Gypsy River
Everyone likes to laugh at Roma monkeys … they add colour.
NIKOLAI KIRILOV1
The Western knights, with no enemy to fight, treated the whole operation in the spirit of a picnic, enjoying the women and the wines and the luxuries they had brought with them from home, gambling and engaging in debauchery, ceasing in contemptuous fashion to believe that the Turk could ever be a dangerous foe to them.
PATRICK KINROSS2
THIRTY KILOMETRES west of Ruse, the first poppies of spring grow beside the architect Kolyo Ficheto's bridge across the Yantra river, which flows down to the Danube from the Stara Planina mountains. To the north, the Danube is fed by the Olt and the Jiu rivers flowing down from the Carpathians. Barn swallows dart beneath the ten handsome stone arches of Ficheto's bridge, and the wavy, broken line built into the stone beneath the parapet gives a sense of movement, a nod towards the majesty of the river flowing beneath it. This was Kolyo Ficheto's trademark, imprinted on almost all the buildings he designed.3 On the Danube shore in Svishtov, the roof of the Church of the Holy Trinity has the same wavy line, as though imitating the waves of the Danube or the Black Sea. The carved ends of the pews in the church at Balatonkenese in Hungary, the floor tiles of a friend's house in Mindszentkálla, have the same, quiet human tribute to the rhythms of nature.
The heart of the nineteenth-century Bulgarian writer Aleko Konstantinov is preserved in a jar in a museum named after him in Svishtov.4 Next to it is the blood-stained jacket he was wearing when an assassin's bullet ended his life in 1897 at the age of only thirty-six. Konstantinov created the fictional character Bay Ganyo Balkanski, whose adventures were published in his 1895 best-seller Bay Ganyo Goes to Europe. Konstantinov won many enemies with his sarcastic portrayal of a provincial Bulgarian setting out to the West in peasant costume and returning home in elegant West European garb, having learnt the basics of capitalism during his sojourn among the peoples up the Danube, but none of their manners or restraint. ‘While Ganyo is simply a comic, primitive buffoon in the first part of the book that follows his exploits in Europe, he becomes the authentic and dangerous savage only on his return, among his own, where he is the nouveau riche and newly hatched corrupt politician,’ writes Maria Todorova.5 Konstantinov thought up Bay Ganyo on a trip to Chicago for the World Fair in 1893, but the character is based on his own experiences in Bulgaria as a judge, before he quit in disgust at the political corruption of his profession. Konstantinov sought refuge from his life and times in humour, and joined a circle of artists known as ‘Merry Bulgaria’. He wrote under the ironic pseudonym ‘Shtastlivetsa’ – ‘The Happy One’. His family disowned him and he clashed frequently with the authorities, but the character he created lives on to haunt the imagination of Bulgarians finding their way in the European Union, not the ugly caricature of an outsider, mocking their worst characteristics, but of an insider. ‘Critics disagree on whether Bay Ganyo represents “Bulgarianness”. In his character, “national” features are combined with those of any upstart; thus he can also be interpreted as representative of human shamefulness,’ wrote Sonia Kanikova.6 Konstantinov also wrote about the flaws of other societies. His description of his visit to America, To Chicago and Back, was published in 1894. According to Kanikova, ‘he regards the American way of life as anti-human and foresees some of the disastrous effects of technological progress and civilisation’. A soul brother, then, for Momi Kolev at the Koloseum Circus in Ruse.
Belene, the oversized village where Todor Tsanev suffered so long, presents a double-face to the world. A huge, unfinished nuclear power station lies along the low cliffs like a mortally wounded lion. An endless building site shelters behind a tall fence, decorated with coils of barbed wire. A hundred security guards provide at least a little local labour. ‘Belene NPP – Energy for the Future’ proclaims an information board in the centre of the town. ‘Construction period – 59 months. Design lifetime – 60 years.’ The reality has proved a little harder. Begun in the 1970s, it was abandoned for lack of money in 1990, restarted and abandoned again several times. In January 2013, a referendum called by the opposition Socialist Party aimed at restarting Belene was approved by the public. But the governing party carefully changed the wording at the last minute into support for an unnamed nuclear reactor. Opponents argued that Belene would cost every Bulgarian dear, and that money in the European Union's poorest member state would be better spent on health care, pensions and safer energy.
Petar Dulev, the mayor of the municipality, is a firm believer in all things nuclear. ‘We always supported construction here. Despite the recent problems in Japan, we believe that nuclear power is the safest and cheapest source of energy, and will provide seven thousand jobs during the construction phase.’ ‘And the prison camp?’ I ask, cruelly. ‘The concentration camp is a black spot on the history of Belene. We try to build our prestige in other ways now. But perhaps in future it will attract tourists here, as a place of commemoration – like Alcatraz.’ As I leave, he presents me with a compact disc of Bulgarian folk songs by a group of local singers called ‘Danubian dawn’, backed by the musicians of Belenka and Dimum. The local paper, Dunavski Novini (Danube News), has a photo of the musicians on the back cover: two accordion players, a violinist and a drummer. The music alternates between the rousing and the melancholy, but is all rather fine. My favourite tracks are ‘Saint George, break in horse’, and ‘Why didn't you come yesterday night, elder brother Maria'ne?’
