The Black Sea
Attuned for nearly a year to nothing but hinterland prospects of plain and mountain, my eyes, alighting now like a stranger’s on the stepped woods and the shore below, found something so improbable and extreme in the beauty of this interlock of vegetation and sea that it appeared an illusion.
The Broken Road
THE SUN CAME UP LIKE A BLOODY BUBBLE. EVERYTHING SHONE with a bright translucence, a light that was indefinably different to any that would fall inland. For a few moments, squinting at the beachgrass shivering in the wind, I was back at the Hook of Holland. But this was a different sea.
I swam, letting the smack of the waves knock all sleep from my body. After so many sweat-slathered weeks the pleasure of being clean was addictive, and from this point I would stop to swim more frequently than I ate. By the time I returned to my tent, a lizard had taken up residence inside. Along the tideline sprawled a sun-dried fish almost as long as my body, blunt snouted, stubby toothed, a misfit from the depths. Other leavings from the sea littered the sand towards Cherniya Nos, the Black Cape: the raggy carcasses of gulls, assorted polycarbonates, ubiquitous flip-flops.
My walk became very simple now: due south, keeping the sea to my left, hugging the coastline all the way to the Turkish border. It was easier to go barefoot, though with the burden of my bag walking on sand could be as exhausting as walking in snow – the same soft collapsing rhythm, one step forward and a half-step back – and I learnt to walk below the tideline where the sand was densely packed. My feet were deeply cracked in places, raw where blisters hadn’t healed, and sand worked its way into the wounds; but this was a minor discomfort compared with the wreck of my boots.
At the end of that first cape a yellow cliff dropped to the waves below, and I rebooted myself to struggle through aggressive undergrowth, spiked, scratched, entangled and stung until, after a bitter fight, emerging at another beach. There were huddles of tents and caravans half-hidden in the woods, glimpses of the deckchair existence of beach-dwelling summer tribes. Outside a boarded-up shack two boys were doggedly filing through the chain around a beer fridge; they grinned when they saw me coming, then resumed their work. With such initiative, they would doubtless make fine mutri one day.
Dunes turned into hills, and the hills became Bialiya Nos, the White Cape, beyond which, down chalky roads, lay the resort of Byala. The town was suffering the development disease, multistoried with cancerous outcrops of sea-facing apartments, and concrete frames jutted from the outskirts like the promise of an uglier future. I swam, ate ice cream, and pressed on. Obzor rose ahead, on the far side of a no-man’s land of half-constructed holiday homes populated by permatanned Russians – the new masters of this coastline – who helped me find my way down newly metalled roads. I wanted to swim, but the sea was as crowded as a rush-hour tube.
Beyond Obzor lay a stretch of merciful emptiness, either too cliffy to build on or granted a temporary reprieve by the economic crisis. Once I’d cleared the last hotels, the bars pumping sweaty beats, the last of the construction sites – a billboard showed a proposed ‘Club Resort’ the size of another small town – the sand segued into rocks and the coast was again unmanned. The elongated hump ahead was the last vestige of the Stara Planina, the range I’d crossed twice already, before the Old Mountain plunged underwater, barrelling under the waves towards Russia. I walked beneath cliffs over rubble and rocks, aurally balanced between the slosh of waves and the chirrup of insects, encountering no one but fishermen and isolated communities of nudists politely nodding hello.
Irakli beach had attained phase one of despoilment – the developers had got as far as a chill-out bar, complete with potted palms – but construction had tentatively halted there for now. The other end was inhabited by hippies peering shyly from the woods, surrounded by driftwood totem poles like charms against further encroachment. Here, Vassil had given me instructions to find the path leading up through the forest beside the fisherman’s stone cottage. There was the cottage, complete with fisherman – who looked like a fat Ernest Hemingway – there was the path winding into the trees, and after half an hour’s climb I was on top of Emine cape, overlooking the glittering endlessness of the sea.
