Spring
The winter was unusually cold. Frightened by it, spring arrived slowly and cautiously, cool and damp. It's still hard to relax, but we can't stay home. We decided that the agonizing warming was worth celebrating outside the city. An early Easter is approaching, and we choose to enjoy the resurrection of spirit and matter in the Gabrovo region. A favorite place. The hamlets with old houses, elegant and sad like sighs.
Kazanlak and the Valley of the Thracian Kings
We will go through Shipka, having previously planned to visit Kazanlak. The city of the Bulgarian rose, Chudomir, the capital of Thracian culture.
We are unpleasantly surprised that the museums in Kazanlak, unlike the churches, are not open on Good Friday. We are skipping the Valley of the Thracian Rulers and heading straight for Gabrovo via Vitynya Pass.
The road to Gabrovo and the atmosphere of the holiday
The kebapcheta at Bulgarian Spring are not as inspiring as they used to be, there's no spring onion. All that's left are good memories.
Clouds besiege Sevlievo, but the town center is teeming with colorful people. Cafes are bursting at the seams. Children dart around the square in electric cars or simply run back and forth. We want to lure the warmth with a few more ice creams that aren't quite suitable for the weather yet, but it's still somewhere on its way and shows no signs of appearing soon. It's cold, but decorative trees, shrubs, and flowers are blooming rebelliously and don't seem bothered by anything. People are smiling and talking loudly. The air is filled with anticipation.
Gabrovo – the town of humor and Revival spirit
Gabrovo appears theatrically from behind the hill after the huge stone horseman. We descend solemnly down the main street and stop in the middle of the center. Plenty of space. The holiday and the threatening black clouds have emptied the streets. Nearby is the „Balkan“ hotel, which once, after an exhausting tour of Northern Bulgaria and overcrowded hotels, gave us a surprisingly sweet refuge. This reminds me for the umpteenth time that good is remembered more than evil. We have booked a room in a hotel near „Etara“ and decide to visit it today, getting ahead of the promised rain from the forecasts.
A fairy tale in reality
Etara – the most beautiful open-air ethnographic museum in Bulgaria
Children adore miniature, Lilliputian things. As a child, I dreamed of my own reduced microcosm, and I had a particular fondness for crafting miniature models of all sorts of things, including small houses. Perhaps I saw similar models somewhere; I don't remember where that inspiration came from. I imagined setting up a small, foot-high watermill in my grandfather's garden, among the grass of the vegetable patch, its miniature waterwheel powered by water that I would supply with a hose from the well. It turned out to be difficult work. There was no one to help me, and I wasn't skillful enough. When I visited „Etara“ for the first time, my dream seemed to come true. Well, the houses weren't exactly small, but they were small enough for me to feel like I was in a living illustration from „Gulliver's Travels“ and my own dreams. I'm here again and thankful that this wonderfully preserved place, one of the very few marvels that haven't disappeared with time and haven't grown with me, still exists.
Architecture, crafts, and revivalist atmosphere in Etar
At the edge of a clear mountain stream, tightly embraced by a small mountain valley, houses, shops, and workshops are arranged like colorful toys. The pure water from the aqueduct enlivens them with its brisk murmur, turning wheels and spindles, casting splashes and colorful sparks from droplets, ignited by the slanting evening sun.
To begin with, it's difficult to make your way through the dense network of smells and colors of the tavern, spread out like a fishing net immediately after the entrance. Strings of sujuk above the grill, from which smoke rises like from an ocean liner, draw the visitor in like a chorus of sirens to a deprived sailor. And he is torn by curiosity to explore the wondrous settlement or to dive into the treasure trove of Bulgarian cuisine right away.