A high security prison has replaced one corner of the old, sprawling barracks of the prison camp, and the still undiscovered graves of those who died here. The rest of the island, and some twenty islands which surround it, have been turned into a national park. Out of the darkness of the past, something green and hopeful seems to be emerging.
Down on the shore, opposite Belene Island, is an elegant, modern building set on green lawns gently sloping down to the river. Here as much effort is going into preserving and restoring nature as once went into destroying it. The park is part of a World Bank and European Union effort to reduce the load of nutrient pollution in the Black Sea, most of which arrives through the Danube, the Dniester and the Dnieper – the great flush toilets of Europe. Thanks to both the prison and the nature protection area, the twenty or so islands of the Belene archipelago are almost inaccessible to the public, a blessing for shy and rare birds like the white-tailed eagle and the pygmy cormorant that nest there. The park authority's job is to undo the damage caused by decades of forced labour by the inmates of the prison camp – the vast dykes that cut the Danube off from the wetland forests, built at such a cost in human misery, which deprived the fish of the spawning grounds they need and the birds of the fish they need to survive. If Todor Tsanev could see what is happening here, I think he would be glad. A system of sluices and waterways has been built on the island, to allow periodic, controlled flooding. After the first intervention, in 2008, monitors from the park recorded a surge in the number of birds. Whiskered terns, mistle thrushes, purple herons and mute swans appeared as if from nowhere. Floating watermoss, mouse garlic, yellow floating heart, fen ragwort and spring snowflake all flourished in the new conditions.
‘A big part of our work is to explain to local people, especially children, why restoring the wetlands is a good idea,’ said Stela Bozhinova, director of the Persina Nature Park.7 ‘Some people understand what we're doing, others resent the fact that we seem to be undoing their life's work, protecting the shoreline from flooding.’ The largest island, Persina, is fifteen kilometres long and six kilometres wide at its fattest point. The water is unusually low for May, which is disappointing for Stela and her team as it makes it harder to flood the forests for any useful length of time. A constant problem for the park is the functioning of the massive Iron Gates dam on the Romanian–Serb border. When water is released at the dam it creates a wave that travels down the river, still sixty to eighty centimetres high when it reaches Belene. That erodes the islands and damages the confluence of tributaries of the Danube such as the Yantra. Even so, the work to nurse the rarest species back from the brink of extinction is bearing fruit. Four of Bulgaria's fourteen white-tailed eagles nest on Persina Island – two adult pairs. This year one nest has two eggs in it, while they have not been able to get close enough to the other to count. If just two chicks survive from each nest, that would mean a nearly 30 per cent increase in Bulgaria's white-tailed eagle population.
Stela notices climate change in several ways. During the eight years she has worked as director of the park, the Danube has not frozen over once, although this used to be commonplace. But extremes of weather seem to be increasing in other ways, with more sudden storms on the river and wild fluctuations in the water level from one day to the next. Several of her colleagues are away on a field trip downriver in a small boat from Vidin as part of a project to track the numbers of two endangered birds, the sand martin and the little ringed plover, down the whole length of the Danube. We climb up into the observation tower. An olive green military van of the Bulgarian prison service drives a batch of new prisoners over a small bridge on to the island. Everything is green here, even the prison vehicles.
The Danube flows past Belene like a solid mass, a moving carpet. ‘Its impossible to say exactly how many islands there are,’ says Stela. ‘Some disappear one day, others appear the next.’
The Danube shore on the right, southern bank is steep, a cliff rising vertically from the water, while the left bank on the Romanian shore is low marshland. The road from Belene descends to the plain of Nikopol, the old Nikopolis. The ruins of the west wall of the Roman fort, built by the emperor Marcus Aurelius in AD 169, crumble gently into oblivion. It was a Roman victory, nike, over the Dacians, forgotten by all except the schoolchildren and tourists in little Danubian museums. A thermal power station on the far bank hisses and roars, periodically releasing an accumulation of steam like a wrestler between rounds. From another chimney, a thin trail of yellow smoke rises, like urine – the shoreline industries of the Romanian town of Turnu Mǎgurele. The sky is restless, and great rolls of black cloud, black as the tarred hulls of fishing boats, swoop down from the Carpathians, though the sun still shines on the Bulgarian shore. A Romanian barge, moored to the dock with its bow upstream, waits for a load of gravel that passes through a long contraption of conveyor belts and chutes. The Danube is strangely calm, reflecting it all. Images of Romanian factories alternate black and white in the colourless river.
