discoloured by sweat and use to a mulberry hue around which ragged turbans, some of them patterned with stripes or spots … were loosely bound. They sat cross-legged, with amber beads in their hands, eyelids lowered over the quiet intermittent gurgle of their nargilehs.’ As with the Hunnish whips of Magyar drovers, or the cowhide moccasins of peasants in Transylvania, the flair and dash of sartorial cultural individualism had altogether disappeared, along with much of the diversity that had once defined the city: Turks and Pomaks mingling with Greeks, Sephardic Jews, Albanians, Armenians, Vlachs, a patchwork of ethnic differences that had, since 1945, largely been replaced by a monoculture.
The Maritsa valley trapped the heat, and Plovdiv sweltered. From one of its seven hills, green and rubbly humps that rose like islands from a sea of tiles, I could make out the pale folds of the Stara Planina to the north; between me and that faraway range was only yellow haze. In the merciful cool of evening I nosed along the alleyways – the ‘undulating rose-coloured tiles, the radiating gullies of the lanes’ prettified but little changed – the paving stones were polished smooth, the air gaggy with the smell of linden. Traditional houses from the Revival, which marked the bloom of nationalism in the dying days of Ottoman rule, crowded on either side: lilting wooden-framed townhouses with overhanging upper floors that made me feel I was far from Europe.
In the centre of the city the fourteenth-century Dzhumaya mosque hunkered over the ruins of an ancient Roman stadium, a cross-sectional diagram of successive colonisations. In a plaza nearby, watching a circle of water-sippers stooping around the trembling column of a drinking fountain – it had the look of a religious rite – I got into conversation with a young couple called Georgi and Elitsa. He was a soft-eyed, intelligent man with American-accented English, she was a slender woman as elegant as a gazelle, and together they made me an invitation: they were on the way to the mountains to sleep by a waterfall called Rai, Paradise, and I was welcome to join them. It was exactly on my route. Early next morning they picked me up in Georgi’s gleaming Skoda, and soon we were speeding through dusty villages, out of the stifling heat of the valley, towards the projecting wedge of the Central Balkan Range.
We left the car in Karlovo, a foothill town where Paddy had encountered more turbaned and fez-hatted Turks, and been invited by an elderly hodja into the sanctuary of a mosque. The mosque was still intact, but there was little evidence of a Turkish presence; instead, hikers in lightweight sportswear packed the cobbled streets. The expedition to Paradise consisted of a dozen of Georgi and Elitsa’s friends, strung out in a caravan loaded with home-cooked food and beer, and several hours’ conversational climb brought us to our destination: a hiking lodge on a grassy plateau where the waterfall tumbled from a high rock lip, fed by the stump of a snowcap, widening as it fell.
It was Saturday night and the site was crowded with other groups; after dark the campfires grew rowdy with songs and rakiya. A folklore group danced the hora, a shuffling circle dance of hops and complicated foot rotations; accordions and guitars appeared, a gaida whined like a trapped mosquito, and bouts of Dionysian caterwauling ensued. They began with patriotic anthems to anti-Turkish uprisings and the mythical Krali Marko, he of the enormous penis, and degenerated into bawdy singalongs, the words of which, I was assured, were absolutely filthy.
Georgi wasn’t joining in but spectating with a look of sad amusement. It turned out that he and Elitsa were soon to leave Bulgaria, emigrating to California to start a new life. I asked why he wanted to leave. Watching people sing and dance on a clear night under the moon, with the Paradise waterfall snaking into a mist of spray, life in Bulgaria looked quite idyllic. But he saw another side, the one that no foreigner could.
‘Everyone is selfish here, obsessed with money. Under Communism we were taught to obey, to let the clever people in the Party make decisions for us, not to have opinions of our own. Fifty years of being told to be stupid and small-minded made us stupid and small-minded. So now we have democracy, but no civil society. It’s called post-Communist apathy.’
Like Paul and Alexandra back in Arad, Georgi was of the generation who witnessed the dying days of Communism, the mafia free-for-all that ensued when Communism fell, and the old Communist leaders reinventing themselves as capitalists. ‘They weren’t stupid. They saw the transition coming and moved all the money to foreign banks until the fuss died down. Then they started bringing it back into the country as private investment. They were magicians, our politicians – they turned public money into private money. They put it in the hands of the mutri.’
The mutri, ‘mugs’, were nouveau-riche gangsters of the shiny-suited, big-necked type, the shock troops of free- market capitalism, and in the 1990s they had practically ruled the country. A popular anecdote told how they liked to park in the middle of the road, causing chaotic traffic jams, and sit back sipping cappuccinos, just to show they could. ‘When people saw the mutri getting away with things like this, they tried to copy them. This attitude trickled down through society. No one cares about anyone else, as long as they get what they want. It’s selfishness like this that makes me want to leave.’