We continue resolutely, proud of our surprising willpower. It is worth delaying this pleasure, at least for a little while, to savor the wonderful ethnographic menu offered by the miniature replica of Revival-era ingenuity, diligence, and sense of beauty. Part of a mountain river has been captured and tamed in a millrace along the right slope. Down steep wooden channels, the water rushes and drives the mechanisms of various miniature production facilities – a whetstone workshop, a laundry, a braiding workshop, woodworking shops, and so on. The narrow valley echoes with the joyful cannonade of clashing wooden mechanisms, and the small houses of the workshops, lined along the millrace, nestled among blooming flowers and fruit trees, compete to surprise the eye with the most beautiful combinations of wood and stone. This monument to exquisite old architecture, where mechanical intervention is almost absent. Where only what could be carried and made by human strength and hands, and domestic animals, was utilized.
The treatment of materials is almost reduced to a minimum, just enough to straighten the lines and humanize them with a sense of measure and decency, but also with great joy and satisfaction with life!
The buildings are part of nature, taken and refined with respect and awe, and therefore they are alive and real.
Between old beauty and modern concrete
Right now, construction is brutal. Man is raping nature, as if fighting it like a wrestler. Arrogant, tense, and deliberately artificial concrete hordes are springing up, crushing everything around them, pushing nature aside as useless. In Etar, this preserved love of man for his true home, with heart and soul, is calming and seems to give faint hope that not all is lost, that this nostalgic attempt by contemporary man to restore the dying beauty of nature might rekindle the extinguished hearths in our souls. Here, one can forget the concrete, glass, asphalt, and adrenaline-fueled world from which they came and experience the unique delight of encountering the natural beauty and humanity of a bygone world, one that we view with the usual condescension of ignorance and arrogance of the living towards the past as something backward.
The Etara Market and the Clock Tower
After the clock tower, a symbol of the Revival impulses and self-confidence of Bulgarians in many of our settlements in the 18th and 19th centuries, one enters the bazaar across a stone bridge. People jostle in the narrow street amidst an incredible palette of colorful facades, the aroma of warm simit and sand coffee wafts through the air. Batteries of cameras shoot in all directions, a local and foreign hubbub flows abundantly, filling every gap to the brim. The tavern's balcony is dangerously overcrowded. Copper cups and coffee pots clink. From the crowd, amidst all sorts of hats and hairstyles, a Yorkshire terrier, overly excited by the din, peeks out. Thank God, it doesn't notice the black cat below, basking on the stone fountain. Next to it, in front of the confectionery, a line snakes for Turkish delight, and we join it. From the shop doors, visitors enter and exit like bees at a hive entrance, and in true Gabrovo fashion, they mostly look, almost never buying. They shake their heads, tut, wave their hands. Wood, knives, bagpipes, leather, ceramics, porcelain, glass, textiles. Mostly traditional, but also quite modernized trinkets, which seem to want to push the more indigestible antiquity through like a gulp of soda. Nevertheless, we are left with the impression of a sense of proportion, even though kitsch spares nothing, like phylloxera on vines. Naturally, there are minor damages here too, but inexplicably, it has missed and not drowned out this wonderful little place. Much of the original idea has been preserved – to produce and sell items characteristic of the Revivalist's way of life. I'm not commenting on the prices, but anyone can take home a unique souvenir from here. After all, to the joy of the people of Gabrovo, it should not be forgotten that the best memories are free.
The trace that remains
We leave, filled with warmth, light, and beauty, stemming from The harmony and unity of the composition, with an aromatic breath of authenticity, recreated not literally, but with a playful flourish, inherent to a good artist who never copies. We carry a joyous sense of completeness of a whole artistic creation, blending moods simultaneously from Mrkvichka, the cheerful, swaying lyricism of Gancho Karabadzhakov, and the ethereal coloring of Zlatyu Boyadzhiev.
