Bulgaria Revisited Part 2

It seems like a lifetime ago now but I was thrilled at finding myself back in Bulgaria, a small, low-key, out-of-the-way sort of country that I had grown extremely fond of for its wonderful mountains and friendly people, to say nothing of the cheap booze everywhere you turned. As on my last visit the capital, Sofia, was simply a happy transit point on the way to somewhere else and I spent a good deal of my single day there shopping for groceries. This was largely a precautionary measure against the rather exciting fact that I still had no idea where I was headed, apart from that it was somewhere in the western Rhodope Mountains, far from everything including, presumably, shops.

On the basis, therefore, that it was better to be safe than sorry I provisioned as if for a minor siege, buying stupendous amounts of olive oil, butter, lentils, beans, cheese, canned tuna, red wine, avocadoes and as many fresh vegetables as I could practicably carry. I bought pepper and salt because I thought it was prudent. And I bought a large bottle of rakija because, this being Bulgaria, I felt naked without it.

Next day at lunchtime a dark blue Nissan pulled up outside my apartment and Radoslav got out. My new landlord was a dark, stocky, articulate and somewhat serious man who worked as an editor in television. Snowflakes whirled in the air and Radoslav talked happily about this and that – his brother in London, his wife who owned a media company, a trip he once made to the Red Sea – as we negotiated the drab and inspiring outskirts of Sofia, the scene dominated by the vast mist-swathed and snow-covered bulk of Mt Vitosha which loomed over the city like a stern guardian. The temperature outside was bracing but in the car we were snug and warm.

Eventually the buildings fell away and we found ourselves among snowy fields tipped at all sorts of angles and hills patched with shaggy evergreens interwoven with stands of beech and oak, the latter conspicuously bare of their leaves. After a spell the previous summer in the Rila Mountains I was well familiar with the gothic charm of the Bulgarian landscape. However the gleaming snow and a dense fog that restricted visibility to less than a hundred metres endowed the scene with a mystical beauty that tugged at my heart. It wasn’t Hansel and Gretel so much as a Balkan Parsifal, a beautiful but benighted landscape into which one could disappear on a quest neither knowing nor caring if one would ever return. I was additionally pleased by the sight on the other side of the highway of heavily laden lorries steaming out of Turkey en route to Europe. To my over-stimulated mind it seemed a sure sign that we were entering some wild and intriguing outland whose wonders may well be boundless.

The impression of wilderness was heightened when mountains rose up, dwarfing our car. But just when they looked like taking over we entered a tunnel punched through the flank of one of them and, emerging on the other side, the land was almost totally flat. On both sides of the road fields of frost-bitten black earth extended with barely a single undulation into a murky distance. Windbreaks of spindly trees daubed the fields like inky brushstrokes. They were the only feature in a bleak, sepia-toned world that appeared totally devoid of life with not a single animal, farmhouse or village in sight. The snow had stopped falling but the sky above the fields remained dark and threatening which further encouraged my fantasies. Moreover, I’d done my research and felt the thrill of history snapping at my heels as I recognised the great Plain of Thrace, age-old corridor between Europe and Asia, trodden down the centuries by a near-endless succession of rampaging armies, bristling trade caravans and miserable hordes of piddling odd-bodies.

The highway, in fact, followed the route of the original Roman road linking Serdica, modern-day Sofia, with Constantinople, the glittering capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. We might have followed it, had we wished, all the way to Istanbul, the equally renowned Turkish city moulded onto the Greek original. However, well before Plovdiv – ancient Philippopolis founded, in 342BC, by King Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, on an even older Thracian site – we turned off onto a secondary road and headed south across the plain towards a vague rumour of mountains.

