And some expressed their gratitude in large sums of money. A man whose daughter had been cured had wanted to give Baba Ava 10,000 euros. She asked him to fix the road instead which made transport to The Passage easier. Another man had built a drinking fountain along the road, dedicated to Ava.

  ‘She’s a holy woman,’ someone muttered.

  Most of these people had exhausted all medical avenues. This was their last resort. They were prepared to try anything.

  The glade darkened with fresh arrivals. A disturbed boy was put through the hole by his parents, screaming. Couples wanting children, couples with sick children, old obese people, young obese people, a mathematician with glasses whose education didn’t allow him to believe in some stone, he said, but he didn’t mind if his hypertension and diabetes spontaneously healed.

  ‘This is my second time,’ said the woman sitting next to me on the stone. She was a GP and she’d brought her sick friend. ‘I feel different here. And it’s nice to have somewhere to go,’ she said.

  The last pilgrim that day was a man of sixty, an ethnic Turk from the Danube, covered in faded army tattoos, who’d lost the use of his legs after a stroke and was puppet-walked, step by step, by his girlfriend and nephew. It took them an hour from the car to the stone. A couple of men stayed behind and helped him through The Passage. Baba Ava encouraged him from the top. Afterwards, the exhausted trio sat on the stone.

  ‘See, you made it!’ a kind helper said, and shook the man’s limp hand while another slapped his back.

  Tears rolled down the man’s cheeks and he smiled his thanks. He had also lost his speech. I came to The Passage three days in a row and so did this trio. Before my unbelieving eyes, this man improved to a staggering degree. On the third morning, he was walking alone with the help of a cane. He was also smiling with a newfound confidence and his girlfriend and nephew beamed. A genuine transformation had taken place. As if the fire of life had been breathed back into him. I have no idea what caused it.

  Baba Acivé was unsurprised.

  ‘It cures all,’ she said, ‘If you believe in it, the stone will cure you. It was planted there by God.’

  She needed no further analysis. A guy with progressive blindness had come here and restored his vision. I had difficulty accepting this, but it didn’t matter whether I accepted it. Miracles don’t need approval.

  The following day, I came up again in the Jeep with Acivé, Arif, the couple from Spain who made the three trips after all but minus going through The Passage, and some new visitors. When we were done, I decided to stay on and wait for baba Ava’s party alone. Arif was happy to leave me: because there’s a keeper, the place is protected, he said.

  For a blissful hour, I sat on the plateau facing the valley. An eagle hung motionless above. Being here on your own was a completely different experience. The sun rose from the east, illuminating this flank of the mountain, and the moon faded to the west. At once I grasped why some herbs, like verbena, were collected only when both moon and sun were visible. The stone emanated a friendly pulse. I melted into it.

  It is because people are not in the habit of peace that The Passage made them well up with gratitude and stuff wads of cash into a baba’s bag. Why did spontaneous healing occur here? I don’t know, but I don’t believe it was because of the geomorphology of the stone. More likely, it was a psychological phenomenon. The place was culturally designated as a passage and here, people had permission to experience miracles. We can have an encounter with the miraculous anywhere, but because of our injured instincts, we need designated passages. In a place like this, the psyche performs its own alchemy and healing can occur.

  The smell was acrid; flour combined with burned hemp. Processed flour had replaced the cereal grains that the supplicant offers to the plant she digs out or to the locus dei of the stone. Cereals come from the goddess of harvest and fertility: Demeter-Ceres, avatar of the mother goddess, a direct link to the earth. The salt was a usual suspect too. Salt has purity and fixity and is one of the alchemical ingredients.

  Then my reverie was broken by voices. The baba Ava party had arrived.

  ‘Hello,’ said the first arrival, a boy with dark circles under his eyes. ‘Are you sad?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m resting.’ He sat next to me.

  ‘My dad is sad,’ he said. ‘I think it’s because of me. Yes.’