Vassil’s directions led me along the dirt road to Emona, where a friend of his lived in the second house past the church. There was the church, and there was the second house, and there, sure enough, was Burya, a blue-eyed woman in her sixties waving from the garden. ‘You have arrived at the perfect time,’ was the first thing she said. ‘We are eating fish and drinking wine.’ Minutes later, so was I.
The fish was popche, ‘little priest’, named for the crossshaped bone in its body. The wine was from a local vineyard and had the tang of retsina. Burya, her husband and their neighbour Hristo had moved here decades ago to found an artist colony, and it was inaccessible enough, and high enough above the sea, to have escaped the construction craze that had flattened the individuality of villages up the coast. They showed me to a spare room underneath a shaded terrace, a stone chamber full of light and air, lizards creeping up the wall. From the terrace, on clear days, you could see the mountains of Turkey. Thick darkness swallowed the bay and stillness fell on the land. It didn’t quite get dark, however: light pollution from the west, where the coastline would take me the following day, made the sky smoulder white, the all-inclusive resort hotels blazing into the night. Fireworks burst above the sea, silent and unreal from this distance.
Hristo and his daughter Maria walked with me the next morning, picking out a secret pathway back to the sea through the coastal hills. The slopes were scattered with broken stone, and the electric fizz of cicadas and the pungency of thyme put me in mind of Greece or Spain; suddenly I became aware I had entered a mediterranean climate, baked and barren, with an impression of deep antiquity. We swam under crumbling cliffs in an uninhabited cove, the only other occupants a herd of cows swishing flies beneath the trees.
‘It was, and is, hard to capture the charm of the journey along this almost deserted coast, and its pervading atmosphere of peaceful seclusion and consolation,’ wrote Paddy. These few-and-far-between stretches of overlooked, undeveloped beach were a glimpse of the coastline he’d walked down, when the region – apart from a few large ports – was a peripheral fringe, the wildest and outermost edge of the continent. Somewhere not too far from here, he came across an encampment of Sarakatsani, ‘the only true nomads of the Balkans’, transhumant Greek-speaking shepherds who grazed their flocks in the mountains in summer, driving them down to the lowlands when winter came. The vision he had of them was like something from the Dark Ages: ‘The place reeked of horses and goats and curds and woodsmoke. Everything was made of twisted branches, thorns, reeds and timber; all was pegged, plaited, woven and lashed with thongs … these black-hooded and cloaked figures, these black and white zigzagged women, these conical huts and their teeming tintinnabulation of flocks through the rainy woods of Rumelia comprised the most mysterious community I had ever seen.’
The Greek population of the coast, like the Turks of the hinterland, had practically disappeared now, destroyed by the homogenising trends of nationalism, Communism and economic advancement. It was hard to imagine stumbling, as my predecessor did, over the rocks one night into a cave of carousing Bulgarian and Greek fishermen, who danced mad as dervishes to the music of gaida and bouzouki. Before publication of The Broken Road this account appeared as a separate story called ‘A Cave on the Black Sea’, and for years travel literature enthusiasts – geekier souls than I – had tried to pinpoint the cave’s whereabouts, combing the text for geological evidence. It was generally agreed that it must have been somewhere in this region, south of Varna and north of Burgas, but no one had ever identified a convincing location. Either the coast had shifted since then, the sea had risen or the cliff had fallen; or – as Artemis Cooper suggests – the cave was another of Paddy’s confabulations, a literary composite melded together from disparate elements. From what I’d seen of the coast so far, I had another theory: it wasn’t inconceivable that someone had slapped a hotel on top. His tattooed Greek fishermen had been replaced by tattooed English tourists, and the bouzouki music he’d heard lived on in Ibiza techno.
