‘We flush illness away,’ she said.

  This is what the anthropologist James Frazer termed ‘sympathetic magic’. He found two main forms of it worldwide – homeopathic and contagious – and the babi of Kribul used both. The first is based on the ‘law of similarity’, like the red rope and the clothes people left on the stone to stand in for them. And the second is based on the ‘law of contact’, like the bullet. Distance made no difference in the world of energy healing. I saw Acivé perform a bullet ritual for a woman who was not there and who had requested it by phone; the lead was intended to be in contact with her imaginal self.

  It was a kind of performance art, too. Its lowest aim was lucre. Its highest aim was spontaneous healing; a phenomenon dismissed by mainstream Western medicine, but well known in Eastern traditions. Spontaneous healing is contact with the philosopher’s stone. And the philosopher’s stone can only be produced through ‘art’ – nature alone does not produce it in the way that it produces crystals and salt. Art can be many things but for the babi, it was this. The Passage was their studio, the mountain their canvas. Ancient mysteries were their palette, their walking sticks were brushes, prayer and poetry their language, and people their spectators and collaborators. Healing was their holy grail.

  I kept the lead which had cooled into a pleasing shape in whose magma swirls Acivé showed me an ‘angel’. Some wore their bullet as an amulet. I keep mine on my desk and I used to put it in my mouth occasionally and taste the metallic coolness, like those soldiers during the First World War who sucked lead bullets to rehydrate when they had no water: until I remembered that lead is toxic.

  ‘You are well, may Allah look after you,’ Acivé concluded and asked where I was going next.

  ‘Ah, The Birches,’ she smiled. ‘That’s Pirin. It’s different.’

  How is it different?

  ‘Pirin is a crystal,’ she said.

  Yet I didn’t know anyone there. Here I had friends. The people, the houses where I slept and visited, the plants, the paths, the trees under which I lay too briefly. The Old Woods had welcomed me as one of them.

  Acivé was poor, uneducated and had slept alone for seventy years, yet she had a better relationship with life than most people I knew. Not because she was simple, but because she was wise. She was surrounded by coarse people but knew to tune into the non-human world for guidance.

  Acivé was off to evening prayer and invited me to the mosque, but I had a date with the goatherds.

  ‘Come again,’ she smiled before she limped off. ‘You know where to find me.’

  It made me happy that I knew where to find her.

  The Passage ritual was place-specific. I wanted to see a local ritual that was not attached to a place, so Arif took me to a healer hodja in a village upstream from Kribul.

  The hodja received me in his kitchen after finishing work in the local sewing factory. He was a man of the people and did his hodja duties on the side. There was a loaf of bread on the table.

  ‘Are you hungry? I can get tomatoes from the garden.’

  He filled a piece of paper with his small writing and gave it to me. It was a Koranic prayer for exorcising unclean forces. I was to place the paper in a pot of water and sugar, and sip the water for seven days. He instructed me to cross a running stream seven times, throw a pebble in it and state what I wished to cleanse from my life.

  ‘Water heals because water has intelligence,’ he said. ‘But it must be clean.’

  I asked him how he became a healer. That’s why I had come, pretending to bring a problem. His response made me feel the weight of my own small lie.

  ‘I had a dream,’ he said. ‘I was by the river and I saw Archangel Michael next to Mohammed, together with Isa. That’s Jesus in Islam. And I saw Mary the mother of Isa in white, like a Greek statue. I had that dream three times. Then I knew this was a calling. I had to help people for the rest of my life. I’ll get you some tomatoes from the garden.’

  Another hodja nearby operated from a small mosque. He was a professional cleric. Every Friday after the prayer called djumaya, the mosque turned into a consultation room and the tiny courtyard filled with people: Muslims, Christians, atheists, people with doctorates and illiterate Roma.

  The hodja was an urbane middle-aged man with a taste in good shirts.

  ‘I have two types of visitors. Clients and patients. The patients have health problems. The clients have other problems.’

