This was syncretism fully cooked: place-specific pilgrimage blended with nature worship, stirred by gestures from a remote past, leavened by imagination and sugar-dusted with Abrahamic religion. I’d seen such dressed-up woods before, usually near a spring. In the Balkans, they have a faint Christian or Muslim flavour depending on who lives there at the time, but the template is the same. On the Black Isle in Scotland, near my river, is a spring called the Clootie Well of Munlochy. It is one of the last active sites of water-and-wood veneration in Scotland. There is no human custodian and people have forgotten why they tie a piece of clothing on a tree. They do it instinctively, from a body-earth memory, even when meaning has been erased from the mind.

  Human culture begins in nature. That is the memory. When you live without nature, you forget. When you come to a place like this, you remember.

  Hairbands, socks, bras, strips of fabric, trousers, T-shirts, shawls.

  Acivé showed me a special place for children; a small rock with ‘children’s footprints’ in it. The children made her sad, Acivé said, because often their illness came from their ancestors and could not be cured in this life.

  Acivé limped along with her walking stick at great speed.

  ‘This is the old path, the animal path. But when The Passage became famous, they made the new one.’

  The old path was only visible to her. Although it was early, we were not the first visitors. Another woman with a headscarf and a stick was returning from the stone. A few people walked behind her. We greeted them.

  ‘See,’ Acivé said, ‘she’s not even from Kribul. But she comes and brings her own people and that’s good. Cos the stone belongs to all. And before her is the dawn shift with baba Nishidé. Later in the afternoon comes baba Nailé.’

  There was a roster! We reached the stone. She threw a couple of pebbles she’d picked from the path at it, to alert it to our presence.

  ‘Salaam Aleikum, Aleikamu Salaam’, she said the traditional Muslim greeting, and tapped the stone with her stick as if knocking on someone’s door.

  ‘We have come a long way, give us healing,’ she said to the stone and climbed the wooden ladder. You had to climb it to reach the stony plateau on the other side.

  ‘Bismillah Rahmani Rahim,’ she muttered as she climbed. In the name of God, the merciful, the beneficent.

  The sun was rising from the east, the moon declined to the west. The birds were singing at full throttle. The area around The Passage was festooned with piles of red woollen threads left behind by people.

  To get a good view of the proceedings, I climbed onto the plateau from the other side where the babi didn’t go. Below was a sheer drop into the gully.

  A small tree growing through the rock was hung with little outfits; an offering from childless couples.

  People had inserted coins and bits of folded-up paper with their wishes into the rock cracks, even small photographs.

  ‘We tell them not to and they still do it,’ Arif said. ‘This is not a monastery, it’s a stone.’

  ‘The stone doesn’t need no money and no paper,’ said Acivé.

  The plateau was covered with white flour.

  ‘To feed the keeper,’ Acivé said.

  She put down her shepherd’s shoulder bag and swept the flour into the gully. There was a little resident broom for this. ‘Tsk tsk,’ she tutted. ‘They don’t clean up after themselves.’

  Meaning the other babi. Watching her sweep, I could see why the broom is one of the witch’s sacral objects. Another object is the sieve. For flour, herbs and to catch the shadows of things.

  This is how it went for the supplicant. You were to bring red thread, the same length as your height and which you placed on the railing by the ladder. You were leaving your measure for the stone. You then climbed the ladder starting with your right foot. You enter the mosque and your house with your right foot, you only go into the latrine with your left foot, baba Acivé explained. In the unwritten book of archaic rules, right was day, left was night. Right was male, left was female. Right was Cosmos, left was Chaos. Right was the sun, left was the moon. Right was conscious, left was unconscious. Likewise, in TCM, the right side of the body is yang, the left yin.

  You were supposed to bring flour and salt. But you didn’t, so the babi provided it.

  ‘Salt is the most precious thing on Earth after water,’ said Arif.

  ‘For the keeper,’ said baba Acivé. ‘To feed him.’

  ‘Him? I thought it was a black snake,’ the lorry driver from Spain winked at us and lowered himself heavily onto the flat stone next to me.