Bozhentsi
One of the most beautiful Revival-era villages in Bulgaria
The other day, we headed towards true antiquity, which has miraculously managed to escape the mighty pressure of reinforced concrete, the greed of multi-star hotels for euros per square meter, and the thunderous conglomerations of silicone molds and gold chains. Through kilometers of dense forest, which was once almost impassable, nestled low in the thick oak groves, Bozhenci appears barely a hundred meters from the first houses. A settlement of refugees, like those that litter our land. It begins, however, with a flourish – past the large, sun-drenched two-story school, where swarms of Bozhenci children once chirped and which is now occupied with some artistic exhibitions, you enter directly into the cozy and spacious reception area of the square. The most hollowed-out place was chosen as the center, where everything easily flows – water, people, and animals. Here, the houses have more modest attire than those in Etara – wooden-colored or whitewashed, but alive, wonderful, and exciting like mushrooms in a thicket. With narrower bodies and broad bay-windowed shoulders, they have sprouted spontaneously in randomly chosen places. Cobblestone alleys connect them, following complex curves, interwoven in a stone lace.
The poetry of old Bulgarian houses
Unlike Koprivshtitsa, Zheravna, Old Plovdiv, and other Bulgarian architectural masterpieces, where the construction is somehow more cohesive, more slender, and orderly, Bozhenci is a unique poem of laconic free verse composed of humbler buildings, scattered haphazardly across the pages of the soft, wooded slopes of a shallow river valley. The slender sonnets of wealthier settlements are replaced here by short, sudden, transparent steps of quiet exclamations and gentle sighs. Here, nothing is imposed; everything is subdued, and the beauty and simple elegance of the humble houses stand out through the generous spaces between them, amidst the spacious green display cases of their vast yards, enclosed by simple fences.
Doncho Popa's House
Let's distinguish some of them. One of the most personal houses is Doncho Popa's. A modest Bulgarian palace of wood, sheltering behind the warm material a very simple beauty, the humble grandeur of the immense labor of our ancestors, who stone by stone, beam by beam, created, left as inheritance, enriched with mood and hope, with love and sensibility this Bulgaria, which today we buy, then sell, resell, and toss around so easily in our mouths on Facebook and Twitter.
The house of Ivan Karadimitrov and the spirit of the Renaissance
I have always dreamed of having an old house in a remote village in Gabrovo. Bozhentsi will top my list for life, and Ivan Karadimitrov's house first and foremost. In a white chetnik uniform and white gaiters, the house stands "komitski" with one foot forward, at the brow of a rise at the very top of the village. Directly above the street, without a yard in front, it seems to be scanning for an approaching enemy somewhere from the southeast. Lying down the slope, almost parallel to the street, in long preparation for the encounter with the exquisite building, wide stone steps elegantly and respectfully lead to the entrance.
In front, like a powerful guard, stands a sturdy walnut tree, by whose heavy crown passersby tread with awe. Only later did I understand that the special beauty of this house was not accidental. Just as the ancients believed that great beauty is also an expression of great virtues. This flair, energy, and charm, openness, courage, and striving for the high, the choice of a personal place, a little off the beaten path from the crowd that hides in the alleys, exposed to view, a personal place from which the gaze takes flight effortlessly, cannot somehow not be the fruit of a great spirit. Its builder – one of the village's greatest benefactors, Ivan Karadimitrov, is known for donating funds for the construction of two schools. He participated in the April Uprising. He was hanged on May 12, 1876, in Gabrovo.
I'm looking at this house and wondering – what owner of such a property today would shoulder a rifle and go out to fight for freedom and rights, to share with their fellow villagers for education and the future of their children. Who? Today, probably no one would lift a finger for anything, not even for their chicken coop. And if they did shoulder a rifle, it would be to rob their compatriots.
Today Ivan Karadimitrov is gone. His kind are gone too. But his home remains, to remind us of the sense of beauty, generosity, and selflessness of his great soul and that of many of his contemporaries. From a time when, along with beautiful houses, the lifestyle was justice, honesty, and readiness to help one's neighbor. A time like that has left this well-proportioned, simple, yet radiating strength and warmth spacious home with the generous measure of the physique of a healthy rural beauty, with whom you want to spend your life in comfort, enjoyment, and merriment. A dream woman. A woman for heroes. And, as I dream of having her, I ask myself - even if I could, do I deserve her?