  The glade buzzed with arrivals. Baba Ava climbed the ladder with her knitted shoulder bag, muttering prayers or curses. The atmosphere changed. People brought their damned misery with them. The ritual began, a queue formed, the stench of burned hemp and flower wafted. Worried faces, slumped bodies, eyes avoiding contact, men holding their distended stomachs as if about to give birth, women clutching their handbags as if surrounded by thieves. Poor suffering humanity was here.

  Baba Ava was quick to see what people had come for.

  ‘Today one of you, next time three of you!’ she called out to the young guy who had come asking for a baby.

  Another formula of intention setting which I saw enacted by women in the valley was that the intention could be directed at the illness itself:

  ‘Today I see you, tomorrow I don’t see you.’

  ‘Here now, gone tomorrow.’

  The driver-nephew promised to show me a photograph of baba Ava on the stone with the spectre of a giant snake behind her. He never did and I was sure the photo was a dud. But it no longer mattered. The place had a life of its own. In a millennial pattern of dormancy and activity, it was simply doing its job. Baba Ava, baba Acivé, baba Nishidé, baba Nailé and baba Aishé were doing their job too. At a time when humans needed a stone for reasons of their own, the babi came out of obscurity with their sticks and their prayers, and donned the priestess mantle.

  Some, who had seen the keeper, said that he could appear with two children at his sides. Some said he was so gentle-faced, he could be a woman. An androgynous, fluid quality permeated these impressions and this ambiguity was what ‘the system’ had always feared and tried to erase from the face of the land.

  ‘How old are you?’ the boy with the dark circles asked. He was fifteen but seemed younger and I feared he may stay a child forever. ‘Guess,’ I said.

  ‘Twenty,’ he said. ‘Twenty-five.’ He tried again, ‘Sixty?’

  ‘Not bad,’ I said.

  ‘I want to grow old,’ he said. ‘But first, I want to have a girlfriend. Yes.’

  His sad-looking dad didn’t make him go through The Passage. They just came for the ride once a year.

  That day, a woman collapsed after going through the hole and had to be revived with water.

  ‘We’ve seen it all,’ the driver-nephew said to me. ‘One time, a woman started wailing when she touched the stone and fell to the ground.’ The following year, she’d returned to report that she was cured.

  A couple popped out of the forest; he sweaty in a singlet with an unhinged look, she pallid in white clothes. They’d walked from Kribul. They looked like they’d escaped from the same asylum. He began to shake hands with people in a messianic way, like a politician.

  There are two types of people: those who know they are unwell and those who don’t. The second type are dangerous. They project their sickness onto the rest.

  People in the queue shuffled their feet, trapped between the stone where Ava waited for them, and the messiah and the nymph who removed her shawl and tied it to a tree. When I heard they were walking back – they had energy – I cut my losses and caught a ride in one of baba Ava’s Jeeps, where we were crammed, but at least everyone knew they were unwell.

  There was a routine: morning trips to the stone with your baba and her driver, afternoon melt-the-bullet sessions at your baba’s house and evening meals with the food you’d brought. Though some people ate at the Kebab café.

  Baba Acivé often sat at the Kebab café with a couple of other babi and I joined them. They approved of my blue slacks, because blue repels the evil eye and there were people here with the evil eye.

  Men with the evil eye were less common, but worse than women, they agreed.

  ‘Never mind the evil eye,’ said the Kebab owner, a pleasant woman in jeans and a T-shirt. ‘Greed is the problem.’

  ‘It’s wrong,’ said an alcoholic called Ahmet who hogged the space with his rants. The skull showed under his face. ‘This idolatry of a stone. If you want God, here’s the mosque. Or the church. It’s gotta be man made. And if someone wants a baby, they need a cock, not a baba.’

  ‘We opened this Kebab café for visitors,’ said the café owner.

  ‘But we don’t know how long this craze will go on,’ said her husband, another lorry driver.

  ‘It has stuck a wedge in our community,’ said another baba. ‘The village is divided into camps. It all happened after they showed us on the telly.’

  ‘It unlocked the greed in people,’ said Ahmet. He ironed clothes in a sewing workshop for ASOS. The money was decent but the work humiliated him because it was “women’s work”. Still, it was a job and it meant that he didn’t have to go picking fruit abroad.