As if to support my fantasy, there came a roar of engines. A convoy of 4×4s thundered from the woods and ground to a halt on the beach, disgorging a score of brightly clad tourists to take photographs of each other, an allotted ten- minute break in their ‘off-road safari’. My friends ignored their presence with zen-like serenity, and after the intruders had smoked their cigarettes, gazing disinterestedly at the sea, they clambered back into their vehicles and rumbled away again.
‘Too close to the concrete coastline,’ said Maria. The cows reassembled under the trees. Hristo took off all his clothes and resumed his swim.
The concrete coastline began after that last lonely cape. First, a hotel the size of a cruise ship. Then another, slightly larger. Then hotel followed hotel as far as my eye could see along the grand sweep of the bay, the conjoined resorts of Elenite, Robinson, Sveti Vlas, Sunny Beach and Ravda sprawling ten miles down the shore. Sunny Beach had been the first – an unremarkable fishing village developed by the Communists as a resort for holidaying Eastern Europeans – but after 1989 mutri money flooded in, and in the construction boom of the 2000s the area had been transformed into a summer metropolis, a glass and concrete monument to capitalist excess.
The architecture of the temple complex seemed to have inspired the hotels along the beach: colossal stepped ziggu-rats shimmering with balconies, surrounded by landscaped lawns and lurid turquoise swimming pools, while the sand itself could hardly be seen for the sun worshippers who covered it, sizzling on loungers and anointing themselves with oil. Glistening faces scowled defensively as I lumbered past; I scowled defensively back, feeling peculiarly exposed in this tourist paradise. Inadvertently I wandered into an all-inclusive resort – everyone apart from me was wearing coloured wristbands to demonstrate their allegiance to a particular package deal, like a form of indentured servitude – and stood in horrified fascination watching fifty people perform a synchronised dance routine led by a whooping girl in Lycra, until a security guard arrived to escort me off the premises. I wasn’t sure if he’d noticed my bare wrists, or simply recognised, correctly enough, that I didn’t belong.
Behind the first tier of mega-hotels, the main drag of Sunny Beach was lined with condominiums, casinos, sports bars, bingo halls, themed restaurants, nightclubs, strip clubs, amusement arcades, crazy golf courses, Irish pubs and all-day English breakfasts. Tourists browsed the beachwear shops in flip-flops and Hawaiian shorts, ate fish and chips under palm-frond roofs, while hip-hop videos pumped and dazzled from flatscreen televisions. This was not Bulgaria, but an international zone with signage in a dozen languages, and the colonising flags of Britain, Russia, Germany, Australia and the USA gave the impression of a frenetic collision of nationalities; adverts for endless pleasures and distractions demanded attention on every side. The walk became a purgatory of identically repeating scenes, scrolling past mechanically while my feet stamped up and down on the ice-cream-splattered pavement.
Marooned in the middle of all this, at the point where Sunny Beach merged into its neighbouring resort – the separate villages of the bay having long since been subsumed into one contiguous sprawl – a causeway ran into the sea towards a little isthmus. I followed it, hoping for respite: this was the ancient Greek port of Mesembria, now rechristened Nesebar, to which Paddy had been drawn with romantic inevitability. ‘A strange, rather sad, rather beguiling spell haunted the cobbled lanes,’ he wrote. ‘In the few winding streets and the coffee house, it was Greek rather than Bulgarian that I heard spoken, and Greek too among the little fleet of beached fishing boats and the russet festoons of looped net. For it was an amphibian place. The water lapped at the end of the streets, hulls and masts broke up the skyline, there was even something of the shipwright’s trade about the jutting timbered upper storeys of the old houses, which confronted each other across the lanes like the poops of galleons anchored stern to stern. So muted, ambiguous, watery, with the dimness of the afterglow contending with lighting-up time, the town might have been at the bottom of the sea.’
There was nothing muted or ambiguous about the Nesebar of today. Its proximity to Sunny Beach had turned it into another theme park, an archaeological Disneyland, to which a steady stream of tourists was channelled on a miniature train, frowning as if they didn’t quite know how they had ended up there. Pizzerias and souvenir shops outnumbered the Byzantine churches, and the ancient stone walls were a backdrop for posing Russian blondes. At least with Sunny Beach there was no hint of what had existed before; here, remnants of the past served only to emphasise the crassness of what had replaced it.
