Traveling to the edge of Europe, a journey to recall the story of the "border"

Editor's note: In Kapka Kassabova's own words, her generation of Eastern Europeans grew up when the Berlin Wall fell, and her childhood coincided with the "Prague Spring" ”, so “Border” has a special meaning to her. Therefore, for her, traveling to the border is quite attractive.

Kapaka Kasapova was born in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, in 1973. She moved to New Zealand with her family in 1992 and now lives in Scotland. He has published the novel "The Villa of Peace", the memoir "The Street with No Name" and "Twelve Minutes of Love: A Tango Story".

Whether she is writing novels, memoirs, or travel notes, Kapaka Kasapova has the temperament of a female poet - keen, delicate and profound.

In the work "Border", she returned to her hometown of Bulgaria after 25 years of absence to explore the stories on its borders with Turkey and Greece. The book has also won many awards since its publication, such as the 2017 Scottish Blue Cross Book of the Year Award, the 2017 British Edward Stanford Dullman Travel Writing Award, the 2018 British Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences Al Rodham Global Intercultural Understanding Award and the 2018 Highland Book Award.

"The border I am about to talk about echoes with the alluring voice of a siren. It is special for three reasons: the remnants of the Cold War still exist there; it is one of the most vast wildernesses in Europe. 1; since the birth of the continent, it has been the meeting point of the continents."

As a child, Kasapova heard that the border area was full of soldiers and spies and that it was a shortcut to the West. A forbidden place that has been forbidden for two generations. And what is left there today?

After the "Cold War", cities have declined and villages have begun to become deserted. However, Kasapova discovered that there are still many stories about fire walkers, smugglers, treasure hunters, and border guards in those ancient border places. Wait for the legend. The wilderness before us has an end, “but in human stories, borders are everywhere—visible and invisible, ‘soft’ and ‘hard’”.

From the shores of the Black Sea all the way west, across the Thracian plains, through the Rhodope Mountains, and finally back to the starting point - the mysterious Strandia, "Border" is both a fascinating and "Walking Notes" is also a secret history of the Cold War that spans time and space. It tells us that the people crossing the border are not just numbers, they are people, carrying stories worth listening to.

With the authorization of the publisher, this article excerpts some of the chapters and follows the author's delicate writing style to explore the ancient Bulgarian fire-walking ceremony buried in the dense forest on the border.

"Border: Traveling to the Edge of Europe", [New Zealand] Kapaka Kasapova (author), Ma Juanjuan (translator); Social Sciences Literature Publishing House ‖So En

Everything begins with spring water

We set off from the "Disco" cafe to the "Great Holy Spring". The convoy drove slowly along the canyon towards a place that could not be found on the map. It was an open space in the dense forest on the border, a crossroads formed by hunters' tracks and driving lanes. On the way we passed the abandoned and snake-infested border barracks, where the elegant "Poles" once stayed in their childhood. The dilapidated gate decorated with tiles had a ghostly slogan written on it: National borders, national order.

I was sitting in a Soviet-made pickup truck with the women in the village. The road was full of potholes, and although the driver tried hard to control the vehicle, everyone was still jolted up and down on the hard seats, and their teeth chattered. The women held the icon in their laps like a child, dressed in a red dress with lace. I glanced down and was surprised to see how lifelike they looked.

"Some of them are very old." A woman with a body as thick as a man said. The oldest icon is 300 years old. The women looked after them like orphans.

"So we only take them out of the church on the feast days of St. Constantine and St. Helena."

Despina, who lives on the same street as me explain. Her husband was bedridden, and she tended a lush garden alone. "What do you think of our village, dear?" The woman who asked the question was chewing gum in her mouth.

I like her straightforward look, and she always likes to say "the world is impermanent". "The cherries are coming soon, and you can't get them in the city."

"Maybe there are cherries in Scotland," Despina said.

"No, there's whiskey in Scotland," corrected the gum-chewing woman, winking at me, "and men wear tartan skirts, right?"

Woman They snickered. To show that I was an old friend, they handed me an icon and asked me to hold it in my lap. There was a woman with blue eyes who had been sitting silently, her eyes looking a little scary. I tried not to look at her, wondering if it was the so-called evil eye.

"Few people come here, honey," said a woman who used to cook in the school cafeteria. "You should really see what this village used to be like."

"There are schools and libraries," said Despina, "as well as orchards, fields, herds of livestock, thousands of cows. Our village used to be very wealthy."

" Let the past pass." The gum-chewing woman sighed.

"A few years ago we went to Meliki," said the manly woman, "and visited the Greeks. They were lovely people."

"Lovely person." Everyone echoed. These icons were left behind by the ancestors of the Greek Meliki people 100 years ago, and they still retain the fire-walking ritual called "anastenaria", which is called "nestinarstvo" in Bulgarian.