As the impressions mounted I felt increasingly keen to reach my destination. So it was rather a let-down when, with barely a word, Radoslav turned off toward the town of Pazardzhik. According to my Rough Guide, Pazardzhik wasn’t much chop. Traditionally it had always been a Turkish and Bulgarian Muslim town. But then in the 1960s the Bulgarian government, in a typical communist masterstroke, moved in vast numbers of Tsigani, Gypsies, in order to redress the balance. Although the Rough Guide didn’t expressly say so, the arrival of the Gypsies appears to have lowered the tone of Pazardzhik considerably. But I didn’t mention this to Radoslav because it was his home town and he was obviously proud of it.

Pazardzhik turned out to be a mix of the good, the bad and the ugly and even the good was relative. Cold air bit at my fingers as we walked along dour streets lined by grey communist-era apartments with oddly tiled balconies hung with satellite dishes and washing. Hunkered down among them were red-brick ruins with boarded-up windows and lichen-stained roofs from which significant numbers of tiles had gone missing. The latter stood in yards full of barren fruit trees and tumbledown wooden outbuildings which made them look like they belonged in the countryside, a curious feature of Bulgarian towns. We also saw a number of neoclassical buildings, some in a state of rank disrepair in overgrown gardens but others gleaming beneath a fresh coat of paint. People hurried past us, bundled up in the coats with their eyes averted. Stray dogs roamed freely and mangy cats hopped in and out of garbage bins whose lids gaped open. I looked for Gypsies but didn’t have any luck.

Things were more interesting in the centre of town where Radoslav pointed out the former communist party headquarters, which was as big and grey and ugly as only a communist headquarters could be, and the history museum, which exhibited the stolid simplicity of a medieval hill fort. A white Tudor-style structure, complete with turreted clock tower, overlooked a broad square of poured concrete surrounded by light towers and barren trees. Around the corner we entered a pedestrian zone where people popped in and out of modest shops housed in attractive, if slightly battered, two-storey buildings painted in a bright array of colours. Radoslav remarked that it was ‘just like Plovdiv’, but I found the resemblance to the gorgeous revivalist architecture of Bulgaria’s second-largest city tenuous to say the least. Once again I kept my opinion to myself.

At the local market folk who looked like they’d been plucked straight out of the 14th century sold cabbages, spring onions and spinach from makeshift stalls arranged in rows beneath a corrugated iron roof. Carried away by the atmosphere I bought a bit of everything. As they fingered my levas the stall owners looked at me like I had rocks in my head. Upon leaving the market I almost got run down by a dusky, moustachioed fellow driving a horse-drawn cart, at a clipping pace, down the middle of the road. Elated by this brush with death I asked Radoslav if the man was a Tsigani. My companion’s doleful shake of his head confirmed that he was.

South of Pazardzhik we drove through more dreary fields. The light had faded and there were few cars on the road. Up ahead, the Rhodopes soared out of the plain in a dark blue wall whose upper levels vanished into an inky maelstrom of storm clouds. An avenue of magnificently gnarled and leafless walnut trees led to the village of Debrashtitsa, atmospherically crouched at the foot of the mountains among wooded foothills bundled in mist. There wasn’t a soul around and as we drove out of the village along a deserted road I looked out at well-built but dilapidated houses with wooden eaves and lichen-stained roofs standing in yards of blackened earth adorned with trellises of woody vines and rows of denuded fruit trees much whose harvest no doubt went towards the distillation of gut-crunching rakija.

As soon as we left the village the road began to climb. It scaled the mountainside in a series of broad and dizzying loops, bisecting a forest of towering beech trees whose iron-grey trunks rose thrillingly vertical. Snow lined the roadside, along with boulders furred with vivid green moss and barbed coils of rosehip, while the ground beneath the trees was carpeted in dry brown leaves. Some six hundred metres above the plain we saw a wooden sign among the trees and Radoslav said that was the Dobra Voda walkers’ hut and they may have internet. It was curious and not displeasing to think that at this early stage of my adventure I still had no idea of how I was going to establish contact with the outside world.