I’d originally planned to return to Karlovo with my friends the next day, then skirt the Stara Planina east towards the Shipka Pass. But now it occurred to me that I was halfway over the mountains. There was no sense in losing height; from Paradise I could follow the ridge for days without meeting a road, and pick up Paddy’s trail on the northern side of the range. So after a lazy morning drinking coffee in the sun, I scribbled a rudimentary map, stowed as much leftover food as I could, and said farewell, yet again, to newly made friends. ‘Goodbyes like these were the only sad aspect of the journey,’ wrote Paddy of a similar parting not far from here. ‘There was something intrinsically melancholy, a sudden sharp intimation, like a warning tap on the shoulder, of the fleetingness of everything, in bidding goodbye to people who had been kind, as nearly everyone was, and knowing that, in all likelihood, I would never see them again.’
With a feeling much like this inside me, I zigzagged up towards Botev, the highest peak in the range, past the remains of the snowcap emptying into the cataract below. Shadowed valleys raced away to the south, back in the direction of Plovdiv. I stopped to drink from a stream that tasted of cold tin, then continued over the curve of the mountain.
For the next three days I walked on top of the range that divided Bulgaria, the north and the south of the country rolling away to my left and my right, suspended in the balance between two worlds; committed to neither, biding my time before the inevitable plunge back down. There was great serenity to be found at these heights. Unlike the rocky upthrust of Rila, jagging dramatically into the sky, the peaks of the Stara Planina were scuffed, eroded humps, chewed down by time. The tussocky grass sprang under my feet and the sloping moorland plunged into broken canyons below, architectures of lichen-spotted stone; here and there the green skin that covered the mountain had pulled away, as if tugged back by giant fingers, and jumbled rock burst out like sausage meat. Long-legged foals were attempting their first skittish gallops on the slopes, and a herd of horses followed me nose to tail for half a mile, part thuggish and part shy, until at last I reeled around and sent them cantering away.
I camped one night outside a cabin inhabited by a pitbull-faced man who spent his time anxiously scanning the peaks with binoculars; the next was spent under pines as lightning pulsed on the horizon. From there the moorland dropped into the beech forests of Bulgarka National Park, and on the third afternoon I wound down towards the villages once again. A drinking fountain gurgled in every square – one of the sweeter legacies of Ottoman culture – and the houses were top-heavy like the ones in Plovdiv, wood framed and wattle walled, with marigolds in flowerpots and trellises of grapevine.
Gabrovo, at the foot of the range, had the dubious distinction of being the longest city in Bulgaria, and carried as its municipal symbol a cat with a chopped-off tail. This, I discovered, was a local joke: Gabrovans were notoriously stingy, and were said to cut the tails off their cats to save heat when closing the door in winter. They were also known for fitting taps to their eggs, to draw no more than the yolk required, and making their donkeys wear green sunglasses to fool them into eating woodchips instead of grass. When I read The Broken Road, I was delighted to discover that this reputation for meanness went back to my predecessor’s time: it was on the road to Gabrovo that Paddy, limping from the pain of an errant hobnail, was twice refused lifts by peasants driving empty carts, conduct ‘unprecedented on any of the roads of Europe … This passion to make money out of chance trivialities, like giving a pedestrian a lift in an empty cart, is a phenomenon I met several times in Bulgaria, but nowhere else in Europe, before or afterwards.’
I didn’t linger in that city of scrooges, but pressed on for another ten miles in the furnace heat of the afternoon to the Dryanovo monastery, a steepled church huddled under cliffs and slabs of rock improbably slanting from the forest. There was a campsite by the river, run by a sweet old lady who seemed more entertained than disgusted at the volume of sweat pouring off me, and here I pitched my tent to a chorus of cackling frogs.
The monastery was made famous when the rebel battalion of Bacho Kiro, one of Vasil Levski’s men, was massacred here by Ottoman troops in the 1876 uprising. Icons in the church – torched by the soldiers, but later rebuilt – depicted Archangel Michael stamping on a defeated Turk, while another angel did the same to a chained black man, from whose lips flared one last diabolical twist of fire. The mercilessness of the image alluded to hundreds of years of hate; wars that had been fought for so long their violence had become holy.