"We also went to Stranca on the other side of Turkey," the gum-chewing woman continued, "to our original village and to see our parents' old house. But no one lives there anymore. , only ruins remain.”

“An empty village,” the man-looking woman added. She cleans the streets in the village, and people call her "The Ear" because her hearing is so sensitive that she can hear the whispers in the houses a few streets away, and maybe even the thoughts in other people's heads. Every day I see her sweeping invisible dust with a broom in the deserted square, and then turning to the other side of the mountain. When I passed by her, I tried to keep my mind blank, but she always stared at me with squinting eyes, which made people tremble in my heart.

Strandja Mountains bghistory.info Picture

The pickup truck finally stopped, and people were already gathering in the forest glade.

People call this place "hometown", which is a wonderful metaphor. For hundreds or perhaps thousands of years it saw gatherings of fire worshippers, musicians, pleasure seekers, mystical soothsayers, and just plain drunkards, until in the late 1940s the object of worship was Stalin replaced nature. I happened to be of a generation that grew up witnessing cauldrons of mutton soup bubbling over fires and women getting out of wagons to stir the soup.

There are five wooden platforms called "odarche" in the open space, one for each of the five villages on the border. When the wooden platform was empty, it looked like an execution platform, but now, people were setting off from the river in a tight procession, one by one, placing the icons on the wooden platform. It all looks like a scene from the movie The Wicker Man. The people holding the holy icon did not stop to pray, but took small steps and performed a routine circle dance on the spot in conjunction with hand gestures. Amidst the incense of Orthodox Christianity, the breath of paganism comes clearly to the face.

To the rhythm of bagpipes and cowhide drums, I join the procession that leads to the river, where women "wash" (without actually getting wet) the icons. They undressed the icon, "scrubbed" it, put it on again, and placed it back on the wooden platform.

This open space is a permanent party space, with platform-like wooden tables that are fixed. By noon, the carnival atmosphere was already strong. Here, the ritual of worshiping icons seems to have transcended faith, carnival, or culture—and been given another meaning. Although I was aware of it, I couldn't tell what it was. It must be some kind of feeling related to the border.

The Greeks also came with icons. A group of Greek women were bent over working by the river. This is the hometown of their ancestors, and their grandparents are buried in the valley village. "Hometown" has therefore become a special tourism brand: ancestor-seeking tourism.

I set off along the steep mountain path in the direction of the "Great Holy Spring". The spring water had just gushed out - this was a grand event. Once the "Great Holy Spring" started to gush water, Strandja would All springs will begin to flow. A girl ran over and patted me on the shoulder. She was dressed in white and looked like a goddess.

"Hello, my name is Iglika," she introduced herself. "Iglika" means primrose. "What's your name?"

I stopped and saw that she had golden skin and long wheat-colored hair, just like the character in the song. Out of superstition, I couldn't help but feel worried. Living like her, wouldn't she be afraid of attracting the evil eye? I told her my name and she smiled, showing her pearly white teeth.

"Your name is Shui Drop!" She said, taking my hand and holding it in her cold palm. "There must be some intimate relationship between you and water. We are very similar. Do you know?" I studied at the University of Manchester for two years, but I couldn't stay in Manchester. No one could live there, so I came back."

On the way to the "Great Holy Spring", she seemed to be gurgling. He kept talking like spring water. But when we followed the flow of people and were about to reach our destination, she disappeared. Iglika comes from the village of Cross, so named because of its proximity to one of the few remaining river bridge crossings on the Veleka River. The Veleka River originates from the Turkish mountains, with a total length of 147 kilometers. It cuts through the Stranca Mountains to form a canyon, and finally flows into the Black Sea, regardless of borders. The river is the boundary in the mythical world - hence the "cleansing" of icons here.

I didn’t see Igreka again that day. The villagers of the valley village 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 that morning - which means sacrificial animal (from the Arabic qurban) ), usually accompanied by bagpipes and drums. Although I have never seen it with my own eyes, in rural areas of Greece and Bulgaria, both Christians and Muslims still retain the tradition of holding kurbans at major celebrations. In the past, every village that held a fire ceremony had knives, axes and tree stumps specially used for sacrifices. Now everything is gone except for the small chapel at the edge of the village. They usually stand on top of a mountain spring, where people worship the icon before the ceremony begins.

"There is a church in the village of Zabernovo in the Stranja Mountains. It is built on a mountain spring. It is an ancient place of worship." I don’t know who was behind me at the right time. said. The woman who spoke had light brown hair, a smoky complexion, and mysterious eyes. Her name was Marina, and she was sitting on a huge oak stake not far from the table, where she seemed to have been for a long time.