By naming his new town after a particular battle, Marcus Aurelius seems to have set the scene for a spate of decisive battles in the history of the place. On the plains of Nikopolis, the flower of British, French, Dutch, Hungarian and Spanish youth met their doom in 1396 in the last, disastrous crusade, against a disciplined army of Turks and Serbs.8 By all accounts, they rather deserved it. The crusaders, led by King Sigismund of Hungary, were stung into action by the daring raids of the forces of the Turkish sultan, Bayezid the Thunderbolt, from his fortresses at Nikopolis, Lom and Vidin on the Danube. Sigismund and his allies gathered at Buda in May 1386, and ignoring Sigismund's advice, provided on account of knowledge gleaned from his own long rivalry with the Ottomans, took the offensive, marching down the valley of the Danube as far as Nikopolis, looting, pillaging and raping each Christian, Jewish or Muslim community in their path. Fortified by the excellent wines they found on the shores of the Morava river in Serbia, they camped in front of Nikopolis, preparing to annihilate the small Turkish garrison at their leisure. ‘The Western knights, with no enemy to fight, treated the whole operation in the spirit of a picnic,’ writes Patrick Kinross. When Bayezid finally arrived to do battle in November, with a force at least as large as their own, – twice as large according to some accounts – the French troops were so keen to prove themselves in battle, to justify their resentment that the expedition had been placed under Hungarian command, that they charged the enemy against the express orders of the ever-cautious Sigismund. The best report of what happened next comes from a French survivor, Jean Froissart. At the head of the French troops, Philippe d'Elu called to his standard-bearer, ‘Forward banner, in the name of God and Saint George, for they will see me today a good chevalier!’ Seven hundred French cavalry charged uphill, scattering the weak auxiliary troops of the Ottomans. Just beyond the brow of the hill, however, the full force of Bayezid's troops lay in wait. ‘The crusaders were still, by the standards of the time, essentially amateur soldiers, fighting in the past and in a romantic spirit. They had learned nothing of the professional art of war as it progressed through the centuries, none of the military skills of the Turks, with their superior discipline, training, briefing and tactics, and above all the mobility of their light-armoured forces and archers on horseback,’ writes Kinross.9 The men of the last crusade were massacred. After several hours, the remnants of the army split, some fleeing to their boats to sail back up the Danube, others beginning a long march home beside the river and across the Carpathians, where survivors from the villages they had torched on the way took revenge on them. The day after the battle, Bayezid had all ten thousand prisoners executed, except for the Count of Nevers and his entourage who were forced to witness the beheading of their men, one by one, roped together like cattle.
I meet Vasile Popov by the shore in modern Nikopol, watching the approach of a storm from the north. He's a handsome man in the camouflage jacket favoured by all Balkan men who keep their old leather one for special occasions and whose denim jackets of their youth are now too threadbare, too small, or have been purloined by granddaughters. He also has a fine moustache, slightly reminiscent of Joseph Stalin, but a much kinder smile. His first Danube story is just hearsay, a tale fondly told in the town, of how in the bitter winter of 1956, a logjam of ice threatened to destroy Nikopol, forming a solid wall and forcing the river to flood its banks. The Romanian army opened fire with mortars, shattering the ice-flows, which then obediently resumed their passage downriver. The town was saved. Exactly half a century later, during the floods of April 2006, Vasile personally took the President of Bulgaria, Petar Stoyanov, on his boat through the flooded town, to show him the damage and to press the locals’ claims for compensation. That same spring, he took his two daughters to the school graduation ball by boat through the still-flooded streets. The girls stepped elegantly ashore in their long dresses.
Vasile works for the town council; ‘there's no other work here … apart from the factory making electricity metres, which has already closed.’ Even the foundations of the old factory have been stripped to the bone by the Gypsies, he says, in their hunger for scrap metal. He used to fish from his own boat, and his best catch was a female sturgeon weighing ninety-five kilos, with twenty-two kilos of caviar. The caviar he sold for three hundred dollars a kilo, keeping only a small plateful for himself and his family to taste – ‘fishermen always sell what they can, and keep the worst bits for themselves … I managed to pay for my daughters to finish their education, in mathematics and foreign languages, with that fish,’ he says proudly. But the story has an unhappy ending. The same year, he caught hepatitis from a dirty needle used by the dentist who was fixing his teeth, and spent the rest of the money getting the treatment he needed to combat the illness. He has still not got back his strength. ‘I used to be so strong I could change car tyres by lifting the whole car up with one hand, and replacing the wheel with the other.’ Now he can't even go out fishing any more, has sold his boat, and lives on his two hundred dollars a month salary from the town council. He loves talking about fishing. There was a lake to the west of the town, where large fish, catfish and amur, got trapped by the changes in the level of the river. Men would beat on the water with sticks, while others would wait with nets across the mouth of the narrow channel, which led the water back to the Danube. ‘They jumped like dolphins – straight into our nets,’ he laughs. He also used to catch amur, a big carp-like fish imported into Europe from the Far East, using cherry tomatoes as bait.
Just as Nikopol witnessed the start of Ottoman domination of the Balkans, events here beside the Danube were also central to its end. In 1812 at the Treaty of Bucharest, the border between the Russian and Ottoman empires was established along the Prut river. Four hundred and twenty years after the Turks first occupied wide swathes of south-eastern Europe, their political and military strength lay in ruins. Historians have long debated how exactly the Ottomans, so effective in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, lost their grip. A Turkish historian, Mehmed Genç, argues that the failure of the Turkish authorities to supply their armies with weapons, tents and food properly, especially from 1750 onwards, was the main problem.10 One reason for this was that the army refused to pay the market price for their goods, and depended on several large suppliers. Their supplies, however, were exhausted and they were pushed to the brink of bankruptcy by the delays, or even the complete failure, of the state to pay. Research by the Hungarian historian Gábor Ágoston has added further reasons – the fact that many of the supplies came not from the Turkish motherland, but rather from Bosnia, involving a long journey first through the mountains, then up the Danube.11 Yet another cause of the defeats in the age of gunpowder was the very variable technical quality of both firearms and ammunition.