Not long past the hut we turned off onto a rutted track that dipped down into a valley tucked away in a lonely assembly of hills. It was the ultimate road to nowhere and as we bumped and rattled along I peered with mounting glee into the forest which the remaining leaves of fledgling oaks had endowed with an attractive reddish tint. By now I felt that we’d moved beyond the reach or even the knowledge of the rest of mankind so it came as a shock when we drove into a clearing where a little plywood shack stood on a neat wedge of lawn enclosed by a green-painted wire fence. A tattered red, white and green Bulgarian flag hung from a tall wooden flagpole beside the house and smoke billowed from the chimney which meant someone was home.

Radoslav said that the house belonged to a fellow called Lazar who was my only neighbour. I didn’t particularly want a neighbour but with these things unfortunately one can’t pick and choose. Worse was to come when we drove another fifty metres or so up the track and Radoslav pointed out his cottage and there was another house right next door across a narrow avenue of grass. This house was big and well-kept and suddenly despite the trees and the hills and the silence the valley was beginning to seem uncomfortably crowded, but Radoslav assured me that the place was unoccupied and I immediately felt better.

I turned my attention to the cottage which was a simple single-storey dwelling with walls of unpainted grey render, broad timber eaves and a sloping tin roof from which a blackened brick chimney projected. It stood in a small yard with a handful of twisted old cherry and plum trees whose bark was wrinkled with striking turquoise  lichen. A small white sedan, which had seen better days, stood propped up on logs and firewood was stacked in an outdoor annex at the end of which flimsy wooden walls enclosed an outdoor toilet. A Bulgarian flag hung limp above the door which was made of timber with glass panels beneath a steel grill and creaked on its hinges when Radoslav opened it.

We stepped into a dim and homely hallway, with a rug on the floor, dark timber shelves and holy pictures on the walls. Radoslav explained that for a long time the house had been occupied by his mother and her boyfriend Mitko. But recently Mitko had suffered something that Radoslav didn’t know the English word for but which sounded like a stroke whereupon they moved to a neighbouring village and he put the cottage up on Airbnb. My landlord went into the main bedroom where he threw open the wooden shutters on two big windows and dour winter light filled the room illuminating a double bed, a wardrobe and dresser. There was a second bedroom off the hall but it was full of Radoslav’s things and therefore closed, as well as a small bathroom with a wood-fired boiler. At the end of the hall was the living room, a comfortable space dimly lit by another big window with a square wooden table in the middle and divans around three of the walls. To one side stood a large woodstove, with a somewhat battered chimney that rose to the ceiling before turning at right angles and running the length of the room before exiting through a hole in the wall. Beyond lay a small nook of a kitchen.

Radoslav stuck around only as long as it took to explain the house’s features, which is to say he left pretty soon. He showed me a nifty trick that involved starting a fire in the stove using a chip of pine wood infused with resin. Then he dragged a solar panel out of the spare room and set it up on a metal rack outside, connecting it by wires to a twelve-volt battery in the hallway that would supply my electricity. He turned on the tap in the kitchen but this was a bad move because no water came out. It was a problem, he said, which sounded rather like an understatement. To make up for it he pointed out two ten-litre plastic bottles filled with water under the sink beside a bunch of dusty jars containing pickled cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers and a ceramic crockpot with a crack down one side. Finally my landlord flung open the door of a canary yellow wooden pantry to reveal a bewildering number of pots and pans and dishes and plates, along with containers full of herbs and spices and more jars of pickled things.

Before leaving Radoslav shook my hand and wished me luck rather as if I was embarking upon a grand undertaking. Then he turned around and walked out the gate and down alongside the house past the old car propped up on logs. It was almost dark by now and very cold so as soon as he’d gone I returned to the living room, shut the door behind me and built up the fire until it was roaring in the stove. As the air warmed up I poured myself a large glass of rakija and sat down on the divan with the window at my back and my computer open on the table in front of me. It was my first night in the mountains and I felt pretty good.