Beyond the monastery lay the entrance to the Bacho Kiro caves, a subterranean labyrinth riddling the gorge. In the system’s deeper tunnels Neanderthal skeletons had been found, one of the earliest traces of human habitation in Europe. I rose before the heat the next day to stoop through stalactite-encrusted halls, working my way through intestinal corridors of dripping rock, and came back out to see white butterflies dancing over the cascades, the sun climbing once again in a cloudless sky. I set out, like an emerging caveman, to explore another new world.
After half an hour of walking, the water in my bottle was as warm as soup. The air was dense with pollen and the blossom reeked so sweetly it was quite unpleasant. I filled my hat with cherries and plums, spitting a trail of stones, and wandered the morning in a daze, stupefied with heat.
Blisters were becoming a problem for the first time on my walk. Hastened by the rubbing of sweat and the gradual collapse of my boots, they ballooned on my heels and toes, and my supply of blister packs – carefully hoarded since the Hook of Holland and hardly touched until now – was rapidly depleted. The soles of my boots had worn thin enough that I could feel the texture of the road; I bought a pair of secondhand shoes to cannibalise for soles, and superglued rubber patches over the holes as they appeared.
In the centre of Veliko Tarnovo, after a long highway tramp sucking in dust and diesel fumes, I practically collapsed outside an expensive café. My head was pounding with heat stroke and my chest flared with prickly heat, like thousands of red-hot filaments needling into the skin. A waiter took pity on me, served me glass after glass of water, and led me down a ramshackle flight of steps to a hostel clinging to the side of the hill. There was a cool bed by a window, and a balcony overlooking terracotta rooftops tumbling steeply down to the Yantra river.
‘The airy town jutted with oriental balconies craning on diagonal beams above the gulf, and hundreds of window-panes threw back the evening sun in tiers of square flaming sequins, as though fires were raging within,’ wrote Paddy; from my window this vision unfolded much the same. At night the city resembled a fossil, an ammonite blazing with tiny lights. I rested there for several days, gently wandering the lanes and discovering hidden alleyways, cockeyed timber-framed houses and shaded gardens where cats squinted evilly from their hiding places. In medieval times Veliko Tarnovo was the capital of the Second Bulgarian Empire, and nearby lay the ruins of Tsarevets, a battlemented fortress seemingly squeezed from the natural rock. This fairytale City of the Tsars symbolised a lost golden age, a vision of the nation’s glory before the Ottoman conquest.
After leaving Veliko Tarnovo, Paddy had struck north across the Danube and the Wallachian Plain, back into Romania to sample the high life of Bucharest, before catching a train south to the Black Sea port of Varna. Ignorant of his route, I kept slogging east towards the sea. Even had I known of this diversion – a round trip of three hundred miles – the idea of plunging deeper inland, away from the promise of the coast, would have been violently unappealing; increasingly dishevelled, daily encrusted with grime, my clothes discoloured from the endless cycle of sweating, drying off and sweating again, the thought of reaching the sea was starting to obsess me.
I had a companion for the first few days of this hinterland trudge. Veny had taken time off work, left Gary with Ellie and the geese, packed a tent and change of clothes, and caught the train to join me. My visit to Belovo, it seemed, had given her itchy feet, made her nostalgic for the carefree days before work and motherhood, when she used to embark on similar wanderings; she arrived sleep deprived with excitement at the prospect of adventure.
It wasn’t quite the happy-go-lucky saunter she might have envisaged. Out of practice at walking, Veny became dehydrated after an hour, and by the end of the first afternoon her feet were raw with blisters. We camped at the edge of a cornfield, downwind from a stagnant lake that smelt unpleasantly of dog food, and her suffering lessened with the cool of the evening. But the second day was even hotter than the first, and by noon she said she had black dots dancing before her eyes; our pace slowed to a crawl, staggering from one patch of shade to the next like a couple of vampires fearful of the sunlight. We managed to reach the Yantra to pitch our tents beneath a weeping willow, spending the afternoon eating fruit and wallowing in the shallows. Then after an hour’s walk the next morning her blisters burst again and we had to abandon the adventure completely, hitching a lift on a Gypsy cart as far as the next village.
Here we waited out the day in the shadow of a walnut tree, and in the morning Veny caught the train back to Belovo. I hoped she hadn’t suffered too drastically on our short excursion. But later she wrote to say that she was already planning a hike to the mountains, and that Ellie remembered me and sometimes asked when I’d come back. ‘When I grow up I want to be a traveller,’ the little girl had said, ‘so I can go and find him.’
