In the main square, where a small memorial listed the five killed during the winter of terror, preparations were afoot. It was day one of Kurban Bairam, the second-largest festival here after Ramadan. Bairam simply means festival and is also a male name. Stalls sold doughnuts and a DJ was setting up.

  The Birches was a village the size of a town. But out of its four thousand people, those not bent over sewing machines worked abroad as builders, fruit pickers, tree planters, poultry farm workers, drivers and warehouse managers, which is why it felt quiet. Across from the mosque was a church. The Muslims helped build it when the Christians arrived one hundred years ago and the Christians helped rebuild the mosque after it was torched in the Balkan Wars around the same time.

  The evening swallows favoured the minaret. They murmured in the pink sky, making shapes. The air was cooler than in the valley.

  Metko Fettahov was waiting for me at the outdoor village café. He rose slowly and we shook hands. It was warm and his hand was damp, or perhaps that was my hand.

  ‘Welcome,’ he said. ‘Can I offer you an ice cream? I’m happy you’re here. I hope you’re not disappointed. You’ve come a long way.’

  Metko Fettahov was the person behind the photographic archive which had made me come to The Birches. He was a tall, stooped man with gentle blue eyes. He turned his head slowly and looked at you with knowingness. He was the chronicler-scribe of The Birches and had compiled a visual and written history of his community. On my veranda in the Empty Village, I’d scrolled through a hundred years of life in The Birches. Men with generous faces and women with impish eyes smiling behind white veils that didn’t quite cover their mouths, children and animals everywhere in the mud, weddings, stilted public events and visits from officials where people’s eyes were full of all that was happening to them but could not be articulated, courting couples, secret Kurban Bairam outings on the glacial lakes in the opulent Pomak dress that was forbidden in the lower world of state control, seasonal carnival village processions with men dressed as characters, one of them a ‘baba’, another on stilts and a band with skin drums and trumpets. And youths in too-tight 1980s trousers and polo necks with transistor radios and the bad haircuts we all had then. At twenty, Metko had already had a knowing look that set him apart.

  Who were these people, so familiar yet unknown? Their faces talked to me. I had the odd feeling of having been among them. Metko and his wife Asiné were captured over thirty years. Clean-faced and shy, courting, in hiking leggings and jackets at the glacial lakes, then married, then with two skinny sons, then Asiné with her moody smile going about her chores, gathering herbs, in a stripy silk kaftan with ornamental belt buckles, a striped apron and headdress like a mountain queen, Asiné carrying a festive loaf of bread, then with long flowing hair and a distant look in Istanbul, Asiné in the last stages of illness, smiling without eyebrows, aged forty-six.

  Metko was a builder by profession and an intellectual by vocation. He shuffled around casually in rubber slippers and old trousers, collecting and telling stories with a measured passion. Like a Diogenes of his community, he went about with a metaphorical lantern, looking for a human being.

  ‘We are not what we are,’ he was fond of saying about the Pomaks. And by extension, everybody else.

  It sounded cryptic but later, I grasped its meaning.

  ‘Where is she from?’ someone called out with a shy chuckle from one of the wooden tables where men sat hunched, their faces full of hardship. The older ones especially. One man had no arm. Another had no eye. There was a quiet old man who had been in a labour camp and was keen to tell me ‘a book’s worth of stories’, but I didn’t make time for him and the following summer he died.

  ‘From Scotland,’ Metko shouted back, though we stood a few steps away. The men nodded, unconvinced, trying not to stare.

  ‘People shout here,’ Metko said. ‘Don’t mind them. And they have verbal diarrhoea. You ask them a question and two hours later you’re still here. It’s because they carry a hundred years’ worth of stuff.’

  Metko had worked in Scotland where he’d broken his arm in a construction accident and had come home before the end of his contract. He was determined not to go abroad again, picking their berries and building their houses, when we have everything here, he said. Now he was fitting out a neighbour’s new house – marble, tiles, shiny surfaces. Shine was favoured as a mark of success.

  ‘It’s ironic,’ he said. ‘While my wife rahmetliykata was alive, I was always away trying to earn a crust. And now I have no need to go anywhere but she is gone.’

