Editor's Note: In Kapka Kassabova's own words, her generation of Eastern Europeans grew up at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and her childhood coincided with the Prague Spring, so "Border" has a special meaning for her. Border" has a special meaning for her. That's why a trip to the border is so appealing to her.
Kapaka Kasapova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1973 and moved to New Zealand with her family in 1992. She has published the novel Villa of Peace, and the memoirs The Street with No Name and Twelve Minutes of Love: A Tango Story.
Whether she is writing a novel, a memoir, or travel notes, Kapaka Kasapova has the quality of a poetess - perceptive, subtle, and profound.
In Borders, a work of art, she returns to Bulgaria, her homeland of 25 years, to explore stories on its borders with Turkey and Greece. The book has also won numerous awards upon publication, such as the 2017 Blue Cross Society of Scotland Book of the Year Award, the 2017 Edward Stanford Dolman Prize for Travel Writing in the United Kingdom, the 2018 British Academy of the Humanities and Social Sciences Ayer Rodham Prize for Global Intercultural Understanding and the Highland Book Award 2018.
"The border I'm going to tell about echoes with the seductive sounds of a siren, and its specialness stems from three things: the vestiges of the Cold War remain there; it is one of Europe's most vast wildernesses; and since the birth of the continent, it has been the meeting place of continents."
As a child, Kasapova heard that the border region was full of soldiers and spies, that it was a shortcut into the West, a forbidden place where two generations had been forbidden to set foot. And what remains there today?
After the Cold War, the cities have decayed and the villages have been deserted, but Kasapova discovers that the old borderlands are still alive with legends of firewalkers, smugglers, treasure hunters, border guards, and more. The wilderness before us has an end, "but in the stories of men, borders are everywhere-visible or invisible, 'soft' and 'hard' "
Traveling west from the shores of the Black Sea, across the Thracian plains, through the Rhodope Mountains, and ultimately back to its starting point, the enigmatic Strandja, Borders is both a fascinating walking notebook and a secret history of the Cold War that spans space and time, and shows us that the people who traverse the borders are never just numbers; they are people, carrying stories worth hearing.
Authorized by the publisher, this article is a selection of chapters, following the author's delicate strokes, together with the mystery of the ancient Bulgarian fire ceremony buried in the dense forests along the border.
The Border: To the Edge of Europe by Kapaka Kasapova (New Zealand), Juanjuan Ma; Social Science Publishing House - Sohn
Everything begins at the spring
From the Disco Café, we head to the Great Sacred Spring. We're heading for the "Great Sacred Spring". The caravan travels slowly down a canyon towards a place you won't find on the map. It's a clearing in the border forest, a crossroads of hunter's tracks and driveways. On the way, we passed the abandoned and snake-infested border barracks, once the childhood home of the elegant "Poles", with their tiled gates in a state of disrepair and a ghostly slogan: National Border, National Order.
I was in a Soviet minivan with the women of the village. The road was potholed, and despite the driver's efforts to control the vehicle, everyone was jostled around in the hard seats, teeth chattering. The women held icons in red dresses with lace on them in their laps like children. I glanced down and was surprised at how lifelike they looked.
"Some of them are quite old among them." A woman with a thick, manly frame said. The oldest icon is 300 years old. The women look after them like orphans.
"That's why we only take them out of the church on the feasts of St. Constantine and St. Helena."
Despina, who lives on the same street as me, said. Her husband is bedridden and she tends a lush garden on her own. "What do you think of our village, dear?" The woman asking the question chews gum in her mouth.
I love her straight face, and the way she always says "things are not what they seem". "The cherries are coming down, you don't get cherries like this in the city."
"Maybe there are cherries in Scotland." Despina said.
"No, Scotland has whisky," the gum-chewing woman corrected, winking at me, "and the men wear tartan kilts, don't they?"
The women burst into sniggers. To show my status as an old friend, they handed me an icon to hold in my lap. There was a blue-eyed woman who sat silent the whole time, her eyes looking a bit intimidating. I tried not to look at her, wondering if they were what was called evil eyes.
"Very few people come here, my dear," said a woman who used to cook in the school cafeteria, "you really should see what this village used to be like."
"There was a school and a library," Despina said, "and orchards, fields, herds of livestock, thousands of cows. Our village used to be very rich."
"The past, let it pass." The gum-chewing woman lamented.
"A few years ago we went to Meliki," the man-like woman said, "to visit the Greeks, and they were lovely people."
"Lovely people." The icons were left behind 100 years ago by the ancestors of the Greek Myriks, who still practice the fire ceremony called anastenaria, or nestinarstvo in Bulgarian.
"We've also been to Strandja, on the Turkish side," the gum-chewing woman continues, "to our original village, to see our parents' old house. No one lives there anymore though, just ruins."