  ‘Sewing has replaced tobacco,’ said the Kebab owner. ‘Every family used to grow tobacco. Now it’s down to a few.’

  ‘They still punish themselves,’ said Ahmet. ‘Why?’

  ‘Cos it’s in our blood,’ said one baba. She still grew tobacco. ‘We can’t give it up.’

  ‘Our Basma is the sweetest. One kilo equals twenty kilos of any other tobacco, for taste,’ said the lorry driver.

  Tobacco connoisseurs know this to be true. The legendary Basma, an Oriental tobacco grown along the Mesta, is considered the finest aromatic tobacco in the world. It’s also called Nevrokop tobacco, after the valley. It’s the alkaline, sandy soil and the dry mountainous climate that make this crop possible only here. The story of Oriental tobacco is epic. Fortunes were made from it for a century and a half. In the 1960s, Bulgaria was the world’s largest exporter of cigarettes in the world via the state holding company Bulgartabac, which was privatised during the ‘murky years’ of the 1990s. The new tobacco barons came down harshly on growers and undercut them to the point where they were losing money. These growers, who for generations had carried the state’s economy on their backs in times of capitalism and Communism, were finally betrayed by the oligarchy. Hearts and lives were broken as the industry all but folded. The mass exodus of persecuted ethnic Turks in 1989 had been the beginning of the end; they had been the key workers of tobacco. Ten years after their traumatic exodus, the remaining tobacco growers and pickers were forced to work in Greece where climate conditions were similar, because the Nestos River and the Rhodope continued into Greece.

  But some stayed. Today, in the valley, for a kilo of your dried Basma, you got 3 to 4 euros. Downstream in Greece, you got 18 euros. One kilo of dried Basma, after being mixed with broad-leaf varieties like Virginia, produces about sixty cigarette packs. Tobacco is still a lucrative business and the growers are poorer than ever. Tobacco is a tough crop to grow and it was a miracle that anyone still did it on either side of the border.

  ‘You grow it from seed. You keep it from frost, you water it. Then you pick it, string it, dry it, pray over it,’ said the baba who still did it.

  I saw her wooden frames with strings of tobacco leaves, sun-curing under a plastic roof. She and her daughter sat on a blanket and did it in the shade. It was the easiest part of the work. If your crop wasn’t blighted and you didn’t mind a chronic bad back, walking to your field in the darkness, and if you didn’t mind yellow fingers and the smell of it, you could at a push make 250 euros a year.

  ‘Today is Wednesday, a good day for work and healing,’ said Acivé brightly.

  ‘Wednesday and Saturday are good days,’ agreed the Kebab owner.

  ‘Every day is a good day when you know your days are numbered,’ said Ahmet.

  ‘All the days on Earth belong to the One above,’ agreed the lorry driver and we watched a man covered in dust puff up the street. He had walked from the valley.

  ‘Greetings, good people,’ he smiled. His teeth were black in a medieval way.

  ‘Are you lost?’ Ahmet mocked him.

  ‘Not at all, I’m glad to be here among the good people of this mountain,’ said the man with such sincerity that the sneer went from Ahmet’s face.

  ‘He comes every year,’ said the Kebab owner. ‘And always has a kind word. When I see people like him, I remember that I’m the grandchild of refugees. They too walked over the mountains with just the clothes on their backs.’

  In the wake of the First World War, border territories were redistributed.

  ‘My grandfather’s family walked here. Their village in Greece is down to four houses now,’ she added. The family never went back.

  ‘My grandfather got lost in that war,’ said baba Acivé. ‘Fighting somewhere in Greece. And my other grandfather too. The both of them. But my father survived the next war and lived to a hundred. He was the best. Took me with him everywhere, to country fairs and markets on horseback.’

  ‘All the lads of the village wanted her,’ said another baba about Acivé. ‘Cos she was the prettiest.’

  Acivé smiled with equanimity. It was hard to flatter or offend her.

  ‘And in the end, she remained a maid,’ said the other baba.