  Rahmetlia is ‘the late one, mercy upon his soul’, from the Arabic rahmet for mercy.

  ‘Anyway,’ he rose to leave, ‘you’ll want to get settled in the hotel. I’m sorry that I can’t invite you round. I’m a widower, my house is not fit for guests. But please know that our hospitality is still alive.’

  And he shuffled with his invisible lantern across the still-empty square to his house full of ashtrays.

  At the café where men gathered, shaking hands with ‘Happy Bairam’, I saw a familiar face. Two faces: the father and son were copies of each other. I’d briefly visited The Birches before and had coffee here.

  ‘Welcome back,’ the son shook my hand.

  ‘Excellent, you’re back!’ the father whispered with damaged vocal chords. ‘Let me get you a coffee.’

  I’d sat down that first time, noticing there were only men, and got talking to a younger guy. Piled up behind him were bags of mushrooms just arrived from the forest. I’d asked what he did.

  ‘Mushrooms,’ an emphysema voice whispered. ‘Mushrooms and women.’

  His father had materialised and was answering on his behalf, although he was clearly talking about himself. I bought some ceps. I’m off for mushroom today, the locals said, or I’m off for blueberry, singular. The only difference from Old Woods was that many more locals foraged here. There was no Roma ’hood to rely on. The son sold them to an Italian dealer in the city and everyone made a cut.

  ‘If not quite a killing,’ the father whispered. He’d been operated on for laryngeal cancer and lost his ability to outshout others. Father and son had specked eyes that were on the lookout for all sorts of opportunities. Dealership ran in the family.

  People poured into the square from the steep streets.

  ‘Happy Bairam, happy Bairam,’ he shook hands with men and women.

  ‘I can’t stand these family festivals,’ he muttered to me. Children played hide and seek among the adults. Street lights were lit.

  I’d heard that there were a dozen ruins above The Birches. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but beware the sheepdogs. Shepherds are forced to take their flocks higher. Climate change. And the sheepdogs attack so don’t hike alone.’

  Where were the birches that the village was named after? I’d expected lots of birches.

  ‘There was once an old birch in the heart of the village,’ he whispered. ‘Nobody remembers when it was cut down.’

  Without memory, there is no story to tell. Without story, there is no memory.

  ‘Do you like our women’s dress?’ another man asked shyly. He had battered hands. ‘Back in the day, gold coins were sewn into them.’

  So they could ride away quickly in case of attack with their fortune on their bodies and inside their horses’ saddles. Some of the women arriving in the square wore the opulent shalvars and kaftans with bright shawls around their necks, as if they’d just stepped off a Silk Road caravan. The DJ put the first track on. The melody coiled like opium smoke with a disco beat to ground it. It invited you to step into the East and enjoy yourself.

  The man talking to me was a builder who picked Scottish strawberries in summer. Did I think Scotland would break away from England? He could understand if they did. They had whisky, hills, people, water. ‘A bit like here,’ I said.

  ‘Ach, we’re poor,’ he said. ‘But we have the best nature.’

  He told me to look out for a drinking fountain en route to the hotel.

  ‘I built it,’ he smiled and I glimpsed the confidence of belonging that had been chipped by harsh living in foreign lands. ‘For sevap.’

  Sevap: merit in the Muslim moral codex. It was the only drinking fountain between the village and the guesthouse. The Birches was the end of the road but the road didn’t end with The Birches. It climbed upstream past fields, glades and a waterfall, to where locals had second houses. To build a second house was a mark of success.

  The Birches Hotel was one such house, but built with EU funds. It overlooked a clearing inside a pine forest. Parked cars and the three-storey guesthouse was lit up like a wedding cake with pop-folk music blasting from speakers. The outside patio was full of demure dining families that didn’t match with the music and its sexually explicit lyrics. Typically three generations marked Bairam together.