She said that there was a well in the church in the village of Zabonovo, where primitive and mysterious gladiatorial battles were held. To this day, if you go to the well at night at the right time in the seasons and know the way, a man and a black bull will come out of the well at nightfall and fight until dawn.

Marina is an ethnographer who stayed in Burgas for thirty years and later returned to the border town to take care of her elderly parents. She didn't ask me about the purpose of her trip because she had another way of knowing people.

The oak forest swayed silently above our heads, and the summer sky was full of life. There are children, octogenarians, drunkards and ethnographers. It’s easy to spot outsiders like me in a crowd—we look reserved after all. The men drank swigs of homemade spirits, and there were people standing guard at every wooden platform guarding the icons.

Marina said: "The manifestation of gods is a kind of belief. People believe that icons are the embodiment of gods in the human world and are the media between mortals and gods." I asked her, "Great Holy Spring" Where exactly is "big"? Because in my eyes, it's really not that big. "We can't take things from the surface." Marina shook her head and smiled, telling me a story.

In ancient times, every spring, a sacred deer would run into the mountains and use its antlers to clean the mountain springs until the spring water gushes out. It comes every year, cleans the mountain spring, and volunteers to be slaughtered as a sacrificial Kurban. Therefore, 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.

In my opinion, the forest is now filled with all kinds of hunting crimes, and people get prey as they please.

"This is how the 'Great Holy Spring' came about," Marina concluded. "Because of this, generations of fire worshipers here were the first to achieve harmony and unity with fire. The spring water gushes out, washes Dressing neatly and circling counterclockwise, these rituals have been with us for many years."

But what does all this have to do with fire? "Obviously," said Marina, "today is the Feast of the Fire of Saints Constantine and Saint Helena. They are worshiped, that is, variations of the worship of the goddess Earth and her son and lover, the Sun. The core of fire worship is the expression of wine The duality of God and Apollo. The sun and the darkness come together, briefly. The stag is both hunter and prey; mother and son. Lover relationship.

"That's what metaphorical thinking is," Marina smiled, showing off her nicotine teeth. Of course, what I really want to know is: when will we see the Firewalker.

"Fire is the secret of the night," said Marina.

"That means we have to wait here all day?" However, Marina suddenly disappeared, like an elf in the tree.

"According to tradition, the ashes of Kurban are the venue for walking in the fire." A young man at the same table with me said. He had a strange appearance. He had always been sitting without drinking. His skin was pale and bloodless, and he had a pair of protruding, bulging eyes. At first glance, he looked like he was wearing the skin of a cold-blooded reptile. He is a local fire walker.

Before long, the band came - a man with a big drum hanging on his body, a chubby bagpiper, a gypsy accordionist who looked like a melancholy Egyptian, and a young singer with a face like a sunflower. The singer brings a fresh breath, as if a door has been opened and a beam of light shines in, making his whole body shine. The bagpiper came down the steps playing the same trembling note, music not composed by consciousness and mind, but the ancient sound of time. The accordionist played a sad tune to the rhythm of the cowhide drum, and the singer opened his voice.

The crowd began to stir, and the forest glade seemed to be lifted up by everyone. Everyone held wine glasses, leaned on the grass, and stared at the mirror-like river. "Real fire walkers often have another talent," Marina sat back on the tree stump at some point, "either singing or prophecy.

”

Ancient Bulgarian fire worship ceremony pinterest.at picture

Fire dance pinterest.at picture

She said that during the First World War, nearby There is a firewalker named Zlata in the village of Urgari, who cruelly and accurately predicts which young people in the village will never come back from the war. The future is glimpsed in the coals, but here, the future is always bad news. The Greek women who come to the "Great Holy Spring" today are the descendants of those who walked through the fire with superhuman foresight before the Balkan War. Everything: the war, the exile, the loss of homes, livestock and children, the long, plundered road to Greece

"Why? They threw themselves down in the ashes and wailed, "Why do we need to farm, have children, and build houses?" Woo-woo-woo-the blackest black! ”

They used to live next door to my rented house. Before anything happened, they already knew that they would lose it forever. During the great migration after the Balkan War, many families were lost in the forest. Babies and children. Refugees of every race were attacked by motley crews, and even children were not immune. It was a classic Balkan dilemma: civilians were more afraid of the war than the combatants, and the remnants of the war linger in the shadows to this day.

"Fire and water," said Marina, "together are a collective therapy. Without it, one would go crazy. She continued: "Fire and water are both purifying and destructive." So the firewalker must convey something. "

"What is conveyed? "

"Suffering," Marina said, stamping out her cigarette butt on the root of a tree, "We all know suffering, but experiencing suffering, experiencing fire and water, and letting others feel it together - this is a Experience from elsewhere, so loving fire is not a family tradition. ”