"An empty village," added the man-looking woman. She cleans the streets of the village, and they call her "The Ear" because she has an unusually acute sense of hearing, and can hear the whispers in the houses a few blocks away, and perhaps even the thoughts in other people's heads. I saw her every day with her broom sweeping invisible dust from the empty square before turning into the other side of the hill. I try to keep my mind blank as I pass her, but she always stares at me with a hard, slanted eye that makes you wince inside.
The Strandja Mountains bghistory.info pic
The minivan finally comes to a stop, and there are already people gathered in the forest clearing.
They call this place "home", and it's a wonderful metaphor. For centuries, perhaps millennia, it saw groups of fire-worshippers, musicians, pleasure-seekers, mystical soothsayers, and just plain drunks come together until, in the late 1940s, nature was replaced by Stalin as an object of worship. My generation grew up just in time to witness cauldrons of mutton soup rolling and bubbling over the fire, and women descending from wagons to stir the broth.
There are five wooden platforms, called odarche, in the clearing, one for each of the five villages on the border. When empty, the platforms look like execution tables, but now people are marching from the river in a tightly packed procession, placing icons on them one by one. It looks like a scene from the movie The Wicker Man. Instead of stopping to pray, the icon bearers took small steps and danced a routine circle dance on the spot, matching hand gestures. Amidst the smell of Orthodox incense, the paganism comes through loud and clear.
To the rhythm of bagpipes and cowhide drums, I joined a procession to the river, where the women were "washing" (not actually getting wet) the icons. They take off the icon's clothes, "scrub" them, then put them back on and return them to the wooden platform.
The clearing is a permanent party space, with platform-like wooden tables fixed in place. By midday, the mood for revelry is already strong. Here, the ritual of iconoclasm seems to have transcended faith, revelry or culture - to have been given another meaning. I could not say what it was, though I sensed something; it was some kind of border-related feeling.
The Greeks came with icons, too. A group of Greek women were bending over the river. This is the home of their ancestors, their grandparents, who lie buried in the valley village. The "hometown" has become a special brand of tourism: ancestor tourism.
I set off up the steep mountain path in the direction of the Great Sacred Spring, which was just bursting into life - an event which, when it starts to gush, makes all of Strandja's springs come to life. Once it starts, all the springs in Stranja will start flowing. A girl ran up to me and tapped me on the shoulder; she was dressed in white and looked like a goddess.
"Hello, my name is Iglika," she introduced herself, "Iglika" meaning spring flower, "what's yours?"
I stopped in my tracks, only to see that she had a golden complexion and long wheat-colored hair, like the character in the song. Out of superstition, I couldn't help but feel a pang of concern in my heart; living like she did, wasn't she afraid of attracting the evil eye? I told her the name and she smiled, revealing a mouthful of pearly white teeth.
"Your name is Water Drop!" She said as she pulled my hand and clutched it in her cool palm, "There must be some kind of intimate relationship between you and water. We two are very much alike. You know what? I went to Manchester University for two years, but I couldn't stay in Manchester. No one could live there, and I came back."
She talked like a bubbling spring all the way to the Big Sacred Spring. But as we followed the crowds to our destination, she was nowhere to be seen. Igrika is from the village of Cross, named for its proximity to one of the few remaining river bridge crossings over the Veleka River. Originating in the mountains of Turkey, the Veleka River is 147 kilometers long and cuts through the Strandja Mountains to form a gorge before emptying into the Black Sea, with little regard for borders. The river is a mythical border - that's why the icons are "cleaned" here.
I didn't see Igrika again that day. The villagers of the valley invited me to sit at their table. Large bowls of mutton soup were passed around, a dish called "kurban" - a stew made from lambs slaughtered early in the day - which means to sacrifice an animal (from the Arabic word "qurban"). The dish is called "kurban" - a stew made from the lamb that was slaughtered earlier in the day - meaning the sacrifice of an animal (from the Arabic word "qurban"), and is usually accompanied by bagpipes and drums. Although I've never seen it with my own eyes, in rural Greece and Bulgaria, Christians and Muslims alike still have a tradition of performing the qurban at major celebrations. In the past, every village where fire ceremonies were held had knives, axes and stumps dedicated to the ritual. Now everything is gone, except for the small chapels at the edge of the village. They usually stand above a mountain spring, where people worship the icon before the ceremony begins.
"There is a chapel in the village of Zabernovo, in the mountains of Stranja, built over a mountain spring, an ancient place of worship." I don't know who said behind me at just the right time. The woman who spoke had light brown hair and a smoky complexion, and mysterious eyes. Her name was Marina, and she sat on a huge oak stake not far from the table for what seemed like an eternity.
There is a well in the church in the village of Zabonovo, she says, where the primitive and mysterious gladiatorial fights take place. To this day, if you come to the well at night at the right time of the seasonal cycle and know the ropes, a man and a black bull will come out of the well at nightfall and wrestle until the break of dawn.