  ‘Ah, we thought the bears got you!’ A guy balanced plates with fragrant lamb, potatoes and salads on his forearms. That was the co-owner of the hotel. They were brother and sister. She was an elegant woman in jeans, a school teacher who ran the reception while her husband, a social worker, ran the kitchen. Their father Shefket drew up crafty business schemes for his family and looked after the grounds.

  ‘And special guests,’ said Shefket and invited me to his table where he was eating a potato salad. He was from an old clan who’d owned a lot of land.

  ‘Tomorrow, I’ll bring you my superfood,’ Shefket lit up at my food questions. ‘Since you like yogurt.’

  He often slept in a back room with jars of creamy sheep’s yogurt that became my staple diet. Each morning, I’d eat a pot of plain yogurt on the patio bathed by the sunrise while Shefket watered his marigold bed.

  When the music beats ceased the cars disappeared, including Shefket’s communist-era relic, and the restaurant was closed by the departing family. I stood on my balcony.

  This was my first night in Pirin Mountain. I didn’t really know where I was. There was no mobile signal and there was just one other occupied room, a city couple who seemed to have eloped. Pines closed in on all sides like a living wall and although the hotel was at the top of the road, it was also at the bottom of something. The boundary between the hotel grounds and the forest was a dragon-snake carved from dwarf mountain pine.

  The moon hung big and buttery above the sharp outline of the pines. The day’s heat had vanished and the air was cold on the skin. The forest silence was like a well with nothing in it, except the sound – clear and perfect, rising to touch your face – of spring water.

  Shepherd’s superfood

  Sheep’s milk, raw.

  Simmer until it thickens, stir constantly. Drink warm or cold. It is dense with creamy lumps. It tastes of woods, wild grasses and wool, of seasons and sunrises unfolding out of sight, of something that you can’t name anymore.

  If you drink it in the morning, you don’t get hungry all day, that’s how nutritious it is, said Shefket. Pure protein and fat. Your consumption drops, but you are fully nourished. This is how shepherds kept their strength up all day in the milking season. Can you taste the thirty-six herbs that the sheep graze on? Some of them unique to Pirin. And Pirin is, how can I say it? Infinite. Not at all like a human life.

  By Fatmé’s Fountain

  ‘A human life is so short,’ Shefket said. ‘We forget what’s important until it’s gone.’

  It was my second day. The grounds had such a pure atmosphere that I lost all desire to go anywhere, even down to the village where Metko expected me. I sipped Mursala tea by a marble fountain in the wood. Its cold water couldn’t be turned off. It came through four spouts with the full force of the spring. I heard the water all night from my room, a conversation without words. The name Fatmé was inscribed inside a heart: this was a memorial fountain and after watering his marigolds, Shefket joined me with a jar of his superfood.

  ‘Do you have sheep’s yogurt in Scotland?’ he enquired.

  It’s actually impossible to find sheep’s milk in Scotland. Shefket was puzzled.

  ‘But Scotland is the land of sheep! Isn’t it wasteful to rear them just for meat?’

  At some point not long ago, the Western world stopped drinking ewe and goat milk and turned to industrially produced cow’s milk, to whose sugary lactose many are intolerant. Recipes with sheep’s milk feature in A Modern Herbal and ten medicinal plants start with the word ‘shepherd’s’, including the sea plantago so beloved of sheep, that in Wales they called it sheep’s herb. Is there more than one reason for the decline of other animal milks in favour of cow, or is it as simple as this: industrial-scale farming? These were the things I pondered by Fatmé’s fountain.

  The next morning, Shefket brought me ‘smoky milk’. It was freshly fermented ewe’s milk cooked over slow heat, so the taste was slightly burned and bracing. It had lactobacilli that replenished your gut flora. Shefket had developed health problems after his wife’s death. Fatmé had been the first university-educated woman of her generation in The Birches. After her death, he threw himself into building her fountain, the mosaic-inlaid pond and the picnic area. He’d kept sheep in the pen by the hotel, once a communist cooperative, but it was hard work and by the time you paid a shepherd to take them out to pasture and back each day, then milk them and process the milk, you might as well buy the milk from one of the small-scale farmers in the village. The resident sheepdog, Lucky, lived alone in the sheep pen. Until a few weeks ago, Lucky was chained outside. But a bear came to the compound and he lashed out. He got off with minor wounds but now Lucky was kept inside.