  The mosque was cosy, with an iron stove that boomed cheerfully in winter. In one corner sat the hodja on the floor, cross-legged behind a low table covered by a towel, to protect it from dripping liquids and burns during incineration rituals. I half expected him to levitate on his rug. On the table were sheets of paper for jotting prayers, numerological sequences and astrological charts, a small vial of an aromatic liquid, and the Koran. There were people with sick children, troubled families, siblings fighting over houses. The most difficult cases were those of possession. But what is possession?

  ‘Possession is when an entity enters your auric field. It happens when your auric field is weak. You can strengthen it with prayer.’

  This time I brought a real problem. He gave me a piece of paper he’d finely inscribed with a prayer in Arabic and dabbed with the pink aromatic liquid: amber, rose and saffron. Again, the instruction was to place it in a jar of water and sip the water.

  ‘Water has a memory. The water becomes energetically encoded with the prayer and drinking it, you drink the intention.’

  I asked him how he became a hodja.

  ‘In the 1990s, I was a lost soul. There was no work and I got into treasure hunting. These hills are full of it. I climbed peaks and vales. But I was looking for myself. Then one night, I had a dream. I walked down into the river gully and a traveller came my way. A giant. “Merhaba,” I said. “Merhaba,” he said and we shook hands. His thumb was soft, without a joint. I still get shivers in my back. “Make a wish,” he said, “but you must pick: it’s either for this world, or for the other world.” I said: “make it for the other world.” The traveller smiled and vanished. I woke up and enrolled in the Institute for Islamic Studies in the capital.’

  To deepen his studies he became an apprentice to a cleric in the village of Ribnovo, who had a large esoteric library. The young hodja climbed peaks and vales to visit his mentor. He crossed and re-crossed the river of his dream. He was still looking for himself, but this time as a different kind of treasure hunter.

  And the thumb?

  ‘That’s why I get shivers. Prophet Hadar was charged with a mission: to appear on Earth momentarily when someone is at a crossroads. He has a jointless thumb. If you shake hands with Hazreti Hadar, you know it’s him.’

  Momentary manifestations, instant travel, telepathic communication, shape-shifting and dreams as gateways to expanded perception: these are trademarks of mystical Islam and of all the mystical traditions from the East. This organic blend of metaphor and dogma is typical of home-grown Balkan Islam. It can be traced back to the medieval Sufis who came from Central and western Asia to Spain and the Balkans. They were the first Neoplatonists and the first alchemists of post-antiquity.

  The hodja took a sip from a small bottle.

  ‘Nigella seed oil,’ he said. ‘Avicenna wrote about it. It is written in the Koran: there is a remedy for every ailment except death and that remedy is Nigella seed.’

  I went to a grocer’s in the city in the valley and bought myself a small bottle that came from Egypt. It is bitter, spicy and makes me dream of the black soil of the Nile.

  ‘How did you learn about us?’ Arif asked me when we walked the hills above the village.

  ‘By following the Mesta River,’ I said. ‘One thing leads to another. It has so many branches that you always end up somewhere new.’

  ‘And after Kribul, you’ll continue to follow the river,’ Arif smiled. ‘How fortunate you are. I’d like to do that too.’

  ‘You know,’ he went on, ‘there are passages like this all over the Rhodope. Passages, cliff niches and other strange things. But the rest is down to interpretation,’ he said.

  Unbelievable belief, hopeless hope, magical miracles, youthful youths. The conversation between humans and the mountain had never stopped.

  We visited two overgrown fields, sites of an early Christian graveyard that had fallen into disuse when people converted to Islam, and the old Muslim cemetery. Both were completely destroyed, first the Christian, then the Muslim one. The only remnants were oblong turbaned gravestones inscribed in Arabic and uprooted like teeth and the base of the medieval church. Wild fruit trees covered the hills and beyond them, anaemiac pines were planted in the wake of the old wood.

