Storyline: Bulgaria with Alex
We left Milan’s apartment and Lyulin, the Sofia suburb where he lives, the day after our landing (still 7 hours jetlagged), for a semi-deserted village with about 10 inhabited houses mainly by retirees from the nearby cities. No wonder Alex felt misplaced in all this. Having never flown across the ocean also meant he hadn’t learned to deal with the jetlag either. He kept falling asleep in the car and it was hard to wake him up for late breakfasts the next few days in the village. To be honest he has hard time dealing with jetlag even now (eastbound, that is – A), after we have now travelled extensively.
(The photos Dili took with her digital camera helped me to reconstruct the first few days in Bulgaria in 2004. Alex was fond of his big, clunky SLR film camera, as digital cameras were still quite new. But of course, over the years we’ve cleaned things out and ditched all the old negatives. Thus, many of our photos from 2004 to 2012 are scanned from old prints and are not even up to the standards of those early digital cameras that he disparaged back then.)
And so, from run-down Lyulin, the first suburb built in communist times in an attempt to resolve growing housing needs of Sofia, he was fetched to an eerily empty village. I have to give him credit because I’d be more than disconcerted during these first few days.
My mom greeted us with the traditional Bulgarian bread and salt at the threshold. The bread, called pogacha (flat and fancy), was hot out of the oven: she had timed it well. We sat around the table which was set with salad and other mezes (appetizers served to complement the drinks) for the aperitive, traditional rakia made by my dad. Rakia is the collective term for the fruit brandies popular in the Balkans. Bulgarian rakia is usually made from grapes. It is the drink everyone will have before dinner. And salad comes with it. It can take a few hours, chatting around the table sipping the shot of rakia and munching on the salad while waiting for dinner to be cooked.
My mom, smiling and talking enthusiastically, was in charge of it. Alex, being chatty by nature, was for the first-time part of a family conversation of which he understood nothing (I found that I could doze with my eyes open! – A). The eyes from both sides of the language barrier were on me, the poor interpreter.
The house had deteriorated over the years. As a matter of fact, the semi-ruined stone walls hadn’t seen repair since being damaged by an earthquake in 1977.
This was the house of my granny (my father’s mom). She had built it alone at the beginning of the 20th century while my granddad worked in the mines, she used to say. Of course, there were masons who put it all together, but she carried all the stones, which mattered the most. As a child, I spent my summers there. Exciting times, long before the television era. Electricity, if any, provided dim lighting often in just one room, but there were no street lights. Refrigerators were unknown. Running water, too. In the village there were two wells and one fountain with stone basins.
The fountain at the top of a meadow just above the last house of the upper purlieu, was where the grannies would do the laundry (cold water, handmade soap and a big washing paddle to beat the cloth).
The village where many kids would spend their summer vacation was, as I remember it, full of grannies. Before I reached school age, we spent a year or two with my granny, while my parents were settling back in my hometown after returning from a small town on the Black Sea, where my father had worked and my brother was born.
The kids used to gather in the dark evenings, sit in the mud and dust of the village roads and with unleashed imaginations tell horror stories as entertainment, clueless of how lucky we were with the freedom of fresh clean air and not planted inside a house, glued before a TV screen. Hands without fingers coming from the ground – someone would draw a circle in the mud and we’d try to imagine the hand jumping out and scream of course; heads living without bodies – the story teller would make a bug-eyed stare; a crooked man who had ears instead of eyes, and anything in between that can be presented as a credible horror.
After we thought we scared each other enough, we’d run, with the exuberance only a kid can demonstrate, after the fireflies in the fields surrounding the village. No one dared to venture as far as the forest, though. There might be wolves there, we’d think.
And we were not allowed to go anywhere near the two small reservoirs in the fields behind the lower purlieu. There were plenty of foxes visiting the village at night, but they were not scary. Around midnight we’d eventually settle in bed, just to be awakened by the sound of the rooster, then later on by the horn of the shepherd, calling for the sheep to be let out of the yards. My granny would have freshly drawn milk for us, still warm from the sheep. Yes, not yet pasteurised or boiled. And when boiled to make yogurt we’d be treated with the absolutely delicious thick cream formed on the top. She then would go about her business, be it in the garden, working in her fields, or in the vineyard.
The vineyard was a bit outside the village, beyond the upper meadow, and she’d take us there, so we wouldn’t jump and drown in a village well or an open cesspit. Yes, we used to play in and around everything. We’d climb the trees, run on the roofs, jump from them and anything a kid’s mind can invent. I grew up in cherry trees, thus my love for cherries. We’d search for eggs which the hens used to lay anywhere they could. Have you tried to suck a fresh egg? We’d gather the eggs in a basket and try some. We had mastered making the hole with a needle. One small for the air and one a bit bigger at the other end of the egg. Loved them! (I always used to think the saying “teach your grandmother to suck eggs” had a different connotation – A)
My parents moved to Gorski Senovets, their home-village from Gorna Oriahovitsa, my hometown, after they retired…at a fairly young age…I should note. The retirement age then was 55 for women and 60 for men. Didn’t look like they’d done any maintenance or improvement though. As a matter of fact, the house continued to deteriorate over the years. Gone were the big pear trees, the peach trees, the mulberry trees and most of the cherry trees.
The lone survivor had broken branches and was on its last legs. But for some strange reason my dad had planted plenty of cornelian cherry (European cornel) trees. Its sour fruits were hard to eat unless preserved with sugar and water, or dried.