Marina is an ethnographer who spent thirty years in Burgas before returning to the border town to care for her elderly parents. She didn't ask me about the purpose of the trip because she has another way of reading people.
The oak forest swayed noiselessly above us, and the summer sky was full of vigor. There are children, octogenarians, drunks, and ethnographers. Outsiders like me are instantly recognizable in the crowd - we look ultimately formal. Men gulped down homemade spirits, and men stood guard at each wooden platform to guard the icons.
Marina said, "Manifestation of the gods is a belief, and it is believed that the icons are the embodiment of the gods on earth, a medium between mortals and the gods." I asked her what was so "great" about the "Great Sacred Spring". Because in my eyes, it really isn't that big. "We can't take things at face value." Marina shook her head and laughed, telling me a story.
In ancient times, every spring a sacred deer would run into the mountains and clean the springs with its antlers until the water gushed out. It came every year, and after cleaning the mountain spring, it volunteered to be slaughtered as a sacrificial kurban. That's why people here never hunt stags in the forest for fear of hurting the sacred deer with golden antlers. Marina says it has been running towards the sun since the Bronze Age, and fire is its earthly incarnation.
And it seems to me that today the forests are full of all sorts of hunting crimes, with people taking prey as they please.
"That's how the 'Great Sacred Spring' came to be," Marina concludes, "and that's why generations of fire-worshippers here were the first to achieve harmony with the fire. The rituals of gushing water, washing our clothes, and circling counterclockwise have been with us for many years."
But what exactly does all this have to do with fire? "Obviously," says Marina, "it's the Feast of the Fires of St. Constantine and St. Helena. To worship them is to worship a variation of the earth goddess and her son and lover, the sun god. At the heart of the worship of fire is the expression of the duality of the god of wine and the god Apollo. The sun and the darkness mysteriously come together, briefly. The two can only briefly **** together."
The stag is both hunter and prey; the mother and the son are lovers.
"That's how metaphorical thinking works," Marina smiles to reveal a mouthful of nicotine-sticky teeth. Of course, what I really want to know is: when do we get to meet the Firewalker.
"Fire is the secret of the night." Marina said.
"That means we have to wait here all day?" But Marina suddenly disappeared, like a spirit in a tree.
"According to tradition, the ashes of Kurban are the site of the fire." A young man at the table with me spoke up. He was odd-looking, always sitting without a drink, with a pale, bloodless complexion and prominent, stormy eyes that at a glance looked like they were cloaked in the skin of a cold-blooded reptile. He was a local firewalker.
It was not long before the band arrived - a man with a big drum on his body, a bagpiper with a round, fat body, a gypsy accordionist who looked like a melancholy Egyptian, and a young singer with a face like a sunflower. The singer brought in fresh air, as if a door had been opened and a beam of light had come in, and his whole being glowed. The bagpiper strides down the steps playing the same trembling note, not music composed with consciousness and mind, but the ancient sound of time. The accordionist played a melancholy tune to the rhythm of a cowhide drum, and the singer lit up his voice.
The crowd began to stir, and the forest clearing seemed to rise up carrying everyone, who leaned on the grass with glasses in hand, gazing at the mirrored river. "True firewalkers often have another talent," Marina said as she sat back down on the stump at some point, "either singing or prophesying."
Ancient Bulgarian fire-worshipping ritual pinterest.at photo
Fire-walking dance pinterest.at photo
During the First World War, she said, a fire-walker named Zlata from the nearby village of Urgari became famous. She was brutally accurate in predicting which of the village's young men would never return from the war. The firewalker can see the future in the coals, but here the future is always bad news. The Greek women who come to the Great Sacred Spring today are descendants of those firewalkers. Their forefathers had seen it all before the Balkan wars, with superhuman foresight: the wars, the exile, the loss of homes, livestock and children, the long, plundered road that already led to Greece.
"Why?" They flopped down in the ashes and wailed, "Why do we have to farm, have children, build houses? Woo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo the blackest of blacks!"
They used to live next door to the house I was renting, and before it all happened, they already knew they would lose it forever. Many families had lost babies and children in the forests during the great migration after the Balkan Wars. Refugees of every race were attacked by a motley crew of all kinds, and even children were not spared. This is the classic Balkan dilemma: civilians are more afraid of war than combatants, and the remnants of the war endure in the shadows to this day.
"Fire and water," says Marina, "together they are a kind of pooled therapy. Without it, one goes mad." She continues, "Fire and water, at once purifying and destructive. That is why those who travel by fire must convey something."
"Convey what?"
"Suffering," Marina said, stomping out her cigarette on a tree root, "we all know suffering, but experiencing it, experiencing fire and water, bringing others together to empathize with it - it's an experience that comes from elsewhere experience, so the love of fire is not a family tradition."