At the end of the road to the south-west is Trigrad, the last big village before the border. The village shop sells everything from salami to shampoo and sunglasses, and the mehana is owned by a man so hairy he seems wrapped in a brown rug. He wears an intensely cartographic T-shirt of Greater Bulgaria circa the Middle Ages. ‘Bulgaria on three seas!’ it screams, the refrain of the nationalist revisionist, while its owner explains amiably why he has overcharged me for my sausage lunch. It’s because in the menu the sausage is priced by the 100 grams, you see, and, without realizing, I’d greedily eaten the 200 grams they’d served me. It’s the pumpkin pie all over again.
When I spot a lone minaret standing in a pile of rubble across the road, my first thought is that the Bulgarian on the three seas must have taken a bulldozer to the mosque.
A pockmarked man is chainsawing the wood from the mosque. A woman is working alongside him. I approach and they turn off the chainsaws. I ask when the mosque came down.
‘Three days ago,’ the man says, gruff and wary of the nosy city person.
‘Ah, so recently,’ I say, trying to sound neutral.
‘Yes, but they’re putting up a new, bigger one,’ the man explains, examining my face for signs of bias one way or the other. Or maybe I’m examining him. ‘A church on one side, a mosque on the other. And they’ll keep the minaret.’
‘Wow, that’s very democratic!’ I say. He blinks at me.
‘We’re like that here,’ the woman joins in with a smile. ‘We get on well in this village. There’s no tension. Why should there be? The main thing is that people believe. Everybody should be a believer.’
‘I’m not a believer,’ I say. There’s a pause of disapproval. ‘But I believe that people should get on regardless,’ I hasten to add.
‘That’s right,’ the woman agrees, relieved.
‘Where are you from?’ the man asks, still suspicious. He can smell a Sofianite when he sees one. I confess.
‘Sofia for you, here for us, that’s the way we like it,’ he declares, and starts up the chainsaw again to make a point. But then he turns it off again. He prefers to chat. I ask about the logs.
‘We’re cutting these up, then we’ll sell them to old people as firelogs. I work for a construction company, I do this sort of thing all the time.’
‘And I work for the local forestry. We have to live somehow.’ The woman smiles again. It’s a smile that’s quite happy with its lot, a rare sight in the countryside. A rare sight in this country altogether.
‘I’ll let you get on with it,’ I say.
‘That’s fine. We don’t mind, we have time here. Not like Sofia.’ He smiles gruffly and puts on his ear-muffs. We’ve made peace. They start up the chainsaws again.
I stroll around Trigrad, greeting the gentry who are busy sunning themselves on benches, watering vegetables, feeding pigs, and gossiping: old men with walking canes; women in flower-printed headscarves and trousers under their blue work mantles. They squint, smile and nod greetings. White crags and pine forests rise on all sides.
The villages around here have palpable names like Chestnut, Pear, Leather, Strawberry, Dragon, Thunder. All the geopolitical and ideological brutalities of the last century haven’t managed to whitewash the colours of the Rodopi or violate its mysteries. After all, humans of one belief or another have lived in the caves and river canyons of the Rodopi for as long as there have been humans at all. What are a hundred years? Not even enough time for the stalactite and the stalagmite to complete that marble kiss.
A hundred years is also how long it takes me to reach my destination. It’s in a deep canyon at the eastern end of the Rodopi, and it’s called the Devil’s Bridge.
I can see why: the devil’s road leads down to it from a tiny village called Grandpas. The grandpas have clearly died off because the village looks derelict. But before Grandpas, I stop in the town of Ardino. I stop because I need to check that I’m still in Bulgaria.
The central square of Ardino is dominated by a huge, pigeon-covered mosque, travel agencies advertising in Turkish, and a loungy café called Bosforus where idle youth with sleek hair sip fruit cocktails. Everybody speaks Turkish. The slow-moving woman in the grocery shop seems lethargically surprised either by my purchase of a packet of Turkish-delight-filled Armenian sweets, or by the fact that I purchase them in Bulgarian. I have heard rumours that in some Turkish-majority towns down here, you won’t be served unless you speak Turkish. You might even be attacked if you don’t. I must admit I’m a little uneasy, both because of the rumours which I desperately want to prove wrong, and because I feel like a foreigner here.