Retracing my steps to the mainland, I resumed my escape attempt from the concrete. Hopeful signs of greenery appeared between half-built hotels, empty plots surrounded by fences and ‘For Sale’ signs, and then the roll of hills gave shape to the land once more. At last, feet stinging from the incessant pounding of the road, I came to a halt at a village called Aheloy. I hadn’t quite out-walked the sprawl, but had succeeded in getting myself to the least fashionable part of it: an odd little campsite on a silted beach, where a line of rusting aluminium pods – some once-futuristic Soviet concept of novelty accommodation – mouldered by the sea. No one else was in residence but an elderly man in a straw hat and Y-fronts, and I was soothed to hear the hiss of waves on sand again. When I went to sleep that night, visions of hotel balconies reeled behind my eyelids.
The worst was behind me now. To the south, wetlands and deltas guarded against further epic construction; the next morning, without looking back, I followed a narrow thread of sand between saline lakes and the sea, meeting no one but a group of bathers glistening head to toe with black mud, renowned for its restorative properties. A sign informed that the lakes were home to the wonderful- sounding glasswort and herbaceous seepweed, smother-weed and lesser sea spurrey; protected under EU law, these slimy succulents had halted development where everything else had failed.
That night I camped again a few miles outside Burgas. This was a large industrial port, confident enough to hold its own against absorption into the holiday coast, and tankers and naval vessels lurked offshore. The underwhelming plaza in the centre was fronted by weather-cracked apartment blocks, and the streets had a reassuring air of lazy normality. The sea was a lovely bottle-green, darkening towards the horizon, and the waves formed perfect triangles in the evening wind.
I didn’t know it at the time, but this was where the final chapter of The Broken Road breaks off mid-sentence: the narrative of Paddy’s great trudge ending, somewhat cryptically, with ‘this little multiracial port in which many of the races of the Balkans were represented; and yet, in another sense, although’, before leaping two hundred miles to his first scattered impressions of Istanbul. My time in Burgas was similarly abbreviated; instinct told me to keep moving, and my glimpse of the city was as brief as my predecessor’s own.
Protected wetlands to the south forced me to veer inland and I spent a weary day tramping the verge of a highway. The exhaustion was worth it: at the end of a dusty, dirty afternoon, I reached the refuge of Sozopol.
The town lay on its own little cape, and from a distance looked like a cluster of barnacles on a rock. Its houses leaned towards one another in gossipy togetherness, their upper storeys overhanging to shade the alleyways below. With their clinker-built walls, bleached by salt and sun, they looked like houses made by boat-builders, and probably they were. This was another ancient port town founded by seafaring Greeks, part of a wave of Hellenic settlement around the Black Sea, a tantalising vision of what Nesebar must once have been. Also like Nesebar it depended on the tourist industry, but it lay far enough south to have escaped overdevelopment; it harboured an artist population of the watercolours-of-boats variety, producing an atmosphere a bit like a Bulgarian St Ives. It was the kind of town that only makes sense when you get lost, safe in the knowledge that a certain number of twists and turns will inevitably lead to a sheet of coruscating blue between the buildings. There were tiny chapels with trembling candles, washing flapping from balconies, huddles of old men and women doing their evening sit. Grandmothers sold green fig jam, and bearded gentlemen snorkelled offshore trailing nets full of edible molluscs.
The Greeks had called the town Apollonia, after a temple to Apollo, and I found a cheap hotel on a street of that name. But sleep, for some reason, was beyond me, so after midnight I left my room and picked my way under blackened cliffs above the dark slop of the waves, energised by the spreading silence of the sea. It was almost dawn by the time I got to bed. Sleep deprivation gave the next day’s walk a pleasant unreality – secluded bays where cormorants stretched their wings on guano-covered rocks, an impassable river delta that forced me miles inland – and in a kind of rambling dream I arrived at Kiten beach, on the afternoon of June 30, to meet a man called Nikolay for the festival of July Morning.