  We walked to the mosaic-inlaid pond beyond the fountain. Shefket had built this too. The pond had its own microclimate. Cold, with a crystalline note. Whenever I lay by the pond with the dark pines above, I drifted and the forest whispered.

  ‘Exactly as I intended it,’ he beamed.

  Out of the woods appeared a mare with a colt. Their eyes, their whole bodies, shone with a wild intelligence. But they were not wild.

  ‘Gone are the days of wild horses,’ said Shefket. ‘And this is not the original forest.’

  The beeches were thin and the pines were not native; the forest floor was pretty dead. Shefket had seen the ancient forest with beech this big – he opened his arms – giants, centuries old. They were all cut down by the communists, sold to the Soviet Union and hurriedly replaced with conifers.

  ‘If you want to see what Pirin was like, go to Eagle Reserve.’

  Where belladonna grows.

  ‘The only true resident of the original forest was the Netikin,’ said Shefket.

  The word struck me at once.

  ‘The mythical giant of Pirin,’ said Shefket. ‘The Netikin travels across the mountain fast. He communicates with all living things.’

  ‘Was the Netikin benevolent?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s wild, like the mountain. But he is a person, with a body.’

  Just not a human person.

  Pirin was a masculine massif; from its name to its ascending energy. Although as soon as you called it ‘the mountain’ it became feminine, because a mountain and a forest are feminine in Slavic languages. So are rivers and valleys.

  And the horses?

  ‘These are domesticated, but there is a guy with semi-wild horses. They go to The Meadow and that’s where he sleeps.’

  In autumn, he brought them down and Shefket let him sleep inside the disused sheep pen, on a sheepskin, with the horses next to him.

  ‘This spring we treated two of his foals in the pen. Their necks bitten by wolves. But the horseman’s not easy to catch.’

  The Meadow was a highland area, gateway to a trail that took in several glacial cirques. It was a steep three hour climb from here to The Meadow. Horseman walked it in an hour, Shefket said, and should be making a living with his skills.

  ‘He can catch a wild horse with a rope. He talks to them. But in this country the hard-working honey bee gets nothing and the drone gobbles the honey.’

  I noticed that people here didn’t talk about conquering peaks.

  ‘We have a different mentality from Westerners,’ Shefket agreed. ‘But living here, you just know that you can’t conquer the mountain. It’s bigger than you. And why conquer it? You want to be in harmony with it.’

  Here, it had been about eking out a living from the mountain: the sandy soil; the edible forest; the seasonal harvests; the ebb and flow of Stormy River.

  How do you cope with a failed crop? You replant for next year and go foraging because the forest doesn’t fail.

  There was an expression, bayr budala, from hill and fool, to describe a person seized by a senseless need to climb a peak.

  ‘Instead of relaxing by a fountain like this,’ said Shefket.

  In the last generation, heavy toil had given way to a sedentary existence and very few Birchers hiked. They drove their 4x4s and picnicked by the nearest water source; a reaction against the backbreaking toil of their parents. The only people who walked the forests were mushroomers and the last of the shepherds.

  ‘Take a walk,’ he said, ‘to feel the spirit of the forest. Take Lucky with you.’

  If I got lost, the river would bring me back.

  The river was lively. I’d spend the following winter in the valley and after torrential rains, I saw why it was called Stormy; it rose vertically like a dragon, formed new waterfalls and cut off the three rhyming villages from the valley.

  Shefket resumed his groundskeeping. He’d been a physical education teacher and I was surprised to hear from a former student how once, a boy masturbated in class and Shefket lined all the boys up and beat the palms of their hands with a willow branch in a rage. But like plants, people have different faces through the seasons of their lives.

  Sleep was so nourishing, I woke at sunrise. Mornings were cool. I ventured up the dug-out forest road. The odd mushroomer on a motorbike purred past and nodded good morning. The blue-flowered chicory brightened as I climbed. I stopped at a drinking spout dedicated to a man with a short life.