But although the Bulgarian I hear is slightly accented, the ethnic Turks look indistinguishable from their swarthy Bulgarian cousins, and the vibes – if we can speak of vibes in a comatose mountain town on a public holiday – are benign. And since this is a marble quarry region, I’m definitively reminded of my whereabouts by a small marble slab resting in a garden next to the mosque. It’s inscribed in gold letters:
01.01.2007
BULGARIA IN THE EUROPEAN UNION
I imagine the unveiling to general cheer by the smiling Turkish mayor. I wonder if anyone else has noticed that it’s only the small gold stars encircling the letters that save the slab from looking like a fresh gravestone.
But on to Grandpas, and off down the devil’s road. It’s ten kilometres of steep, rocky whiteness plunging into the canyon of Arda River. The owners of private cars are easy to spot: they are walking; their hair isn’t standing on end like mine; and they’re not muttering through gritted teeth, ‘This bridge had better be worth it.’ By the time I reach the river, I’m as wrecked as the rented car. But one look at the river confirms that it was worth it.
A dream-like, three-arched stone bridge rises to twelve metres. It is so stupendously curved that it actually peaks at the top. Not a stone has fallen out of it since it was built – not by Romans, Byzantines, or the Devil himself, as some locals fancy, but by the Ottomans. On closer inspection, I find one possible reason for this endurance, locked in a hexagonal keystone in the centre of the bridge. This is what was known to alchemists as Solomon’s seal, a symbol of earthly and heavenly vision popular with every major faith.
It was especially popular with Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent. Speculation about the date of the bridge’s construction wanders wildly between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, but it’s very possible that it was built in the 1500s under the Magnificent one. The central stone then makes perfect sense. The Magnificent one liked to stamp himself messianically onto buildings with all available symbols of earthly and heavenly power, especially Solomon’s seal which had both.
It also makes perfect superstitious sense. The seal protected you from evil, and since the bridge was used by camel caravans carrying cotton, wool, tobacco, rose oil and other earthly delights, travelling all the way from the Thracian plains to the Aegean in the south, you really needed supernatural protection to survive. Because the various bands of hirsute brigands operating in the mountains were enemies in theory, but united in practice by a desire for self-enrichment.
A gunshot startles me from my reverie. After I check that I’m not bleeding anywhere, I locate two teenagers further down the bridge, with an airgun. They flip-flop back to the wooden shelter on the edge of the river, where their fathers whack them edifyingly on the neck and beckon for me to join them.
Soon I’m putting away quantities of barbecued chicken, water-melon and baklava, overseen by an extended family of Bulgarian Turks – mute grandma in a headscarf, men in tracksuit pants, teenagers, and younger women in jeans who talk little but smile a lot.
‘We often come here for picnics,’ one of the fathers says, ‘and now we have family over from Turkey.’ The woman at the barbecue shakes hands with me. She doesn’t speak Bulgarian, and giggles delightedly when I thank her in mangled Turkish for the second portion of chicken. They ask me which part of Sofia I’m from. Youth 3, I lie. Ah, the woman who made
the baklava says, my sister lives there. Her brother, a man of few words, has worked in Sofia too.
‘We all work in construction,’ the more extrovert husband adds. ‘But now there’s more work here, and we won’t have to go far any more. It was quite depressed before, but things are picking up.’
We chat for a while, and finally I manage to casually slip in my burning question: what happened to them in the eighties, during the Revival Process? There is a painful pause. Even the relative from Turkey seems to understand and freezes up, barbecue prod in hand. Then the extrovert father waves it away with an uneasy smile.
‘Ah, it’s all water under the bridge now…’
‘We came back but some of the family stayed in Turkey,’ the woman with the baklava tries, but her husband cuts her off.
‘It’s all water under the bridge. Forgotten. Why talk about it now?’
She doesn’t insist. Embarrassed, I quickly say the first thing that comes to my mind – what’s the baklava recipe? She starts listing the ingredients (which include yogurt, of all things) and everyone relaxes. Then they load me up with one last lot of chicken, and I scramble back up to the car.