Their only use that I really remember was to treat diarrhea. But the jam from cornelian cherry is really delicious if you like sugar – much better than the lemon curd that Alex loves.
The entire property was surrounded by stone walls, with the house and outbuildings forming the rear wall, and a wooden gate providing access from the street.
The yard was separated into a few different spaces. The house and part of the yard were fenced off from the rest and entered through a second gate.
Inside were the flowers, the strawberries, raspberries, lettuces, herbs and (now sadly missed) pear trees.
The adjacent open-walled barn spaces were outside this gate but shared the roof with the house. Part of the structure was, as I remember, the hen house, now full of junk.
Then the real barn with the bales of hay, then the pigsty and the latrine at the end.
There were two big walnut trees that supplied us with nuts year-round. We loved playing in the barn, sliding from the top of the bales, jumping and hiding in them and producing clouds dust that filled our lungs.
The house now looks more like a camping cottage with some amenities. There was no garbage collection though. In the time of my childhood everything was biodegradable. Most of the food, chickens, pork, lamb, vegetables, beans, sausages, dry meat (prosciutto) and many others were produced by the household. One would only buy sugar, salt, oil (the bottles, well-washed, had to be returned to the store), perhaps bread, some hard sugar candies and waffles, matchboxes, and gas for the lanterns, used when the electricity was off, which was rather often.
The glass jars used for milk and yogurt in the cities were replaced by plastic. The few inhabitants left in the village didn’t produce much yogurt and milk anymore. It was easily available in the store. But still no garbage collection, although my dad tried to use them as much as possible. So, there were piles of plastic everywhere. When my kids were little, we’d send them to the village in the summer. Their toys, swings and bicycles were scattered among all other junk under the roof of the open shed.
My Dad, a WWII veteran, never really left the war behind. At any opportunity he’d bring the conversation around to his beloved tanks. He used to operate one. He’d pull out old newspapers with photos and talk about the different models, which ones he drove, the war itself, the fact that all one needed to have was cigarettes and matches. You could trade these for anything. He’d show Alex all the photos and newspapers and I guess since the word tank was the same in both languages, they got along well. And he’d make sure he’d show us his medals too.
Alex
I was fortunate to have the perfect in-law relationship. Our interactions were limited by the lack of common language, and were conducted primarily by signs, smiles and by Diana’s periodic translation of ongoing conversations. And while Diana is multilingual, her skills as an interpreter are somewhat ‘sketchy’. She’d periodically ‘translate’ something her parents said by repeating them to me in Bulgarian, and would then turn to them and tell them in English that she had just ‘translated’ their words into Bulgarian for me, before telling them in English what I had said. This, to everyone’s amusement. And it occurred more frequently as more rakia and wine were consumed.
One thing my parents had done though, was to build a small shower cabin with cement floors and brick walls and install the wood burning boiler which I remember had been in their apartment in Gorna Oriahovitsa before they replaced it with electric one. Since there had been no hot water in Milan’s apartment (thus no shower) due to maintenance work, on our first morning in the village my dad fired up the boiler and there was just enough hot water for the two of us to shower. One at a time, then shove more wood and wait for the water to warm again.
May in Bulgaria can be quite rainy, and it rained a lot and heavily in the village. By the time we’d reach the latrine at the end of the long building structure we’d be soaked.
Back to the room to change and dry and then sit under the overhanging roof of what could pass for a covered porch, but much bigger and 2 floors tall. This was used as a summer kitchen and dining room, and also a summer reception room where rakia and salad would be served in the afternoon, or coffee and home-made jam (a teaspoon with one fruit in a small sushi serving size plate) in the morning. I loved the jam with whole green walnuts my mom used to make. There is nothing I have ever seen anywhere else like this sugary green walnut (they are picked long before maturing) melting in one’s mouth. It is a forgotten art to make green walnut jam which is labour intensive (a lot more work is needed in processing and preparing the nuts than any fruit jam) that had probably died with the Bulgarian grannies and the women of my parents’ generation.
One of my favorite foods was snails. We used to harvest them in the ditches around the water, but they were literally everywhere in the village. And after all the rain it wasn’t difficult for my dad to bring home a pot full of them, which my mom prepared for my contentment. We used to forage for a variety of wild plants and herbs – nettles, dock, sorrel, mint, thyme, chamomile…but mushroom picking was one of my favorite activities. When the rain stopped I wanted to go into the forest and pick some. My dad however said it was too early that year, so we’d just explore the village milieu.
Alex
Diana’s parents had lived self-sufficiently in the village for over 20 years in 2004, growing their own food, harvesting produce from communal and allotment gardens in the village, and doing it all with only hand tools. So at 83, my tiny (can’t have been over 5’1” or ~155cm) father-in-law could really move along. He took us to the woods above the village and we had to hurry to keep him in sight. He was fast, and very knowledgeable about local flora. The whole experience was a window into life in the early and mid-20th century that was still being lived in the small rural villages here.
When we had visited Cuba in 2002, I had been surprised at the common use of donkeys and pony-carts on the road, I saw many of them here in rural Bulgaria, too. I suppose that the experience in Cuba had reminded me that the whole world is not like Southern Ontario!
Including the wonderful fresh fruits, salads and vegetables, my in-laws had gone all out with the proteins we were served. When we arrived, there was a piglet and a lamb in a fenced-off part of the garden. The next day a local butcher was brought in and prepared them both for cooking there and then. In our oblivious city lives, we tend to forget the sources of our meat, but here was a direct reminder, and it took me back to my arctic trips where the local people have lives that take them daily into much closer contact to life and death than we experience.
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