The memory of the old tavern
A little further up, at the edge of today's village, is the house of Minyo Popa, the famous joker, hero of many of the renowned Gabrovo jokes, and brother of Doncho Popa – the famous merchant. Further up along the Roman road, there are now only remains of houses from a once much more populous settlement.
We return to the center, where smaller, larger, richer and poorer, braver or shyer, but all without exception fabulously beautiful, nesting and preserving their fear amid the deep Balkan forests, are the surviving houses. Before we leave, by tradition, we pay tribute and visit the old inn, just as other Bulgarians climb Shipka on March 3rd. With our hand on our heart, we admit that this may be the deepest reason for our love for Bojenci. A place that not only gave us beauty, relaxation, and fun, but also help in a difficult time. At that time, the keepers of this sanctuary were people who had escaped the world due to their own troubles, who sheltered us with incredible warmth and hospitality.
We haven't seen them since, though we've looked for them, but we want them to know that we've placed them on the iconostasis of our soul, where there aren't many icons. They are one of our first discoveries, that people in need are always more ready to spare it for others, that scarcity is more generous than abundance.
The legendary tavern in Bozhentsi
On its own, it is a legendary hub for the most discerning connoisseurs of sublime patriotic experiences, a sanctuary, a nest, a nurturing ground for generations of fighters, the most select national custodians of Bulgarian cuisine and cellar. The dilapidated ancient building in no way reveals its incredible history of heavy conspiracies and culinary achievements, it guards the secrets of generations of national heroes of the shish kebab and the flask like a committee hideout – Levski. We always enter, even if it's not for eating and drinking, because some memories are no less sweet than good food. (And the flatbreads?! Do you remember the flatbreads?!)
Caramel-brown Vesuvius, from whose oven-cracked slopes, the milky-yellow lava of hot depths is visible. There are no more like these! And no more such kebabs, and no more such steaks, and no more such kurnacheta, and no more such...) We look around inside, to inhale the tart breath of boxwood, old beams, and savory, and to make sure that the old benches, on which we have welcomed more than one morning, are still in their place. We tell ourselves that when we had so little, we actually had much more, and we lament again why wisdom always comes to a person too late. As in other places during our journey, we note how many things have changed - from the old folk traditions to our youth, and from our youth to our old age. Some changes are appalling – at this moment, in this holy place, some rootless wretches are sacrilegiously sipping espresso with coke?! We leave embittered, as if we have suddenly bitten into a sour apple. But the astringency quickly passes, sweetened by the sweet memories of youth, which are never tiresome to recall.
Tryavna
The road through the Balkan Mountains to Tryavna
From Bozhenzi, we embark on another adventure. We set off for Tryavna straight through a narrow cart path across an old beech forest. We are tempted by the mysterious woods and the short distance that the map and our all-terrain vehicle, which we assume can go everywhere, lure us with. Along the way, with great difficulty, we overcome several huge and unexpectedly deep mud puddles, which only I navigate with my eyes open. After a few kilometers, we get lost. The GPS, as almost always, doesn't help. "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe," and I take the left path. Naturally, we later found out we should have taken the right one. Through thick brambles and sparser forest, we enter a deserted hamlet. I follow the eastern turns and suddenly, with relief, like potatoes falling from a ripped sack, we unexpectedly roll onto an asphalt road not far from Bozhenzi. From there, the navigation is more helpful on the asphalt. We again choose an unknown road through small villages and hamlets. The names alternate, some ringing like cowbells and others crisp like May pastures – Trapezkovtsi, Chernevtsi, Redeshkovtsi, Kmetovtsi, Kharachetite, Belomazhite, Gorni and Dolni Varpishta. The soul drinks in the enchanting herbs of the mysterious ancient language and the wondrous sights. Finally, below Tsareva Livada, we turn south and through another dense beech thicket, we conquer Tryavna, a town surrounded by forests and mountains on all sides.