As the temperature soared, my walking pattern changed. I started packing my tent before dawn, walking until the sun was high, and then retreating under the trees until it was cool enough to emerge. The weather elasticated the days: while at the beginning of my journey it had been night by five o’clock, in the summer of the south the light was slow to leach from the sky, and there was a special sense of freedom to seeing my shadow lope ahead as the sun went down at my back, a feeling that the night belonged to me alone. With the dying of the heat each day, the land and all the living things in it breathed an almost audible sigh of relief. I avoided cities and large towns, skirting their peripheries in favour of dusty country roads; I camped one night in a field of wheat like an advert for a breakfast cereal, the air alive with mites and motes, and the next in a dried-up gulley with fireflies pulsing between the trees. On another occasion I fell asleep to a sound disturbingly like babies crying, the yapping lament – I discovered later – of Caucasian jackals.
A few miles east of the city of Shumen, a plateau of yellowish limestone sprouted from the blandness of the plain, dominating the landscape for miles in every direction. Veny had told me about this place and I reached its foot as the cliffs turned Arizona red in the sunset, each contorted rock formation casting a deformed shadow. It was clearly a site of significance, and as I wound my way uphill I had the feeling of approaching a temple; which, long ago, was perhaps what it was. A flight of stone steps led up to the Madara Rider.
The ancient Bulgars had carved it there, though some believed it was centuries older, and depicted a Thracian god: a simple relief of a mounted hunter – the horse’s hindquarters now severed by a vertical crack in the rock – with a hunting dog loping behind and a lion at the horse’s hooves, ground down in symbolic defeat. No other carvings surrounded it, no dedications or commemorations, as if those figures said everything the carver wanted them to say. There was something familiar in the angle of the rider’s spear, the lion’s misery under the hooves, and it took me a moment to recognise what: if the lion was replaced by a lizard, the image was identical to St George and the dragon. When I later discovered that St Georgi was Bulgaria’s patron saint, a clear line leapt back to ancient Bulgarian culture.
I pitched my tent at a campsite nearby, in the company of a boss-eyed mongrel and a Pekinese with an underbite; the quality of hounds had clearly gone down since ancient times. I spent the evening killing mosquitoes, and discovered in the morning a place of even stranger magic: the Sanctuary of the Nymphs, a sacred place for the pagan Thracians, a vast depression in the rock like a bowl standing up on end. The wall flexed inwards in such a way it was hard to tell how big it was, or how far back it went, and sometimes it fooled the eye into thinking it wasn’t concave but convex, bulging outwards like a great stone bubble; too huge to take in as a whole, the effect was similar to an IMAX cinema screen. I felt sure the unknown carver, whether Bulgar or Thracian, must have stood in this exact spot, craning back their neck in the same way I was doing now.
East of Madara the countryside grew increasingly parched, beaten down by sun. The jungle green had disappeared and swathes of the land were yellow – yellow with wheat, yellow with rape, yellow with sunflowers – and marched across by pylons snaking power towards the coast. People were less friendly here, less inclined to wave or smile, and subsequently I found myself feeling more suspicious. It was a tougher, poorer region; there was a sense of violence in the land, and no shade on the road.
On a road through sunflower fields I was overtaken by a man with no legs, trundling in a cloud of dust on an electric wheelchair. Past the village of Zhitnitsa a car pulled up containing four Roma boys, none looking older than sixteen, with broken teeth and chests already covered in homemade tattoos. They asked where I was going. I told them Padina, the next village, and they beckoned me in. It was the least advisable lift I’d been offered yet and I have no idea why I accepted – the words ‘ah, fuck it’ ran through my head – and seconds later we were going at ninety miles an hour down the road, Balkan music pumping from the speakers, while they whooped and threw cigarettes at each other and the driver kept turning round to grin, as if driving was the least important thing he was doing at that moment. An hour’s walk evaporated in a few terrifying minutes, and we just had time to exchange names before the car screeched to a halt, exactly where I’d asked to be dropped. After a round of handshakes they were gone, and I was alone again in another cloud of dust.
I’d been making for Padina because my map showed a lake behind the village, and I envisaged my last night inland camping on its shore. But the lake turned out to be a retention pond containing the poison-blue effluence of a PVC factory, ringed by lights and service roads, and it was another two hours before I reached safely wooded hills above Razdelna. Smokestacks dominated the horizon, and fields of sickly looking crops grew alongside canals filled with water the colour of detergent, run-off from the chemical reservoir; the landscape was confused between industry and agriculture, as if, the closer it got to the sea, the less it knew what to do with itself. Even so, the woods were real woods, dappled with evening sunlight. Mysterious pathways through the trees gleamed with cobwebs of enormous tensile strength, stretching like elastic as I shouldered through them. I wandered in where I wouldn’t be found and gathered sticks for a fire. It was the night of the summer solstice and I felt savagely glad. The next day I would reach the Black Sea.