The collapse of the Ottoman empire would tax the minds and budgets, and stimulate the ambitions, of European statesmen for the next hundred years. The essence of what came to be known as the ‘Eastern Question’ was whether, as the German statesman Count Metternich put it, the Sick Man of Europe (Turkey) ‘be sent to the doctor, or to his heirs’ – that is, the many states still under Ottoman control, all straining for independence.12 The River Danube was to play a crucial role in the strategic diplomacy, wars and skirmishes that followed. By 1852, a third of all shipping on the Danube was British. The first steamships had appeared on the river in the 1830s.13 The industrial revolution in Britain needed raw materials and foods from the Near East, and markets to sell its rapidly expanding range of manufactured products. The route up and down the Danube, across the Black Sea to Constantinople then across central Asia to India, was a third shorter than round the Cape of Good Hope. ‘If in a political point of view the independence of Turkey is of great importance, in a commercial sense it is of no less importance to this country,’ Lord Palmerston told the House of Commons in 1849.14 And for that trade to flourish, the survival and stability of the Ottoman empire appeared the best guarantee. Madder root needed by British industries to dye textiles, valonia to tan leather, wheat and corn to feed Britain's fast-growing population, raw silk and raisins, all came from the Ottoman empire. The grain grew on the rich farmlands of the Danubian plain.
Britain intervened on the Ottoman side in the Crimean War, from 1853 to 1856, to prevent Russian encroachments that threatened her trade routes from the north. The ships carrying letters home from British soldiers travelled up the Danube, alongside other ships carrying grain to feed their wives and sweethearts.15 Each ship issued its own postmark on envelopes, and they are now much prized by collectors. Meanwhile Russia was pressing ever closer to the Danubian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, on the northern banks of the river, and to what would later become Bulgaria on the southern shore. The tsars presented themselves as the champions of the Balkan Christians. From the 1850s, France also became a supporter of the national independence movements against the Ottomans.
In 1848 Habsburg Austria crushed the revolution and war of independence in Hungary with Russian help, and more than four thousand Hungarians and Poles fled to safety on Ottoman territory. When Vienna and St Petersburg demanded their extradition to face almost certain execution, the British and French sent their fleets to the Dardanelles to protect the Turks from a possible Russian attack. Public sympathy in Britain was firmly on the side of Hungary and her Turkish friends, and against the ‘bullying’ tactics of Austria and Russia. ‘By an ironic twist of history,’ wrote L.S. Stavrianos, ‘Turkey now stood out in the public mind as the champion of European liberty against the brutal despotism of the two emperors.’16 The peoples of the Balkans, on the other hand, saw Russia as a useful ally to break the Turkish grip on their countries once and for all. In December 1877, Vasile Popov tells me proudly, a threat by the Russian and Bulgarian besiegers to flood the city of Pleven, the modern Plevna just to the south-west of Nikopol, finally forced its Turkish defenders to surrender after a five-month siege.17
While Bulgaria was shaking itself loose of Constantinople, and into conflict with its neighbours about just how big an independent Bulgaria should be, the Romanian-Danubian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia finally managed to unite, first of all under a home-grown prince, Alexander Cuza, in 1861, then under a foreign one, Charles of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, in 1866. Cuza, though unpopular with the Romanian liberals who had set their hearts on a foreign prince, pushed through an important land reform in 1864 that stripped the monasteries, which owned 11 per cent of all arable land, of their holdings. He also liberated the large, semi-nomadic Roma population from slavery.18
A clock strikes twelve on the wall in Milan Nikolov's office. We stop talking to let it finish. Twelve strokes can take such a long time. The waiting seems appropriate, as we are talking about his own history and that of his people. Both his grandfather and his father were born in Ruse. His family are Calderash Gypsies, coppersmiths, whose work has been sought after for centuries throughout eastern and central Europe. The Calderash are one of the proudest and most traditionally-minded of the Roma tribes.19 Milan is the sixth of seven children, four boys and three girls. Part of his community has assimilated, he says; some have become Muslims or Christians, and many have lost their roots. He still speaks the Roma language and works in the city council to improve his people's lot. He studied agriculture at university, an unusual subject for a man from a community that has been traditionally landless, but has been increasingly drawn to social work since he finished his degree – to deal with the age-old problem of how better to integrate the Roma into society and politics. He was elected as a councillor for the Union of Democratic Forces, a centre-right party that won the 1997 elections, but has largely disintegrated at national level. Rain starts falling heavily outside as we speak, battering the panes, followed by peals of thunder. The city beyond his windows goes dark, the roofs lit up by brilliant flashes of lightning. I imagine the storm sweeping down through the whole Danubian plain, conducted by the river.
Mesere is the Roma word for justice, and some Bulgarian Roma still maintain the Roma court system, overseen by the elders of the community, just as they do in Romania. He describes it as a way open to Roma families to solve conflicts between them, without resorting to the state justice system. Divorce is one area in point, in a community where the young usually marry very young. Aged forty-four he has three children of his own, five grandchildren and one great grand-daughter. Another use of traditional justice is in disputes over property. When one family starts building on land which another claims, they can turn to the mesere. Theft can also be dealt with – there have been cases when a father was held responsible, and fined, for the burglaries of his son. The whole point of it is not to ‘do justice’, but to restore peace within the Roma community.20 As the rain eases, we talk about weddings. Better-off Roma like himself are expected to contribute to other Roma weddings, though some money comes back when his own children or grandchildren marry. Weddings function as a bank within the community. Those who contribute to the wedding of your children expect your contribution when their turn comes round.