  ‘I thought everyone had to marry,’ I said.

  ‘Aye, we do,’ said Ahmet. He was married twice.

  ‘Not everyone,’ said Acivé firmly. ‘Only those who want to.’

  She hadn’t wanted to. She had been devoted to her parents. There was something devotional about her. While others were concerned with houses, ostentatious weddings, more grandchildren, she focused on staying tuned to some inner rhythm. Most people have an active outer life, Acivé had an active inner life. That’s why she was interesting. Her idea of success was to maintain harmony with all around her, every moment of every day, and to help, but only those who wanted it. She did not force her help on you.

  She told me how, twenty years ago, walking to the nearest town, two hours over the hills, she had seen a woman on a rock, bent over. But when the woman lifted her face, Acivé was stunned to see that it was made of light, immaterial. Acivé ran away. When she looked back, the woman was gone.

  ‘She was a holy woman, an evliya,’ Acivé said. ‘Someone killed her for a piece of land and she was showing herself to ask a favour, but I was so scared, I told people about it and she never appeared in my dream.’

  Evliyas deliver their messages in dreams but sometimes they appear in the waking world too. It is an unwritten law of the Otherworld that you mustn’t blab about its visitations. The numinous requires discretion.

  ‘How did you know about the stolen piece of land?’

  Acivé smiled. ‘People think you can only know things if you’re told or if you read it in the newspaper. But you can know in other ways.’

  After buying a shiny new lead bullet from the shop, I followed Acivé to a dark house next to the mosque. Here, she melted-the-bullet. It is the most popular ritual in folk diagnostics. It uses three substances in a way that can be described as basic alchemy: fire, lead and water.

  ‘Everything has imitators,’ she said, ‘except lead. Lead doesn’t lie.’

  It was sympathetic logic: lead couldn’t be falsified, therefore lead didn’t falsify. She asked me to hold my bullet while she lit a small camping gas stove on the carpeted floor. It was a gift from a man whose wife had recovered after Acivé poured her a bullet.

  She placed the bullet in a big ladle and held the ladle over the gas fire until it began to melt, saying a duva under her breath. When the lead turned liquid, she brought the ladle head to my feet and ‘scanned’ them. Then she poured the liquid lead into a dish of water and it solidified again. She studied its shape. It was a regular shape.

  ‘Your feet are fine,’ she pronounced, and held the ladle over the fire again, to re-melt the lead and repeat the procedure for my knees, abdomen, heart, back, neck and head. It took a while and was strangely relaxing. She looked like a magician-forger, pouring and decanting the liquid state of her charges and I wished I was her apprentice.

  ‘Oh, there’s a problem with the belly!’ she said when the lead crackled and spat. I did have abdominal pain that worried me a bit. The lead hardened in a prickly shape which indicated disturbed energy. She repeated it until the lead came out round.

  ‘It’s cleared. Nothing serious,’ she concluded, satisfied.

  I had no understanding of the chemistry of lead or sympathetic magic, but I was still relieved. With some people, she had to re-melt the bullet so many times that it fell into crumbs and several bullets were needed.

  The babi here used lead, but in other regions they used coal: one or three hot coals named for the patient were placed in water, just like the melted lead. Fire is the activator, the named object is the mediator and water is the environment. These were very ancient ‘reading’ practices – lead, coal, coffee grounds, tea leaves, smoke, sea conches, animal bones, broken egg, wine, blood.

  ‘There was a mute child,’ Acivé said. ‘But the problem showed up not in his head, but in his heart and arms.’

  ‘A woman came with her breast removed. Cancer. She was unhappy all her life, an orphan. Never felt loved. The cancer was gone, but the bullet still picked up a lot of trouble with the heart.’

  She had complete faith in the lead because she had complete faith in the invisible laws of the universe. That gave her the serenity of the wise crone that is so rare. Most people don’t become wise, they just become old. At the end of the session, she dropped the lead in a small jar of water, dabbed my forehead, lips and chest with the water and asked me to sip from it, then threw the water into the sink.