We’d met briefly in Sofia, in the bar in which I’d heard the gaida for the first time. He was a writer and spent his summers living in a tent on the coast; a sandy-haired man with a broad, smiling face, older than I remembered from our smoky encounter in the bar, and accompanied by his red-haired wife Maria. ‘Here you will feel kef,’ he said as he showed me to their home: a forest village of tents and caravans a hundred metres from the sea, where a bear-like man with a black moustache was cooking stew over a fire. They came to this place every year, ‘the last free beach on the shore’, where they could live for months without being disturbed. It had the feel of a settlement of castaways after a shipwreck.
Kef was one of the many Turkish words that had drifted into Bulgarian during Ottoman occupation. ‘It means good, but it’s better than good. It’s the biggest good you can feel.’ Another Turkish-origin word soon entered my vocabulary: ‘You are Nicholas, I am Nikolay. If someone shares a name with you, that means they are your adash. You are my adash – we are name-twins.’
Bulgarians had been telling me about July Morning since I’d crossed the border. ‘You know the band Uriah Heep?’ they asked when I told them where I was from, ‘you know the song “July Morning”?’ People seemed slightly shocked that I didn’t. When it was explained that July Morning was a festival, at which people gathered on the coast to watch the sun rise in the east, I’d assumed the festival had come first – an ancient Bulgarian custom, perhaps pagan in origin – and Uriah Heep had sung about it; though why a British rock group from the 1970s had written a song about an obscure Bulgarian folk tradition was unclear.
From my adash I learnt it was the opposite way round. The 1971 hit, with its generic rock lyrics about the power of freedom and love, became a counter-cultural anthem in Communist times. In the early 1980s a group of friends had gathered in Varna to sing this song as a subtle act of defiance against Soviet rule. To their surprise – and doubtless to the astonishment of Uriah Heep – the idea took on a life of its own: the final years of Communism had seen hundreds, then thousands of people flocking to the beaches on the last night of June, and after the Iron Curtain fell it remained an annual fixture. Now tens of thousands joined in, there were DJ sets and all-night raves, and – as with any genuine tradition – the younger revellers had mostly forgotten the festival’s origins.
At sunset the dwellers of the forest village heated an iron griddle and cooked flatbread smothered in melted sheep’s cheese, washed down with wine. There was no big party on the beach, but people huddled in blankets on the tideline and the sand was scattered with isolated fires, pools of music drifting and merging, each group absorbed in its private meanings. I slept a few hours in Nikolay’s hammock and woke to see the sky already reddening over the sea, so I hurried down to the only bar to grab a beer and join the others in their quiet waiting.
The sun popped up surprisingly, as things do when you wait for them long enough to forget what you’re waiting for. It cleared the horizon in seconds, drenching the waves blood-red. People leapt from their blankets and ran into the sea, dogs splashing after them, as the song blasted from the speakers: ‘Here I was on a July morning/I was looking for love/ With the strength of a new day dawning/ And the beautiful sun/ At the sound of the first bird singing/ I was leaving for home/ With the storm and the night behind me/ And the road of my own…’ In many ways it was an unlikely choice for an anthem, with no chorus and five minutes of rambling psychedelic organ riffs, but perhaps this represented the freedom people had been yearning for, a reaction against the straitjacket of totalitarian culture. It left me nonplussed at first, but as the guitars and organs wailed on, as people leapt in the shallows or stood quietly alone, contemplating the brightening sky, my eyes flooded with unexpected tears.
The tears were partly for the song, for what it must have meant. They were partly for my sleeplessness, and for beer first thing in the morning. But they were also for my walk; the realisation hit me now that July was the month I would reach Istanbul.