I find Pastor Iliya leaning on the fence in front of his church, a little balder, a little thinner in the face than when I first met him, here in the Humata suburb of Lom four years earlier. He has a fine moustache, a freshly ironed pin-striped shirt which he wears outside his black trousers, and a tiredness, almost a desperation, in his eyes that was not there before.
Lom is, or was, a success story for Bulgaria's half a million Roma, a town where few Roma pupils drop out of school, where nearly half the Roma children win a place at university, and where top officials in the town administration – the deputy mayor, the director of social services, and a good number of doctors, police officers and engineers – are Roma. The skills of local Roma community leaders in raising funds for the town, combined with a protestant work-ethic that men like Pastor Iliya have instilled into the community, helped the fourteen thousand Roma in this town of twenty-eight thousand pick themselves up by their own bootlaces.21 Then the 2008 economic crisis hit and settled in for the duration. North-west Bulgaria is the poorest region in the poorest country in the European Union. Central funding was cut for Lom's many social and educational programmes on which the Roma had built their progress. As an EU member from 2007, the community also found it much harder to tap EU funds than when the country was a candidate, knocking at the gate. ‘When you were last here, we were feeding twenty-six children every day,’ Iliya reminds me. They were mainly children whose mothers were working abroad, or whose fathers were in prison. The soup-kitchen was staffed by volunteers from the community and funded by donations from the congregation of his Pentecostalist church – all Roma. But, as more and more adults came begging at the church door, the pastor took the hard decision to stop feeding the children. There were too few coins in the box to feed very many.
He's especially weighed down with the problems of the world, because he is just back from a gathering of all the Roma pastors of Bulgaria, where unemployment, homelessness and poverty were the main themes. And debt. ‘My people know no boundaries!’ he laughs, bitterly. ‘They find it very hard to resist something which catches their eye. Like a plasma TV. So they borrow money. Then when they cannot pay the money back, the lender comes and takes their house.’ The problem is all the more entrenched, because these are cases of Roma exploiting Roma. Usury is illegal, but victims are reluctant to report their follow Roma to the police, however cruelly they are treated by them, partly from loyalty, partly out of fear. Interest rates are 100 per cent a month. Some Roma get rich by exploiting the weakness and poverty of their fellow Roma, who lose even the little they had in the process. And the sight of Roma fighting Roma is the subject of mockery from the wider, non-Roma, society – the salt rubbed into the wound. ‘I tell my congregation – do not borrow money if you cannot pay it back! Stay away from those who charge you such interest rates. If you need money, go out and work for it in an honest way!’ But there never was much work here, even in the boom years in Bulgaria, let alone now in the depression.
So Father Iliya is going to restart the free meals for children – the congregation will be encouraged to bring a little rice, or flour or oil, or vegetables – anything they have to spare except money. He has also set up a room with computers, next to the church, where users must pay a pittance, except between two and four each afternoon, the hours reserved for those children who cannot afford even the lowest denomination coins. The upstairs of the church – built by his own congregation – is lined with mattresses for the homeless. All of this is taking its toll on Iliya. He has a kind of flu, speaks thickly though his nose, his eyes have lost some, but not all, their sparkle. I say goodbye to him on the porch of his yellow church. There are flowers in all the windows. As I drive away I look back to see him supporting himself between two black gate-posts.
Niki Kirilov is also much less optimistic than when I last met him. We sit at a table outside a restaurant overlooking the main street in Lom, with his friend Svetlin Raykov. I eat catfish from the river, and drink excellent beer from the Almus brewery in Lom – Almus being the old name of the town. My hosts sip soft drinks. There's a graduation ball going on, and the streets are thronged with girls in mini-skirts and boys with ties thrown loosely round their necks. Each bar and restaurant pumps music into the early summer evening. ‘Listen – the gadzos (Roma slang for non-Roma) have even stolen our music!’ Niki jokes, but it is the only joke of the evening. ‘There's a fundamental difference between being poor in a poor country, and poor in a rich country,’ he says. Many Roma have gone abroad to work, to Italy and Spain in particular. There's even a joke in Bulgaria that there are only two ways to leave the country – Terminal 1 and Terminal 2 at Sofia airport. ‘As a Roma you are marginal, without rights here or there … but at least those who come back have learnt to put rubbish in the bin! … For years I've been pushing young Roma to study. To go to university, even when their families can't support them. Now they finish university and there are no jobs for them. And they come back to Lom and say to me, “You lied to us. You cheated us. You said it would be better if we had an education, and its not.” What this means is that we are losing the tools to change the Roma, to help them.’
Niki is one of the leading Roma intellectuals of Bulgaria. His sister is at the Sorbonne in Paris. His voice is respected in Roma and non-Roma circles. ‘Fifteen years ago we had a dream. I don't want to imitate Martin Luther King, but they have taken that dream away from us.’ What had impressed me most about him at our first meeting was his total lack of self-pity or complaint. His was not a litany of words such as ‘discrimination’ and ‘prejudice’ – words ‘devalued by over-use’ he had told me then – but rather a list of individual and collective successes. But this time he is worried by the growing desperation of the Roma, and the increasing hostility between them and the majority, white population. ‘The gap between the Roma and non-Roma is getting bigger and bigger, and if that process is not stopped, sooner or later there will be clashes, ethnic clashes here.’ He also worries about the retreat of the state from the Roma ghettoes in Plovdiv, Bulgaria's second largest city, where teachers no longer bother to teach Roma kids, and where what he sees as the ‘Islamisation’ of young Muslim Roma is going from strength to strength.