  ‘We are a people without a history,’ Arif said. ‘Because we have no storytellers in Kribul. Yet a lot has happened here. Sometimes I want to write it all down, but it’s not my forte. Still, we have the mountain with its mysteries. And we still have water.’

  ‘Over there,’ he pointed above the last houses, ‘is the mother.’

  ‘The mother?’

  ‘The mother spring. The main water spring.’

  On our way down, we passed a woman with matted hair who was digging small grooves in the forest and damming them with stones. It was a lot of work and she was absorbed in it. She had heavy bags full of stones that she moved around. Her hands were covered in cuts.

  ‘She was fine,’ said Arif. ‘Then she went to the city to study, and when she returned, she lost her mind. Something happened to her there.’

  Something that couldn’t be named. The sky turned pink. We passed Arif’s empty family house where he had grown up. Last year, his elderly father wandered into the hills, in the direction of The Passage. He had been hearing voices, music. There had been a search but his body was never found. I wondered what he had experienced out there, in his last hours.

  The people of the Rhodope have been seeing spectral merrymakers for ages. It is always the same. A party appears; music and laughter, a weird procession. Usually in the darkness of the early morning when people went to the fields. Liminal places and times; on the edge of the forest, outside the village. Then the party passes right through the stunned witness as if through air, vanishing altogether and the witness knows that this is another reality. People put this down to the many necropoli and ruined dwellings. The past surfaced and made contact with the present. Or something altogether out of time, a parallel dimension.

  ‘Some things we can’t explain, yet,’ Arif said. ‘The question is: can we accept that they are there, independently of us?’

  We stopped at the goatherds’ house to buy fresh cheese. He was a man with a tired face and she was large and cheerful, sat on a low tree stump like a dairy queen. They were poor and overworked. A kilo of fresh, organic goat cheese cost just a few euros. The work of the earth’s carers has been debased by the corporate mafia that eviscerates the mountain without putting anything back. In the morning, he took the 200 goats into the hills and in the evening they milked them and processed the milk, which was sold for small change. But she was a believer in the health benefits of goat milk, and proud that her children had never been sick.

  Every time I bought a litre of warm milk from them, or a half-kilo of curd, they gave me half a litre halal. They had too much milk, not enough appreciators and big hearts.

  Halal among Balkan Muslims is an offering, a gesture of generosity that brings back abundance. It comes from Koranic law and means permitted, as opposed to haram: forbidden, taboo, closed. Halal is yes, haram is no. In all my time among Our Folk, I didn’t hear haram once but often enjoyed halal.

  ‘What is she doing with those stones?’, I’d asked Arif when we’d passed the ‘mad’ woman.

  ‘Digging channels,’ he said. ‘To connect to the river. To bring the river to the village and cure it. She thinks that the whole village is sick.’

  The river was a long way down and the mother spring was a long way up. She was here all year round, building and demolishing her waterless channels.

  Before we greeted her, I’d seen her talking to someone who was visible only to her, perhaps a tree spirit and she seemed happy with her project, happier than those who arrived in Kribul with their everyday madness looking for a quick fix.

  We had greeted her and she had smiled. It was the smile of one who had crawled through The Passage but hadn’t returned because it was safer on the other side. The whole global village was sick, she was right about that. She knew how far the river was and that there were many more stones to be moved: but she would keep trying.

  It is the only thing left, her smile said: to keep trying.

  The Birches

  * * *

  EARTH

  Place and mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered. I cannot tell what this movement is except by recounting it.

  Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain

  Birch, Birches

  To reach The Birches you climbed from the floor of the valley up Stormy River.

  Tucked out of view, Lazhnitsa, Kornitsa and Breznitsa were three rhyming villages united by a river and a fate. Fate and a river are alike. They flow in one direction only and there’s no avoiding them.

  Breznitsa meant The Birches and it was the highest village of Stormy River. Above it were glacial lakes.

  During the 1972–1973 terror campaign against the Pomaks, two places rebelled en masse: Kornitsa and Breznitsa. It was the beginning of a bitter winter when the people of Kornitsa came out on the square to protest the changing of their names. To wait, in their own words, for someone to come and explain why they had to change their names and the names of their dead.