But not quite yet. Days went by. I slipped all too easily into life on the last free beach, spending mornings in the sea, afternoons outside the bar, evenings around the fire eating charred fish and potatoes, discussing books with Nikolay and various friends who came and went, assembling and dismantling tents and wandering naked between the trees, and nights in the hammock. I kept planning to leave, but it never took much for Nikolay to dissuade me. ‘Hey adash, what’s the rush? You can stay as long as you like. Stay a month, why not?’
Yet the Strandzha mountains rose to the south, and beyond those mountains was Turkey. When I stopped to focus on it the proximity of my destination caused a near-constant flutter of nerves, butterflies not in my stomach but in my feet, my lower legs, my shoulders, below my collarbones; the parts of my body most affected by walking. It was like being on the verge of meeting a legendary character whose existence I had always known of, but never entirely believed in. Under the laziness of those days ran a current of excitement, of fear, of curiosity, and when the time was right I allowed it to dislodge me. I went for a final swim, said goodbye to my adash, and left the forest village on another cloudless morning. The current gently picked me up and carried me away.
Soon I would have to turn inland. At last I was leaving EU jurisdiction, and the border could only be crossed at designated points: the Rezovo river and a Turkish military zone lay due south, neither of which was passable. But first was a journey along some of the loveliest coastline I’d seen, and I determined not to let the sea out of sight.
This obstinacy almost killed me on the first morning. An unwise decision led me up cliffs I could climb neither up nor down: every piece of rock I grabbed at broke away in my hand, landslides of scree skittered under my boots, and the weight of my rucksack pulled my body off balance. I sent the bag crashing to the beach below and inched down to start again; attempting an easier-looking route, I somehow managed to get myself in an even worse position. Toeholds crumbled under my feet, handholds flaked at the slightest touch, and for one horrible, disbelieving second I felt myself peel away from the wall, dragged towards empty space, before lurching for a thorn-covered stalk I trusted blindly would hold my weight. Using this, I hauled myself to solid ground. My fingers were bloody, my arms scraped raw and my legs too wobbly to walk. When I finally carried on I felt chastened by the land, as if I’d overstepped a line and received a strongly worded admonition.
I became humbler after that, and the coastline followed suit. The next two days were beaches of sand, beaches of stone and beaches of shells, alternated between bare feet and barely functional boots. I followed cliff-top paths, secret shores of rockpooled rocks, and when forced to use the road I was happy to find it potholed, less cared for than before, petering out as it trickled towards the border.
Sinemorets, on the far side of the green Veleka river, was my last halt on the Bulgarian coast. Between two widely spaced rock humps arced a perfect fingernail of sand, the forest spilling jungle-green down the slopes behind. At the northernmost end of the beach the river gurgled into the sea, its current pushing back the waves, and wading across this confluence of waters brought me to a tent-sized spit of sand squeezed between rocks and river. The water hopped with tiny frogs skirting the boundary of salt and fresh; river fish held themselves in the current, pulling against its flow. I let my body drift downriver and be carried into the sea, over smooth stones, flat-bodied on the sandbar, into clearer, cooler depths with the wavering shadows of rocks below. The moon came up red, then orange, yellowing as it climbed, cooling to a soft eggy shade and finally white as bone.
The moment the sea was out of sight, the temperature rocketed. On a path parallel to the river I sweltered westwards into the verdant swathes of the Strandzha National Park, windscreen-wiping sweat off my face, out of my eyes. There were locust trees and waist-high wild grasses, subtropical humidity, an unfamiliar ecology of beeches densely hung with vines, forests of enormous ferns and prehistoric-looking tendrils on stalks. The air swarmed with hornets as sinister as Chinook helicopters, and iridescent insects that weren’t dragonflies and looked like flying silverfish, which appeared to move only horizontally. The path became overgrown and I lost all sense of direction. By the time I had found the Veleka again it was covered in dark and slightly nightmarish lily pads; the water had a hallucinatory quality and – was it my imagination? – seemed to be flowing the wrong way from the sea.