The Ministry of Education in Sofia has cut funding for one of his programmes in Lom because he included non-Roma children in it, although the money was for a Roma project. He wrings his hands – ‘but the whole point of it was to integrate the Roma with the non-Roma!’ His voice lifts, almost shouting over the roar of a car that is backing precariously towards our table. ‘So what can you do?’ I shout back. The car's engine is switched off. We can talk normally again. ‘We fight, of course, but we have fewer and fewer tools …’ Niki Kirilov expresses both admiration and frustration about Livia Jaróka, a Hungarian member of the European Parliament, and the most prominent Roma in the whole of Europe.22 She told me recently that she had spent her first five years in Brussels learning the system – of political influence, and access to funds, and how she feels that she is in the European capital for all Roma, not just for her own centre-right Hungarian party, Fidesz. He agrees that you have to know the system; that has been the key to his own success and that of Lom in Bulgaria. But, he adds, ‘if she wants to represent us, she should tour the Roma communities of eastern Europe, listening to our problems, and telling us what she is doing on our behalf – then she would have a real mandate to speak for us in the corridors of power!’ Otherwise, she is in danger of being ‘a lone Roma monkey,’ he says. ‘Because everyone likes to laugh at Roma monkeys! They add colour …’
On Saturday morning I go with Niki's friend Milenko to Lom market. The first of the local spring vegetables are for sale, spring onions and leafy vegetables from the greenhouses. The Roma don't have land, so I'm more interested in the stalls on the edge of the market where they are selling their wares. Spasska sits behind a pile of small, white haricot beans, and is introduced to me as a fortune teller. She's a grandmother figure of indeterminate age, who speaks in a great stream of Bulgarian intermingled with words from the Romani tongue. I go round the back of her stall for her to read my fate in her beans. First she takes my hand, places it over the big pile of beans, places her hand over mine, and asks my name. Then she starts dividing the beans swiftly into nine piles, with between one and four beans in each. It all happens so fast, and she keeps talking throughout, I do not notice the moment that she shifts from exchanging pleasantries with Milenko to the incantation with which she begins to read my destiny. Milenko stumbles over his simultaneous translation, such is the speed of her delivery. I will have a very good exit, she says – does she mean death? I ask him – ‘I don't know! She used the word for “exit”’ he mumbles. ‘You have a big fight with the woman you love. You are desperate, in ill health,’ Spasska continues, her hands racing between the beans, adding and subtracting all the time, the piles rising and falling. ‘You want to start a new job in a new place – that would be good for you. Everything will be all right if you go to your new job.’ She pauses, looking at me to say ‘this is your pile, and this is your woman's … you have thoughts to live with or without her, but she is ready for you, you call her, she is ready to live with you … if you call her, everything will be all right, and your exit will be excellent.’ She stops in mid flow, and it is all over. ‘I think this is the moment when you should give her some money,’ Milenko suggests. I ask her how much it should be. ‘There is no fixed price,’ she says. ‘Pay what you want. I have no food. Give from your heart.’ I give her a ten leva note – five Euros – and she seems content, if not very impressed. ‘How did she learn to read the beans?’ I ask. ‘A priest taught me,’ she says, rather surprisingly. ‘I had no money to buy nappies for my grandchildren, so I was begging outside a church. The man came up to me and offered me a whole bag of money. I looked into it and took out a ten leva note. That is all I need I told him, though I could have taken it all. “Did you go into the church?” the priest asked me. “When the shepherd loses just one sheep, he leaves all the others to go and find the one that is lost,” he said. “From now on, that will be your role in life.”’
We thank her and stand up to go, turning down a chance to buy some holy water. Milenko walks me through Lom and points out shops which are owned by the better-off Roma families. One selling fancy clothes for special occasions, another selling children's toys and bicycles – one family alone owns six or seven shops in the centre, and employs twenty people. We're on our way to a café with a Roma waitress, to meet Mladenka, a twenty-three-year-old Roma girl who is studying at medical university in Sofia. She's sitting there already when we arrive, a mass of lush, dark hair framing a pretty face, with black earrings, and deep brown eyes. She's wearing a Snob Cat T-shirt, and is a little bleary from the previous evening's revelry – a night dancing with her friends and relatives, celebrating her younger sister Pavlinka's graduation. She only finished school herself aged twenty, because the whole family went to the Czech Republic for several years to work in an air-conditioning factory. There she saved enough money to pay for her first year at university in Sofia. For the second year, she won a scholarship for students of Roma origin, from the Roma Education Fund in Budapest. She wants to come back to Lom when she finishes her course, to work in the hospital – to help her people, she says. Most of all, she would love to become a doctor, but does not know if she will be good enough, or will be able to find the money and time to study. Her words suggest that it is high time she started contributing to the family coffers. Her parents were aghast when she first mentioned she had won a place at university, but have slowly come round to the idea. She has never had a problem at school or university because of her ethnicity and is proud of her Roma identity. She does not hide it as many do when they start to make progress away from the ghetto. All her classmates from high school are already married with children, but her younger sister is following in her footsteps – sort of. She wants to study bakery and cake-making at the University of Plovdiv. Her older sister is in Lom, aged twenty-seven and married with two children. As for Mladenka, she will have her hands full with local health problems. There is something known as ‘Lom disease’, a kind of muscular dystrophy of the arms and legs, caused by a missing chromosome that affects the Roma in particular.23 ‘And the Danube?’ I ask. ‘I can't swim!’ she confesses, though she likes to walk beside it with her friends when she comes home from her long sojourns in the capital.