  ‘It ain’t a black snake,’ Acivé said calmly, sweeping. ‘It’s a person. A young youth.’

  The village was torn by feuds but agreed on one thing: there was a keeper of the stone. In the days before ready-bought flour, her grandmother brought grains of rye and threw them at the stone. ‘Here,’ she’d call to the keeper, ‘make yourself a necklace with this.’

  The first time Acivé saw The Passage was at the age of seven, when she ran away from school one day and snuck up here. She saw her grandmother talking to the invisible keeper and doing a ritual for a woman with a sick child.

  Acivé’s mother was a young woman when she came through the woods on her mule to ask The Passage for a favour and this smiling man-boy appeared. Very tall and made of light, in a long white gown. A giant hologram. Her mother talked to him and all he did was laugh and disappear. Her grandmother had seen him too, a generation before.

  ‘A young youth. She asked him three times “Who are you?” and three times he said nothing.’

  But the keeper, being a shapeshifter, could manifest as an animal or reptile. Some spoke of seeing a black snake over the years. A small lizard darted past us and a yellow butterfly alighted.

  ‘A sign!’ baba Acivé and Arif said in chorus. ‘A welcoming. See, the butterfly is looking for the Koran. Because this place is all about the Koran.’

  She meant relief. For women of her generation, the ‘Koran’ stood for compassion, right action, divine law, healing and holy scripture all in one. Later, when I spent time with her, Acivé said things like:

  ‘When judgement day comes, the Bible where the Koran is written with all its pages will turn blank.’

  To her, the holy book was everywhere, it was nature itself. Our Folk the Pomaks had a habit of saying ‘Allah-God’ when talking to non-Pomaks, to make it clear that Allah was just like everybody else’s god.

  ‘And just as Allah-God is one, so people’s little soul is one,’ she said. ‘They think they’re separate, but they’re not.’

  I saw how she treated cynical people who mocked her and the stone: with firm openness. Because she had no need to prove anything, she also had no argument with anyone.

  ‘You come here to stand before Allah. If you don’t think so, don’t come. This place is about your maker.’

  ‘This place is about symbols,’ said Arif, and lay down on the sun-warmed stone. ‘This is my spot. I feel the energy here. Every time my girls are about to go abroad, we come here and they lie on the stone to charge them up and give them strength in England.’

  They didn’t bring a baba and they never came in the dark, no, you never hang around after dark, Arif said. You wouldn’t want to, and the keeper didn’t like it either. There were tales of campers on a nearby meadow who’d heard eerie music in the night: flutes and drums, and laughing voices. The stone itself wouldn’t let you sleep, Acivé said, and I never spent the night here because I know my limits.

  ‘I don’t even know whether I’ll reach here when I set out each time,’ she added.

  That’s why she said a prayer to Hazreti (Prophet) Elijah before and after each visit, because you never knew when you might be struck by lightning and stopped in your tracks. May as well say a little duva to the prophet and there’s a duva for every occasion. Duva is a prayer from the Koran. From here, we could see St Elijah Peak on the other side of Clear Water, and next to it, Islamov Peak. It was a perfect twinning in a landscape animated by a force so old, it had no name.

  Acivé crouched at the opening of The Passage like a midwife and burned some hemp on a portable stove to smudge the air of unhealth, then scattered flour at her feet.

  ‘Come up,’ she called to the Roma couple.

  The couple wound their red thread around the nearest tree, climbed the ladder and stood before Acivé in their socks. Acivé turned to the gully with raised hands, palms up and began a prayer for fertility. The couple, who were Christian, were supposed to pray too, but they looked lost.

  Acivé produced an apple from her apron, cut it in two, and gave them each half to eat, with the seeds. They ate it without joy. In a mixture of Bulgarian, Turkish and Arabic, Acivé prayed. She really stood before some nameless force, a mediator between the seen and the unseen, the great unmoving mountain and the small human in socks. In her blue mantle, perched over the abyss with the awakening forest around her, she was completely at home.

  To see this scene – the eternal crone and her two charges with their apple like a gormless Adam and Eve – was so striking that even the lorry driver from Spain was silenced: briefly.