It was an alien and threatening new environment. I hated it there, and it seemed to hate me back in equal measure. The track divided, looped back on itself, inexplicably vanished. Under a tin roof in the woods I found an old man asleep, a shepherd without his sheep, and woke him up apologetically to ask for directions. He seemed only too happy to help, but the track he pointed out went the same way as the first, melting away like an illusion, and I had to retrace my steps and wake him up again. This time he walked me deep into the forest, explaining something very slowly and precisely in Bulgarian, saying goodbye when we reached what looked like a confident path. Five minutes after he’d gone, the path disappeared again. I gave up, set my compass west, and plunged into the brush.
For the rest of the day I battled through woodland, mosquitoes hanging off my arms, a walking waterfall of sweat. The rising, plunging hills made going west impossible, so I struck south until I regained the Veleka. It had lost its nightmarish aspect, bubbling clear with deep emerald pools, and I dragged off my sodden clothes and lay in it for a long time, trying to wash the Strandzha off my body.
In the indolent village of Kosti I found kebab, salad and beer. In lazy loops around the plaza cycled a little girl reading from a book balanced on the handlebars, and the old man who shared my table had eyebrows merging into his sideburns, while one hand took the form of a fleshy pincer with two muscular thumbs instead of fingers. The evening road led from there into dense beech forest, winding ever up and on, into the border mountains. I walked surrounded by tiny flies that hovered inches in front of my eyes, as if trying to see in, behaviour that was absolutely maddening. The unvarying tunnel of trees gave me no reason to stop in one place more than any other, so I carried on until exhaustion forced me off the road.
My penultimate night in Bulgaria was marked by a visitation: a creature I had been waiting to see – half with hope and half with fear – since my wanderings in the Carpathian foothills. Lying in my tent at dusk, I heard a crunch of branches that I supposed to be a deer, but as the sound got louder and closer I realised that deer didn’t move like that, didn’t have that physicality at all. The steps were ponderous, deliberate and accompanied by a noise horribly like heavy breathing. In all my time camping in the wild, I’d never got over the primal fear of hearing something approach my tent, its species and intentions unknown, and that fear gripped me now. It was worse to stay inside and imagine what might be coming, so I crept from my flimsy shelter to peer into the dimness of the forest.
Leaves cracked, sticks bowed and snapped beneath the weight of the thing. The huff of laboured breath increased. A black shape loomed into view and for a second I saw a dog, some brute of a Doberman, but it was bigger than that. It stopped. An ear swung like a fan. Then my eyes pulled into focus and I was looking at the thrusting snout and tushes of a wild boar, like a monster from a fairytale, standing square and facing me head on.
It was utterly unlike a pig; that was my first observation. I could see the coarse hairs on its nape, the muscle of its shoulders. I couldn’t believe how large it was: it seemed the size of a small horse. It took a couple more weighted steps, stopped again, considered. We regarded one another. I ran through various options. There was a knife in my bag, but the thought was ludicrous. Probably I should climb a tree, but there were no trees that could be climbed. Perhaps I should throw rocks at it, startle it away. That scenario played out in my mind, and I thought of the many ways that aggression was bound to go wrong; more than anything it seemed rude, in the same way that throwing rocks at a stranger in the street was rude. The idea was almost embarrassing. I understood that if it wanted to attack me – if it had piglets to protect or was simply in a rotten mood – there was absolutely nothing I could do.
In a way that was a relief; the social obligation was on the boar, and all I could do was respond in whatever way seemed appropriate. Its ear swung back. It made a noise like it was clearing its throat. Then it turned away, as if pretending we had not seen each other, and picked another route through the trees.