On Saturday afternoon I sit with Milenko to watch the famous Karbovski show. It's one of the most popular on Bulgarian television, almost a national institution, and an example of the mockery, according to Roma leaders, of the everyday racism which they feel the Roma are exposed to. ‘Karbovski carefully chooses the most ridiculous, the most awful cases, and thus reinforces this stereotype of the Roma as weird, lazy, parasites.’ Martin Karbovski looks the ideal TV chat show host: neatly ironed blue shirt, braces, short-cropped hair, intellectual-looking glasses and a little neat, carefully cultivated beard on his chin. His show is so popular, Milenko explains, because he asks direct questions – unlike most Bulgarian journalists. This week's Roma theme is a Romeo and Juliet story, a love affair between a Roma boy and a non-Roma girl – Danielle. The non-Roma family reacts violently to their daughter going out with a Roma. ‘Why did you hit your own daughter?’ Martin Karbovski asks her father. ‘I don't have a daughter,’ he replies, pointedly – in other words, no girl of mine would ever go out with one of ‘them’. ‘We're honest, working people,’ the father concludes – making clear that no Roma, in his estimation, could be like that.
Milenko puts on a recorded copy of an earlier show, about Roma transvestites working as prostitutes. The triple strangeness – of Roma, transgender, and paid sex – are the perfect ingredients for a Karbovski interview. ‘We don't need millions, we just need a normal life,’ says a man dressed as a woman, his dark face fragile and hurt above his large breasts. ‘I just want to be a healthy person … and help other people.’
‘Oh come off it!’ says the host. ‘You – help other people?’
‘I cannot eat if someone else is hungry and looks me in the eyes,’ says Tonsu the Roma.
‘Do you know that we live in the European Union?’ asks Karbovski.
‘Yes. That's why every Bulgarian goes abroad to work.’
‘Would you leave?’ asks the host – in a way that suggests he would like him to.
‘Yes. If I find a way.’
‘And would you work abroad as a prostitute?’
‘Maybe. But I can do other things …’
‘What is the Roma word for prostitute?’
‘Hangeli.’
‘Do you feel ashamed of what you do?’
‘I can't be ashamed of myself. We are how God creates us. If God had given me horns on my head, then I would have to live with them too, wouldn't I?’
‘Do you vote in elections?’ Karbovski asks – this is his style, to ask totally unrelated, provocative questions, to keep his viewers glued to the screen.
‘I vote for the party I'm paid to vote for. They give us twenty, thirty leva …’
‘What's the matter with your mouth?’ Tonsu is grimacing, painfully.
‘My tooth hurts.’
‘Why don't you go to the dentist?’
‘Because the dentist would charge me twenty-five leva, and then I wouldn't have any money left to feed my children. It's cheaper to take a painkiller. That only costs two leva.’
‘Do you feel happy?’ Karbovski asks, finally.
‘Just look at me. Do you think I look like a happy person?’
The gravel beach at Lom is the scene of a short story by the contemporary Bulgarian author Emil Andreev. In ‘The Return of Teddy Braun’24 a small boy listens entranced to the drunkard Teddy Braun, whose real name is possibly Todor, but might even be Mladen, as he spins a yarn about his origins. He's the son of a Red Indian father and an Irish mother, born on the shore of the Mississippi, he says – a river that makes the wide Danube at Lom look more like a stream. The child drinks up every word, and drinks down each lemonade Teddy buys him, while the man's drinking partners mock and insult him at every turn. Eventually Teddy sets out to fulfil his boast to swim the Danube, right across to the Romanian shore. The reader is left with the impression that he probably drowns. Many years later the boy, now grown up, finds himself in Lom again and wanders down to the shore. The Seagull restaurant they sat in together has been burgled and smashed up, the sandstone wall is broken and the beach a wasteland. Suddenly he hears a voice in English behind him. ‘Come on, Ted, we'll miss the ferry. Granny Ramona is too old to wait …’
The drunkard, it seems, was telling the truth, or a part of the truth, after all.
Half an hour's drive from Lom, a steep road leads down into the city of Vidin, the regional capital. For only the second time on my journey, on this Saturday afternoon there are prostitutes lining the main road. The big, empty office blocks beside the road have signs in the windows – ‘Office space to rent, 23 Euros a cubic metre.’ This is the town where Momi does not like to bring his travelling circus. Poised on the south-westward shore of a great zig-zag in the river, Vidin is like a guard post, a citadel at the top of the Danubian plain.