  ‘This place is really something,’ he said.

  ‘People need places like this,’ his wife said. ‘It’s therapy.’

  I saw that the battle of the babi was not just about money. It was about the title of chief priestess. It was a cultural contest. These women understood that they were custodians of unity in a fractured world. The wheel of time had turned and their once-spurned customs had become valuable again. Being a priestess of The Passage gave them a livelihood, but also purpose and worth.

  The Great Goddess has been worshipped in the eastern Mediterranean for about 8,000 years. The last two thousand have been difficult, yet here she was.

  There were two holes at the stone: you climbed through the first, the baba received you and you slid down the second. When the driver’s turn came, the first hole proved too small. His wife pushed him from below and baba Acivé pulled from above. The rest of us were in stitches, but baba Acivé smiled sympathetically.

  ‘You’re full of sin, that’s what it is!’ his wife quipped.

  ‘You must eat less,’ Acivé said. ‘When the moon wanes, it’s a good time to fast.’

  The driver had no such intention. Acivé did fast.

  ‘When the moon is thin you feel less pain,’ Acivé said. ‘And you lose weight faster.’

  The truck driver grazed his knee on the way down and declined a second go.

  ‘This is known in traditional medicine,’ said the GP. ‘Lunar waning is a good time for surgery, tissue healing and generally shedding.’

  ‘The best time to come is full moon, Wednesdays and Saturdays,’ said Acivé.

  These were propitious days in everyday Balkan Islam where numerology, seasonal cycles and folk rites play a big role.

  ‘Women understand the moon better than men,’ Arif said. ‘Women understand most things better than men.’

  We were all lying next to him on the stone, our faces in the sun.

  ‘And sacred places like this were always overseen by a woman who is a maiden or whose periods have stopped,’ he said.

  Acivé had never married. In these conservative communities, this was unusual.

  ‘Have you noticed something about the names of peaks here?’ said Arif.

  They were named after people, sometimes saints.

  ‘Female saints,’ he said.

  I looked at the map of Old Woods, then the whole of western Rhodope and the Pirin side of the valley too. There they were, in the hills: St Petka-Paraskeva, St Varvara, St Nedelya, St Marina, St Tekla (an early Roman martyr), many St Marys Mother of God, and Mitrovitsa, a feminised echo of the Zoroastrian Mitraic cult where Mithras of the mind vanquishes the bull of matter. Place-names like ‘Holy name’ or ‘God’s name’ signalled a nature cult that became taboo under the Church but continued to be worshipped.

  Amazingly, an annual Kurban feast was still held at Mitrovitsa Peak, at which only female animals were slaughtered in offering; a clue to the remote female divinity behind the name. And then there were the female names without a saint attached to them. They had been people of the mountain: shepherdesses, mystics, healers, cobblers, foresters, musicians, wives of local chieftans and people who had died on the hills or performed feats on them. It was impossible to know whether they had been women or men because the men’s names had acquired a feminine suffix: Boyanitsa, Milushitsa, Stankovitsa, Vassilyovitsa, Orlovitsa, Vishteritsa (Witchy River) and Ablanitsa. Many of the villages had feminine names too.

  Like the hills, the babi incarnated these avatars of the Mother Goddess.

  Then it was my turn. I climbed through the first hole and emerged on the plateau. It was awkward and slippery and that was the idea, to squeeze through a threshold of discomfort and emerge anew. The early people of the mountain had venerated womb-like caves where sunlight enters like a seminal liquid and rebirth is mimed. Baba Acivé prayed for my health:

  ‘Bismillah Rahmani Rahim, make her healthy today, healthy tomorrow, chase away the djinns, the sheitans, bring her kismet, selemet, bereket. Amen!’

  It was actually a much longer prayer, but this is all I could remember. Then I slid down the opening. The stone was polished from thousands of behinds. I scraped my knee like the driver and didn’t repeat the experience.

  At this point, baba Ava’s party appeared in a single file among the ragged trees led by baba Ava herself, who was small and square and carrying her walking stick. With her flowing mantle and followed by fifteen people and her two drivers, she looked like Moses leading her people across the desert. She also looked in a foul mood. It was time for us to clear off.