When I was sure it was gone I armed myself with stick and knife – defences that were patently useless – and hung what little food I had in a tree as far away as I dared. Later that night I heard it again, snuffling and shouldering, but it seemed to be keeping its distance. Unless it was creeping, I thought, half-asleep. Could pigs creep? It seemed unlikely. At least the tent was a symbolic barrier. Did pigs understand symbolic barriers? That seemed unlikely too.
‘Every year he kills someone in forest. He is very dangerous,’ said the owner of the guesthouse I stayed at in Malko Tarnovo. He had seen me studying the boar’s head mounted on the wall: its frozen snarl and protruding tusks were horrific, but the expression of rage was nothing like the look on my boar’s face. It was anti-boar propaganda. The use of the personal pronoun, however, put my boar in a different light, and for a second my memory added a murderous gleam to his eye.
I had reached Malko Tarnovo – Small Tarnovo, the diminutive cousin of Veliko Tarnovo, Great Tarnovo, which I had left three weeks before – after a journey of dust and trees, enveloped every step of the way in a halo of face-flies. Unusually for a border town – though the border was some miles distant – it was a pretty and tranquil place, with streets of traditional Revival-era houses, winding steps overgrown with weeds, gardens of pear trees. In the square Roma women were beating the dust with rush brooms, managing somehow to transform menial labour into an act of ownership. Later the Strandza’s humidity broke. Rain washed over the mountains, bringing forth a deep green smell and a feeling of relief, as if something had finally been decided.
Mountains and forests rose on all sides, rolling away to Turkey. Not long ago, much of this region was a forbidden military zone; greater perils than wild boars lurked in the trees. Until 1989 the Strandzha was the no-man’s land between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, another point where East met West – ideologically and geographically – and anyone entering those forests was likely to end up like the bullet-riddled corpses sinking to the riverbed between the Iron Gates. Even locals, said the guesthouse owner, had needed permits to work here. ‘And still it is dangerous. Now illegal immigrants come – North Africans, Afghans, Kurds. Wolves too. Wolves from the mountains…’ He gazed wistfully at the wall, as if imagining a mounted wolf’s head to accompany his boar, and maybe a couple of immigrants to go with them.
Talk of illegal border crossings made me anxious the next day, on the ten-mile stretch towards the checkpoint, not knowing how the Turkish authorities would react to me walking. There was no particular reason why crossing on foot should be a problem – there was nothing illegal about it – but it seemed to be one of those things that conjured darkly suspicious feelings in many officials. Somewhat anticlimactically, no one looked at me twice. I paid €15 for a visa from a man who looked as Turkish as the Turks in every East London corner shop, got it checked by a pretty young woman who seemed to live her life constantly laughing, passed the sign that read TÜRKİYE, and strolled into my eighth and final country.
The vision of a new flag had instant power. After a continent of tricolours, that white star and crescent moon on a field of red was a statement of altogether different intent, proudly and unmistakably un-European. That, and the portraits of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk – glowering under a tall wool hat, eyebrows flared like a B-movie vampire – shifted everything into a different reality.
Half an hour from the checkpoint, though, I’d almost forgotten I was in another country. Apart from a better-maintained road than any I’d seen in Bulgaria, so wide and so empty of cars it felt almost agoraphobic, nothing in the landscape was different to how it had been for the last three days. The mountains were the same mountains, the rolling forests of oak and beech were the same rolling forests of oak and beech, the birds sung the same songs, and my head had accumulated an identical cloud of face-flies. The highway unspooled down the mountain towards yellow lands beyond, but I struck east down a smaller road, from where I could start to work my way back towards the sea.
A village lay some way ahead: Dereköy, said the sign. Its outskirts appeared the same as any Bulgarian village – whitewashed houses with tiled roofs, chickens pecking in rubbly yards – and the only immediate variation was the white minaret. Women in hijabs and floral skirts were making their way towards the centre, and I followed in their wake. There the change was so abrupt and startling it was like waking up on a film set. Suddenly, I was in a truly different world.