I’m reluctant to leave this charmed – or cursed, it’s hard to tell – place. The more I look at the central arc and its twin reflected in the calm green water, forming a prefect mirror-like oval, the more I find all kinds of unlikely superstitious tales quite likely. When you have so much history, an old bridge is never just an old bridge.
There’s the one about the master builder who had to build his own wife’s shadow into the foundations, to ward off the devil. This made bridges durable and killed off wives. But it’s too generic a story. Every second bridge in Bulgaria has a person’s shadow built in. This is also the story of Ottoman Bulgaria in a nutshell. Build your shadow into the Ottoman bridge, it will kill you but what you build will live on. It’s a suitable metaphor for a nation that lay low for centuries in order to survive. As the saying goes, keep your head down and it won’t get chopped off. Those who dared lift their heads usually lost them.
The sky is packing up and I look back at the Turkish family who are beginning to pack up too. It was their Ottoman ancestors who designed the bridge, but I have no way of asking how they feel about this heritage, how it feels to be the descendent of the national oppressor, how it feels to see graffiti like the one in Peach Street in Sofia: ‘Death to the Turks’. After all, the opening scene of Time of Violence was shot here, on this bridge: the cruel caravan of the janissary Karaibrahim filing into town to slaughter the locals.
And for as long as some Bulgarians have to believe it was the Romans who built the bridge before they can admire it, these questions remain hard to answer, and harder yet to ask.
Back in Shiroka Laka, I decide to part on a friendly note with the guesthouse owner. I sit at an outdoor table with a soothing mountain tea. He’s pottering in the bar with his back to me.
‘Your cook made a delicious pumpkin pie for me,’ I say brightly. There is no reaction. He keeps his gruff back to me. I feel foolish with my forced friendliness.
Eventually, when I’m about to go, he turns a glum face to me, looks away, and says, ‘It’s been a hard year. Fires, droughts. I don’t know how she found a pumpkin.’
This is his way of being friendly. This will have to do instead of a smile. I’m a bit lost for words and try to arrange my face into a suitable expression of glumness. Then I walk to the top of the village, watch the sun set over the rooftops, and dine on wild plums from the trees. After the pumpkin-pie orgy, I have neither the money nor the appetite for a more substantial feed.
From up here, Shiroka Laka looks like a bowl filled with broken brick fragments and set carefully in the middle of the canopy of hills. I think I get it now.
Like the houses, this is a fortified stronghold, first for the endangered Christian identity, then for architectural unity, and now… Now it’s as if survival in hard times has hardened the very soul of the village. As if the quiet, stubborn will to survive unadulterated is written into the DNA of the locals, and lives on for generations after the enemy is gone.
Suddenly, a choir of undulating female voices rises from the bottom of the bowl, or rather from the culture hall, where rehearsals for the grand opening continue.
The otherworldly, high-pitched lament of the voices takes you straight back to those Orphean times of wine, blood, and undying love.
And caravans trotting along arched stone bridges, carrying the invisible cargo of a mountain spirit across canyons and centuries.
The next morning I am in Plovdiv. This is the country’s number two city for population after Sofia, number two for beauty and history after Veliko Turnovo, and – for me – number one for home-made pies.
I stay at a small nameless hotel near Djumaya Square. My shower ejects lukewarm water in desultory spurts, just enough to flood the bathroom, but it’s the cheapest hotel in town and every hotel room is booked up anyway. Most importantly, it’s three minutes away from the Oriental Patisserie at Djumaya Mosque.
But when I arrive at the patisserie, greedily panting in anticipation of semolina cake, calamity strikes. The patisserie is no more. The street around the mosque is dug up, the mosque itself encased in scaffolding, and two swarthy men are poking with grim tools inside the cake shop. They are Turks, and answer my anxious questions with heavily accented gruffness. No, the cake shop won’t be coming back. Yes, we’re fixing the mosque. In my distress, I briefly consider turning my back on Plovdiv for ever. It’s just not the same without the semolina cake. True, I’m glad they are restoring the Balkans’ oldest mosque, here since the fourteenth century. But a mosque without sweets is like an Eastern Orthodox church without incense, a dull affair.