I’d pictured the arrival over and over in ambulatory daydreams: a lonely coastline, a final rise dropping to a deserted beach, the unimaginable pleasure of cool, rolling water. But in the manner of many arrivals, my first sight of the sea fell flat. Industry had wrecked the prettiness of the Varna estuary, where a trapezoid mountain of chalk erupted dust into the sky, and processing plants and loading bays blocked my view of water. A brief vision of blue opened up and then was whisked away by hills. The E5 road corkscrewed into the sky and I found myself on a four-lane highway on a concrete bridge soaring above the estuary, from where the sea was only a hazy band beyond the cranes.
The vision of water vanished again as the flyover plunged me into Varna, the biggest city on Bulgaria’s coast. I paced like a madman through the outskirts, determined not to let the sea get away, hurrying without much interest past a golden-domed cathedral, dwarf palm trees in pots, a maze of pedestrianised shopping streets, mobile phone shops and ice-cream stands, dodging a pair of baby-faced Mormon missionaries, past a row of stone columns, Greek or Roman, I didn’t care which, until at last I crunched onto sand, threw off my rucksack and my clothes, and collapsed into the waves.
‘Everything.’ I thought of the hermit in the Rila mountain lodge. That was the only word to describe how good it felt.
It was a crowded city beach splayed with the tanned and beautiful, the topless and the should-be topless, with lines of parasols you had to pay to sit underneath. I was the whitest and hairiest person in sight, pale legs chicken-poxed with mosquito damage; I felt like a northern barbarian stumbled into paradise. Waiting out the afternoon, watching the topography of bodies change as groups came and went, a feeling of peculiar melancholy grew as evening gathered. Roma wrestled in the shallows, hurling their children into the air – dressed noticeably more modestly than the Bulgarians, who flaunted everything – and it made me feel dislocated, far removed from beach life. Reaching the sea after all these months had something of anticlimax and something of loneliness. Mostly, though, it was simply the sadness of arrival.
At night the city came to life and that sadness faded. Coloured lights lit the pillars and palms, and fire jugglers and street musicians drew ice-cream-eating crowds. In the murmur of bars and the pulse of music, the men handing out flyers for strip shows outside clubs and casinos, Varna made sense of itself: a pleasantly seedy Black Sea port, with all the quiet sins and amusements of any seaside city.
I stayed with an archaeologist called Vassil, a connection that had come about in such a convoluted way – a friend of a friend of a friend – that I wasn’t even sure how it had happened. He put me up in an attic room with a view over tiled roofs to the sea, where I woke to the raucousness of gulls. Eating fried fish later with archaeologist friends on the beach, he elaborated on the country’s history, how Bulgarians were pulled down by the weight of their conquered past. ‘On national holidays it all seems wonderful. People think “we had a great empire.” Yes, but that was ten centuries ago. I think people feel like they’re living at the end of history, that everything is behind them. All they have to do is live a little longer and get it over with.’
‘Deep in our soul we are part of Europe,’ said his companion, a black-bearded man who’d been introduced as Big Ivan. ‘In medieval times we were one of the most powerful countries in Europe, the heart of the Orthodox world. But then the Turks made us part of an oriental empire for five centuries, a culture totally foreign to us. Then we got dragged away again by fifty years of Soviet rule, another eastern empire. When the EU accepted us in 2006 there was national celebration. Finally we had made it home to the European community, after centuries of separation. There was such hope for the future! And now the EU’s falling apart. All that hope has disappeared. That’s Bulgarian luck.’
He took a forkful of fish and another swig of beer. ‘Can you imagine how it feels, after waiting six hundred years, to arrive just as the train leaves the station?’
The next day Vassil drove me and a carload of friends to swim at Shkorpilovtsi, a beach twenty miles south, and left me there to continue on foot along the coast. It was late afternoon; I shumped down the sand away from the few struggling bars, until there were no more manmade things, and pitched my tent between the dunes. Here, free from sunbathing crowds, Balkan techno and the roar of cars, I could hear the waves for the first time.
I sat there all evening, sand between my toes. Darkness spread from the east, drawing the sea and sky together into a single stain. A flight of birds in V formation whistled northwards up the coast, too high to identify, perhaps on their way to the Danube delta in faraway Romania, and the lonely light of a ship on the horizon slipped south towards Burgas or Turkey. Varna had been a false arrival. It wasn’t until that night, rolled to sleep by the slow boom of waves against an empty shore, that I really reached the sea.