  I decided to stay on for the next shift, though. Baba Ava’s two drivers gave Arif a dirty look as they passed each other on the path. Baba Acivé vanished up her goat path.

  Baba Ava was a buxom woman with a large nose and the traditional braid down her back. Her face said: ‘this is work, don’t piss me off.’ She nimbly climbed the ladder and assumed the position. She lit the small camping stove for the hemp-burning and said a prayer to ‘open up the stone’.

  ‘Tsk tsk tsk, this place is a dump,’ she muttered. ‘They don’t clean up.’

  It was true that baba Ava’s team were the only ones who did clean-up operations, collecting hundreds of kilos of fabric and red thread several times a year in jumbo bags that lined the edge of the ragged glade and were eventually taken away by trucks. They used to burn them in the glade above, where night campers had heard eerie music and laughter, until it was prohibited because of the risk of fire.

  Meanwhile, people queued up for the ladder in an orderly manner, instructed by the two drivers. One of them was baba Ava’s nephew, a man in a tracksuit who liked to show people the ‘hand print’ and other marks in the rock; all of which looked recent. The commercial value of The Passage had obviously unlocked dormant entrepreneurial talent.

  The other driver had a slow expression and served as bodyguard and intimidator for the baba Ava ring.

  ‘Just for the record, there are no other babi,’ he said, giving me a look, knowing I was here with the previous party. ‘There’s only one. The others are fake babi.’

  But baba simply means old woman or crone. This was a place where women competed to be authentically old, or failing that, authentically crone-like.

  Ava’s knitted shoulder bag began to fill up with banknotes. People were generous. And desperate. Because of the sheer numbers, who kept coming down the path from additional vehicles driven by other men in her entourage until there were thirty people in the glade, she could not do individual rituals. She just muttered under her breath continuously, only breaking off to help the stuck, encourage the fearful and give hope to those weakened by despair and decay. Which was everyone.

  ‘Come on now, you can make it!’

  Like Acivé, she had a kind word for everyone and made people feel like she saw their pain and that it was okay to have this pain, but they also had to let go of it and she would help them. Women like her and Acivé have served as midwives, wish-granters, spell-lifters, spell-casters, medicine dispensers and physio- and psychotherapists for most of human history. They had held things together when things were falling apart. As political experiments came and went, as the patriarchy issued its decrees, ran its murderous bureaucracies, changed people’s names and clothes and robbed until there was nothing left to rob, the babi of the mountain kept at it. That’s why a folk festival, called Babinden, Baba’s Day, dedicated to the midwife, crone and all-round healer of women’s problems is still celebrated in January.

  ‘This is a nightmare,’ said a woman who hugged the stone wall without moving, as if the stone had literally petrified her. She had climbed the ladder and received baba Ava’s prayer without hope. Her face said: All of life is a nightmare.

  The faces in the queue agreed with her. They all wore wilted expressions, not seeing the sunshine, not hearing the birds, too busy taking morose selfies. They were like souls at the gates of hell. I don’t know what each person’s illness was; some didn’t have illnesses, or not physical ones, but the group emanated something like a dark gas.

  Baba Ava had allegedly cured herself of inoperable bowel cancer by coming to the rock. She’d then taken a vow to help people for as long as she could without asking for money. But the money came anyway and her entourage swelled. Now she needed the extra minders to orchestrate the crowd.

  Unlike Acivé who lived an ascetic life, Ava was a standard baba. She had a large family, animals and a couple of big houses at the top of the village where visitors stayed and where she melted the bullet for them. But the numbers were overwhelming for one baba and it was handy to have several who were natural hostesses. Most of them did the bullet procedure as part of the package.

  If you could ignore the politics which bred a malignant atmosphere not aligned with the benign purpose of the place, you saw that when she did her work, like the other women, Baba Ava embodied the qualities that visitors sought out like parched pilgrims. They were the qualities of this mountain. Having a baba to guide your passage through an imaginary threshold was to be cared for in a careless world.