Still, heinous cake crimes aside, Plovdiv is looking its best. Above the excavated Roman forum, a bronze Philip of Macedon points victoriously to the heavens from a concrete plinth, reminding us that this was once the city of Philipopolis. Being the egomaniac he is, Philip stands as tall as the minaret, if not a few inches taller. High up in the old town, a Roman amphitheatre spills whitely downhill.
The International Jazz Festival is on and the pedestrian mall in the new town is buzzing with shops, shoppers, cafés, café moochers, buskers and artworks. A euphoric jazz orchestra is playing on a summer stage near a jubilant water fountain, people are sunning themselves on benches, and the colourful fin-de-siècle façades are being spruced up for the first time since the Second World War. Things are happening in Plovdiv, good things.
I meander up the steep streets of the old town.
Past the Puldin Restaurant which sits on top of Roman walls and inside a medieval monastery of the Persian Order of Whirling Dervishes.
Past the nineteenth-century Hypocrates Pharmacy full of wondrous jars and humming with alchemy.
Past the richly painted Revival houses lining the streets, the names of their old masters ringing brightly like chords in a cosmopolitan symphony of times past: Hindlian; Efosyan; Nedkovich; Balabanov; Danov; even Lamartine who only stayed here for three days in 1833, but Plovdiv so yearned for Europe that the name stuck.
Past the hallucinogenically painted church of Sts Konstantin and Elena where a muttering old witch with a moustache tells me to ‘cover up your tits, girl’, meaning that I shouldn’t wear a vest-top inside.
Yes, past the charming people of the old town, all the way up the dead-end last street to the Nebet Tepe lookout point. Nebet Tepe sounds like an extinct volcano, and in a way it is. The hill underneath my feet is so packed with history that it’s amazing it hasn’t imploded from the sheer pressure of eras bubbling inside like elemental gases.
Here lie ruins from the Thracian settlement of Eumolpias in 7000 BC, a Hellenic citadel from the times of Philipopolis, Roman underground passages from the time of Emperor Justinian which lead to Maritsa River, medieval water tanks from when the town was called Puldin, and no doubt the odd Turkish stone from Philibe.
In the pink light of dusk, the
rooftops of Plovdiv seem to shift, coming in and out of focus inside the long-zoom lens of time. A strange oriental tune suddenly rises from this open-air museum. I search among the detritus of Nebet Tepe and find a lonesome, barefooted hippie in a headscarf and long skirt. Turned towards the setting sun, her hair on fire, she is playing a flute.
Later, the night sky unleashes a warm thunderstorm on the city. I duck inside a late-night internet joint in the now empty pedestrian mall. It’s at the top floor of a heavily graffiti’d, urine-smelling staircase. There are a dozen teenagers in the smoky computer room, playing violent computer games. They’re pimply, aggressive, and speak with about five words, all of them obscene. I flee back into the warm rain.
It’s technically impossible to get lost in the centre of the new town, but the combination of rain and darkness makes sure I do. I grope for my hotel in the tangle of semi-dark streets. The only noise I hear is the distant thumping of some disco and the lashing of the rain through blossom-heavy trees. I’m sodden and suddenly sad, and to cheer myself up, I hum an old song by the pop band Tangra: ‘Yes, that’s how it is in the small town/in this boring, old-fashioned town/You may as well fall in love/Or nothing ever happens.’
‘You wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette on you?’ A ruin of a man materializes under a streetlamp in a whiff of alcoholic haze. He has eyes washed out by alcohol and rain.
‘I don’t smoke, sorry.’ I glance around the empty street to confirm that if he attacks me, nobody will come to my help.
‘Do you have 10 stotinki?’ he tries.
‘What can you buy with 10 stotinki?’ I continue my brisk walk in a random direction, and he hobbles along.
‘As much as I can buy with 10 leva or 1,000 leva,’ he slurs. ‘Nothing. The things that I’ve lost can’t be bought with all the money in the world.’
‘What have you lost?’
Street Without a Name Page 22