  For three months, the people of Kornitsa camped on the square with fires in the snow. This was protest and safety in one; to prevent militias bursting into their homes. Their resistance – they were unarmed, isolated from the rest of the country due to an information blackout and surrounded by soldiers – represents a civic achievement in the history of Communist Europe.

  The People’s Army took up position in the hills. Until midnight every day, the army blasted out Soviet songs through megaphones, to break people through noise. But they didn’t budge. At the end of the winter, the Birchers heard that their neighbours in Kornitsa were under attack and set out to help; not down the road blocked by tanks, but over the hills. They crossed streams and waded through snow. But when they came to the boundary river between grazing lands, the army opened fire on them. A schoolboy fell dead. After the peaceful protest was broken up by the army – with the help of a fire engine that sprinkled people with boiling water – the beatings and arrests began in the two rhyming villages.

  A woman with a child strapped to her back was shot in the front but lived. Three more men were killed point blank and hundreds of men and women were savagely battered with stakes and batons, and the border army dogs were set on them. Some died later or were left crippled. A pile of twenty or thirty men lay broken by the mosque after a beating, their blood running in the gutter. Others were sent to labour camps, including the two leaders of the Kornitsa revolt, where they endured ten years of forced labour. ‘It was hard,’ said one of them in modest understatement in a short documentary, ‘I gave the best years of my life to prison. But I don’t regret it. We did the right thing, we showed the world that we didn’t agree with their policies.’

  Their charge had been ‘conspiracy against the state’. These men and women, labourers of the land, had faced the guns with nothing but their bodies. In the aftermath of the pogrom, a curfew was introduced in the three rhyming villages. Women had their trousers and headscarves cut up with scissors and men wearing the small knitted skull cap were refused entry to shops. Silk kaftans, the padded striped overcoats worn by women on special occasions and reminiscent of Mongolia, were burned. The state even banned the sale of silk because it was a staple of Pomak identity. And instead of the customary black overcoat called feredjé and worn on top of other clothes by women when working (cotton) or feasting (velvet), the state issued synthentic worker’s mantles for them; Soviet-kolhoz style with buttons at the front. If you wanted to go outside covered, you had to wear this. But they were so ugly that women barricaded themselves in at home or wore traditional clothes and walked long distances between work and home because rural buses were under orders not to take ‘persons in traditional dress’. Schoolgirls had to swap colourful shalvars for tracksuit pants. Colour was banned in favour of greyness, in clothes, names and behaviour. This is why Pomak women in the region still wear the blue mantle reminiscent of Soviet-era factories. It’s a remnant of that time.

  When the border opened in 1990, forty per cent of the people of Kornitsa emigrated to Turkey: two thousand people. Even with the regime gone and people’s names and freedoms recovered, the hurt ran too deep. The exiles, who spoke no Turkish, were given social support by the Turkish government and settled in émigré colonies near the Aegean coast.

  Even if you didn’t know this, there was something bold about Stormy River’s sharp twists and crumbly crags. It was rebel country. The soil turned sandy. New peaks appeared that were not visible from the valley. The atmosphere changed, as if a veil lifted.

  I arrived in The Birches at dusk. Women in floral shalvars sat on benches placed against the walls of their houses, facing the street in the time-honoured way. They scanned my registration plate and became busy with speculation. Tourists were rare and you were assumed to be visiting relatives. It was the start of preserve-making season. Older women sat around bubbling cauldrons in their courtyards, bent forwards on low stools, elbows propped on knees and I was ten years old again, elated by arrival in my great-aunt’s village. They were making lyutenitsa, pesto from tomatoes and peppers.

  Younger women walked home from one of the sewing workshops. The Birches and the rest of the Mesta basin was a major tailoring hub in Europe. The clothes, stitched from rag to label by women and men here will next turn up in your nearest highstreet shop with a label that says ‘made in the EU’.