Ein guter Freund von mir aus Holland hat sich bereits seit langem von Bulgarien faszinieren lassen und fährt fast jedes Jahr dorthin. Er hat sogar die bulgarische Sprache gelernt und übrigens verfügt er über solche vertieften Landeskenntnisse, deren sich die Bulgaren selbst nicht rühmen können.
Mit seinem Einverständnis möchte ich seine interessanten Erlebnisse während seiner Reisen in Bulgarien mit euch teilen. Mit feinem Humor, interessanten Details und in Englischer Sprache sind sie auf jedem Fall eine sehr zu empfehlende Lektüre.
Message from Zlatograd and reserve Srebarna
Größere Kartenansicht
Zlatograd means "Gold Town". It is in the South, near the Greek border.
After Rousse on the Danube I went to the nature reserve Srebarna (incidentally meaning "Silver"), but with a detour via the tomb of Demirbaba, a 15th century Sufi holy man. Sufism is a mystical wing of Islam, to be found from Morocco to Pakistan. Derwishes are usually Sufi. A deer crosses the wooded road before me. In line with the warnings I slow down and yes ... another one follows a few moments later!
The parking place near the tomb is filled with a few hundred people that combine a visit to the tomb with a Saturday picknick. There's a stall that sells little toys, cold drinks and beer. Wood fires burn under large 10 or 20 litre pans and everyone is having a good time sitting, talking and enjoying the outdoors and the shade. The Turks here adhere to the liberal Ali-Bektashi Islam, where alcohol and headscarves are not taken too seriously. One saying by Demirbaba is "If you search God, go among the people." Men and women sit in separate big circles, it's cosy and one can talk more freely.
After the picknick one visits the tomb. It is 60 metres down a steep mountain slope. There is a source and the water is holy since time immemorial, certainly prehistoric times. There is a stone which you can lie upon to gain strength (was an altar stone once and gullies were carved to let the blood run off) and two holes in the rock to put your hands in for health. In the tomb one prays. There are portraits of Ali, son-in-law of the prophet Mohammed and Shiite. Alevites resemble Shiites in some ways. The pictures show Ali as the romantic hero of a penny novel. Just as the Western and Eastern Christians have their Androcles and Gerasimo, Islam and Christianity have copied stories from each other. Saint George and the dragon is here Ali and the dragon, and Ali does what Christians know as the New-Testamentical miraculous multiplication of bread. The hundreds of steps up are a heavy burden for some. These people are Aliani, also called Kuzzulbashi or Alevites. There is a booklet from 1991, when the door to freedom had just opened, that describes in a detailed way their habits and customs in two villages, Bisertsi and Mudrevo. It is made in an exemplary way, with a bibiography, an explanatory list of words, a register as well as a thematic register, an English-language summary and black and white photographs. It deserved better than an edition in somewhat smudgy typescript and with newspaper type raster photographs.
Srebarna is a marshy blind side arm of the Danube, a nature reserve known for many rare birds like all kinds of herons, the ibis and black pelicans. This is not the top time for birds, but there are choirs of amphibians, birds and insects until deep in the night. My plan to walk round the lake (it is dammed on the Danube side ) failed because of lack of road signs and too high water levels. The reserve also is inhabited by the fire-bellied toad, the 10-spined stickleback, a land tortoise and a meat-eating underwater plant (not seldom in the Netherlands either). An invisible bird calls prrrrr.... prrrr.... . Anybody has an idea what it is?
Some pelicans can be seen doing formation flight, with almost motionless wings. Pelicans, like other water fowl, prefer floating masses of water plants for their night shelters, where they are safe from enemies like foxes. Frames for these floating nests are now made for them (in Vietnam!). They are made with two floors, and the birds thankfully live an apartment building life. Saw some all-white mini herons and a small white one with beige back.
The evening dusk brought village quiet. Cocks and chickens mix their sounds with the water birds. Several frog choirs start up that will continue long past midnight. Crickets or grasshoppers join in. Moist evening smells with a spicing of honest manure. Next morning, first I looked at a tit's nest hanging like a bag high in a willow tree from a thin shoot (can't find the English name of the bird just now).