The Revivalist Harmony of Tryavna
Behind natural fortress walls, the town is comfortably situated in a spacious and flat river valley. Through the dismal industrial zone, a common scar on almost every Bulgarian settlement, we hurry towards the center to relax our bodies and eyes amidst its Revival-era harmony. Over a sand coffee in the old town square, meant for normal people, not for an industrial proletariat consisting mainly of forcefully corralled peasants and all sorts of other random human detritus, we try to shake off the visions of rusty factory behemoths, sunk in weeds and piles of degenerating waste. This dirt, this disease-ridden lichen on the body of the majestic Tryavna tree cripples the sense of wholeness, harmony, and rhythm of any normal human dwelling, especially of old Revival-era centers. A brutal clash of value systems from different eras, and rather a devaluing of the authentic and its disfigurement by soulless and brainless force. The only positive thing is the feeling that these giant mutants of stupid, proud ambition, rusted, dilapidated, and lifeless, have collapsed at the feet of nature, of normality, and of more modest proportions inherent to man in the world.
But the hot coffee, the sun breeze, and the clear silence under the clock tower wash away bad thoughts, and we relax in the sunshine. With the irresistibility of an innate habit, the gaze begins to wander curiously over facades and faces.
The Bazaar and Life by the Clock Tower
Refreshed, we rush through the colorful bazaar. All sorts of shapes and colors spill out of wide-open shops – clothes, souvenirs, postcards, jewelry, all kinds of trinkets. The entrances to the fast-food restaurants here are like beehives – honey-seeking tourists from all over land and take off with a cheerful buzz in different languages. Colorful groups of an inscrutable mix of guests and locals, seemingly with no urgent business, fill the benches, stand, or simply wander around. Children in new clothes, celebrating a birthday, have swarmed a bright carousel, chasing each other and getting dirty almost like in a laundry detergent commercial, shouting at the top of their lungs, intoxicated by the celebration, the sun, and their inexhaustible energy. We cross the stone bridge, which lifts us on its high back in the middle, and it seems to elevate our spirit along with our gaze. Amidst the reflections of the colorful buildings on the bank in the clear, full-flowing Osam River below, excited barbel dart about, fighting for the pieces of bread that passers-by throw from above.
The entire joyous spring world is gathered under the modest but elegant aegis of the sky-piercing clock tower. It presides over the small town, not with the fearsome might of a Gothic cathedral, but with the tenderness of a mother hen to her chicks, it has drawn the diversity of the wondrous, pure imagination of the Renaissance builders around itself.
The small, vulnerable Bulgarian settlements did not have the opportunity to transform into fortified medieval bastions. Instead, accepting their fate as easy prey to the ravages of time, they humbly yet joyfully stretched out their adorned forms, as if to say – what other choice do we have? We will surrender to life and happiness, however brief and fragile they may be, and let whatever will be, be. Nothing else is foreseen.
The Old School in Tryavna and the Spirit of the Bulgarian Revival
But while we feel the enthusiastic revivalist atmosphere almost everywhere in the town from the outside, only through her outer attire, provoking the imagination with colors and sophisticated playful building and street contours, we enter the heart and mind of the preserved Revival school, into the embrace of lost time that the facades only hint at. We imagine rediscovering it for a moment in its warm, authentic traces as we sit at the desks of our invisible ancestor-children, amused by the strictness and archaic language of the rules of conduct, which with all their solemnity and awe-inspiring nature, endear us with the sense of the immense power of purity and morality of a bygone era, of different people who naively, but with painful sincerity, believed in perfection achieved through faith, knowledge, hard work, and honesty. The portraits of people from that time in another room of the museum exude precisely those words that seem forgotten today, simple but irreplaceable – faith, hope, love, dignity, honor. And how fun and interesting that time must have been for its owners can be felt among the collection of old clocks, for whom it seemed to be a delight, a time rich in labor, dreams, and optimism. Something very different from the propaganda of nationalistic historicism, which insists that we are descendants of grim slaves, clenching their teeth in martyrdom amidst endless hellish tortures.