I check into the Hotel Bononia, against the better advice of my guidebook, and wander down on to the promenade along the Danube shore. A park of shady trees, playgrounds and ice-cream stalls stretches all the way to the Baba Vidin fortress. A young woman in a long, flamingo pink dress has just got married and stands beside her elegant bridegroom for a photograph before rejoining the guests at the restaurant behind her. Each large Bulgarian city seems blessed with one particular kind of tree. In Silistra and in Ruse it was the horse chestnut; in Vidin it is the sweet-scented acacia. There is also a constant drift of white cotton on the breeze from the hybrid poplar, Stalin's favourite tree. In addition there are Islamic tombstones, laid out in the grass with beautifully carved grapes and pomegranates. And a black-rimmed poster mourning the death of an angler. ‘To mark the passing of forty days without our beloved Tsvetan Iliev Tsokov – Fisherman’, reads the text, and there is a black-and-white photograph of the man himself, sat quietly beside his rods in a little harbour. The poster has already been fixed here for three months, and Tsvetan himself has almost faded from the picture, while the black outline of the boats is as strong as ever. The magic figure of forty has lingered on in the popular culture of south-eastern Europe longer than elsewhere on the continent. ‘In the religious lore of both Christian and Mohammedan the same number constantly recurs,’ wrote R. W. Hasluck.25 ‘The great fasts of the Christians are of forty days, dervishes of the Khalveti order likewise practise fasting and mortification for periods of forty days … there are forty traditions of Mohammed … forty ogres, forty jinns and numerous groups of forty saints.’
That evening I eat fish on the deck of a restaurant moored to the shore and watch the river traffic as darkness falls. The Mercur 307, of the TTS line, its decks painted red, white and yellow, pushes a long barge of black coal upriver from Galați. There are two Romanian tricolours and a blue European Union flag, and the mounds of coal piled high on its decks look like a model of the peaks of the distant Carpathians. Along the railings of my restaurant, bulbous yellow lamps shine against the darkening sky like blobs of caviar. In the far distance, the half-completed Vidin to Calafat bridge is lit up across the river. Closer to hand, a fisherman struggles to start his outboard motor as his small blue boat, the Gloria, floats gloriously downstream. Then a huge Ukrainian ship, the Ruse, its name written in both Latin and Cyrillic script, roars downstream pushing no less than three barges, each the length of a football pitch – the biggest single craft I have seen on the river. The ship is black, with a square bow, and sailors in blue overalls walk along a dark-green deck. In the pitch darkness of the May night, as I pick over the bones of my supper, a Bulgarian ship registered in Lom, the Phoenix, pulls slowly upriver, looking for a berth for the night.
I get up early the next morning to watch the sunrise, and make a small driftwood fire on the shore. I have watched the sun sink into the Danube many times on this journey, but this is the first time I watch it emerge out of waters upriver, a scarlet ball leaking red paint into the whole landscape. After breakfast that morning, in the village of Pokraina near Vidin I track down a family of Calderash Gypsies I met in the marketplace in Lom who make copper stills in which to distill rakia, plum brandy. Tseko Natovi is the grandfather. He sits and rests on a bench with cushions in the corner of the yard, and oversees the work with a critical eye. His sons Sasho and Eulogi do most of the work, while his third son, Mitko, translates for me. He is the only one of the family to try his hand at something different – he's studying to be an accountant in Bucharest. There is also a smaller boy, also called Tseko, aged about ten. The women flit through the yard like swallows – mothers, daughters and grandmothers – cleaning fish, hanging out washing, and smiling shyly while their men do the talking. One is Mitko's wife. They are only just married. Most of the work with the copper takes place under an old walnut tree in the yard. Sasho sits cross-legged on a piece of cardboard in the dust and takes a ring of copper, while his brother Eulogi prepares another circle of copper for the base, swiftly going round the edge with a pair of pliers, cutting and bending up little tabs in the soft metal. The base is then attached to the body of the vessel with the help of a strip of copper wire which goes between them as the tabs are each hammered down one by one. This is one of their smaller stills, designed for 150 litres of rakia. The largest they do is for five hundred litres. Despite the beauty of the piece, I cannot convince myself that it would get much use in my Budapest flat, so I opt instead for two copper bowls with big looped handles, like Gypsy earrings.
Mitko's mother sets to work immediately, to melt a metal bar to coat the inside. There is a hearth built into the soil beneath the walnut tree. Mitko makes a fire in it with wood, then brings pieces of coal, while one of his brothers brings a vacuum cleaner, in which the flow of air has been reversed to turn it into an electric bellows. The fire blazes, and my copper pots, one at a time, are heated over the furnace by Mitko's mother, holding them in a pair of tongs as she squats in the dust. Apart from the hoover, it might be a scene of copper-smelting from any time in the past seven thousand years. The bar of zinc and lead – a modern luxury – is melted in the pot until molten silver drops fall from it, first green then bright translucent silver. When the whole inside of the pot has been coated, it is left to cool. Then the copper is re-polished.
The men have finished the still and rakia is brought. Only the men drink, while the women clean the fish. Mitko's wife shyly puts on the gold, Austro-Hungarian sovereign, which she wears on a chain round her neck. On one side of the coin is the emperor Franz Josef, who sports a Bohemian beard and pony tail, though it may just be a head band, tied in a ribbon at the back, and the words FRANC IOS IDG AUSTRIAE IMPERATOR. On the front is the imperial double-headed eagle, with the Habsburg crest, and the words HUNGAR. BOHEM. GAL – for Hungary, Bohemia and Galicia, three of the Austrian realms, and the date 1915.26 She wears it outside an equally astonishing shirt depicting a long-haired, long-legged girl sitting back in a rather sultry style in a red chair. Her own single ponytail hangs dark over her shoulder. Standing next to Mitko, framed by the dense green foliage of the trees, the couple might have been married that morning.