Message from Kazanlak-Rose Festival
Größere Kartenansicht
The roses are in flower here and the storks tend their nests. It is somewhat warmer than in Holland near the coast and there was a rainstorm every night. The thunderclaps were so loud that cats mewed, dogs wailed and car alarms went off.
As part of the Rose Festival in Kazanlak, there was a good bread exposition in the Rosarium Park. Bread decorated with figures, motifs, special Easter and Christmas bread. Under them, specially made as background, there were very large and flat undecorated breads.Two stalls full, decorated with vases full of ears of corn and flowers, with costumed people in attendance.
After the exposition the bread could be tasted. This was advertized for twelve, but began at ten and within half an hour the beautiful bread exposition was over because an enthousiastic crowd had eaten it or carried away . At eleven thirty everything else, stalls and all, has been cleaned, dismantled and carried off. Few tourists in the crowd, but well-to-do Bulgarians, not the poorer kind that knows hunger first-hand.
Sunday I saw the main event of the Rose Festival: Rozober or Rose Plucking start. It is also an important state matter, the president of Bulgaria was there and four ambassadors. Something like a thousand visitors, of which the majority Bulgarian. Some 20 to 50 rose girls or -boys, folkloristically dressed up and available for photo opportunities. Further in the fields on this Pentecost Sunday were a number of Gypsies, who were actually plucking and getting paid 30 stotinki= 15 euro cents for a 25 litre bag of rose leaves. They were completely unperturbed by the festivities. (For best results, these Damascus roses should be plucked while the morning dew is still on them.) Comments I heard about this: "Yes, there is little other work for them." "My father and my aunt used to do this. It was early morning's work and you wore long trousers and long sleeves, not to get pricked." "My father and mother do this each year. They save holidays from their work for it to make some extra money."
Message from Russe
Größere Kartenansicht
Rousse is a town of some 200 000 inhabitants on the Danube. It is a more European-looking town because of the contacts by ship with countries like Austria and Hungary.
Millions of explosions. During the long ride from Holland, out of boredom, I noticed the needle of the rpm counter standing at over 3000 rpm. When it sunk in that this is 3000 full turns a minute, it struck me that after a little more than five hours this adds up to a million revolutions! Since in every turn two cylinders fire, in a standard engine, that makes for two million explosions before you're out of Germany! They are very small explosions though, each of half a droplet of gasoline. I had never realized that. Hope I have not bored readers with these calculations.
The Greek troubles meet with little sympathy from their Northern neighbours. Their complaints irritate Bulgarians, who have to make ends meet with quite a bit less than the Greeks. "And did you know that Greeks sometimes inherit their parents' pensions? Maybe we Bulgarians should also protest louder, like they do, and not meekly do as we are told." Cutting art budgets happens here too. Theatre companies are near the financial brink. Artists have to take on side work. "That means they are not autonomous any more."
There was a Tryavna school of icon painting in the 18th and 19th century which is quite different, much more home-grown than the traditional Greek style. Regretfully, the museum that shows them is a full kilometre out of town, via a cobbled road on a 50 meter hill. You could go by car, still this dampens enthousiasm so much that there are only a few visitors a day. The collection is absolutely worth it if the subject interests you. It seems the town just allotted this space to the museum.
Corruption has not vanished. Within the police, too, but they are careful with foreigners, who might bring trouble if touched. When a friend of a friend drove a car with foreign number plates, there were no problems. He bought a car with Bulgarian number plates and it started instantly. His "charmed life" was over.
The road to Rousse is through an undulating Danube plain, a few hundred meters above sea level. Not a sediment plain, it resembles Northern French and German landscapes. A few rivers have cut deep and steep valleys in the underlying chalk. You could say the mountains are under the land here. The chalk at Ivanovo is soft, has holes like a sponge and has been used for rock churches and rock monasteries for centuries. The walls have been polished and painted with religious scenes. One is the story of Androcles and the lion, but the Eastern-Orthodox tradition ascribes it to Gerasimo Jordanski. He cured a lion's paw by extracting a thorn. The lion became his friend and later did not eat him in the Roman circus. On the way back the cuckoo called in the echoing valley and I saw lizards, including the larger Emerald lizard, deep blue and pale brown dragonflies and the oriole, large with a strikingly yellow back (never seen, only heard).
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