Dimitar Kazakov – Nero and the Clash of Eras
The exhibition of the artist Dimitar Kazakov – Nero in the west wing is interesting in itself itself, but it feels like a strange deviation from the overall tone of authenticity, nestled in the ancient stone and wood building, a sudden retreat from the general sound, from the point to which the entire rest of the ancient time machine guides us. Perhaps a brilliant cry over lost time? The flying fairies, Lazaruvanki, and all sorts of other unsettling female silhouettes, having successfully and beautifully overcome gravity, ultimately seem to reconcile with the meek spirits of the stricter, simpler, and everyday aesthetics of the Renaissance.
The Church of St. Archangel Michael – the Soul of Tryavna
If the school is the heart of the town, then the old church of St. Archangel Michael is its soul. You haven't truly seen, understood, or fully embraced Tryavna if you haven't submerged yourself in the cool medieval twilight of this stone Noah's Ark towards the afterlife, if you haven't wiped your gaze with the dark velvet of its smoke-stained vaults, if you haven't calmed your senses and thoughts, ignited by the hot sun and worldly clamor outside, if you haven't refreshed them with the balm of its mystical, universal silence and feeling of unearthly security. Built in the 12th century by the Asen brothers, it was burned down by the Kardzhalis at the end of the 18th century. It was rebuilt at the beginning of the 19th century. Like most buildings of this kind from that time, a large part of its interior space has been stolen from the depths of the earth, where it is sunk about a meter and a half.
The pathetic story of a suppressed religion, driven underground by the oppressor, told with masochistic fervor by guides and patriots of all stripes, can certainly be told here too. How the Turks diminished the self-esteem of the enslaved people by making their churches smaller, so they wouldn't overshadow the height of this or that pasha, on horseback or on foot, with or without a turban. I don't know what measure was used to build this church, but it is indeed very low compared to later 19th-century examples, about four meters to the eaves, by eye. However, I think that the faith of its builders and worshippers not only hasn't lost anything from this, but has gained. Even if it's a result of the oppressive instinct of the ruler's brute force, the intention to degrade and subjugate a faith alien to the ruling power, it, in my opinion, has actually been a great service to the believers. So the front of the temple is lowered, and with that, it seems to compel the entire flock to bow down, to fall to their knees in the most fitting posture for Christians – of humility and reverence for the Master of the humble, the poor in spirit, the weak and the sick, rather than standing tall in the proud posture of the masters of this world. The Babylonian pressure of the huge cathedrals, of the enormous churches around the world, competing for attention and power with the state, trying as if to replace God with themselves, is completely absent here. Here, faith is alone, without the shield and sword of secular power, even troubled by it. As a result, its temple image has acquired normal human proportions, corresponding to man, insignificant in comparison to God, a place for the worship of the repentant sinner seeking forgiveness, a sufferer next to Christ suffering for him. This Archangel Michael here seems to me somehow closer to the biblical picture of the Savior in a simple shirt, preaching under an open sky, more believable, more real, a place for purer, sincere, and incorruptible worship.
The building's exterior doesn't impress with its grandeur; rather, its simplicity warms, exuding a sense of closeness, a feeling of being welcomed. It's lower in height compared to even the later-built homes of Tryavna merchants, so nearby you can see its entire tiled roof. It doesn't dominate the sky with dizzying towers and piercing stone spires, but has humbly bowed in motionless reverence, befitting a true righteous person and a humble supplicant, aware of the great message of the gospel that the meek shall inherit the earth.
Tryavna and the magic of the Revival Gabrovo Balkan
We are leaving Tryavna and with it, the ethereal archipelago of the Revival spirit, humbly kneeling at the foot of the Gabrovo Balkan – a fragile antiquity, surrounded by a faceless modernity that has sprung up accidentally, without any natural transition, itself a monument to the sins and madness of its successors. A past that smolders under a museum display case like the last specimen of a rare exotic flower, beautiful but distant and doomed, like a naive icon sinking into the darkness that swallows the extinguishing candles after the end of the Easter evening service.
See more Author Atanas Krastev here
