A retired shepherd from The Birches slept in a shelter here, because it felt good to sleep outside with a blanket and he repaired the shelter for something to do. His greetings were like the morning itself. He’d come down the road, barefoot and skinny, open his arms and call out:

  ‘This is Piriiin! Good morning my friends!’

  There was just me, but he was greeting all living things. I’d sit with him by the spout and have a dram from his homemade brew.

  ‘Have you heard of the giant of The Birches?’ he said one morning.

  ‘The Netikin?’

  ‘I’m his nephew,’ he went on and I realised who he meant.

  I’d seen photos of this man in Metko’s archive, from the Kadiev clan. He had been a log transporter, eight-foot tall. He’d pick up a log and chuck it onto the horse saddle. When crossing flooded rivers with his mule, he’d pick it up like a goat and carry it across. The valley remembered him: for his size and for his kindness.

  ‘Places round here are named after him and our clan,’ said the retired shepherd. ‘Kadiev Peak, Kadiev Meadows.’

  Courted by the Nazis in their racist projects when they camped here en route to Greece, the giant Kadiev fled to the giant forest where no one could follow him. His father had been tortured to death before his boyish eyes by armed bands in 1912; Kadiev wanted no part in any kind of politics. There is a photo of him with his arms around two dwarf-like German officers in The Birches, all smiles. Later, he did time in a labour camp for being a ‘collaborator’. You could not escape history here, even when you were an eight-foot giant in a remote forest.

  After the war came forced nationalisation. The Birchers lost their thousands of heads of grazing animals and were pauperised overnight. It was a double blight: forced collectivisation and crippling reparation duties to Greece for the role Bulgaria played as a Nazi ally. The prime herds of the valley were packed onto cargo trains and sent south; the border is only a few kilometres away and although it was closed to civilians during the Cold War, other transactions went on. Sheep and goats travelled on a free deathticket on the railway line to Drama. This railway had carried the tobacco fortunes of the Balkans south and then the Jews of Macedonia north. Families marked for extermination were packed into tobacco warehouses en route. People, plants and animals were swapped, but the destination remained the same: the death camp, the processing plant. The extraction-extinction project of the twentieth century.

  The people of the valley paid a high price. Cultivation of private fields was banned, while bread was rationed in the shop. The giant Kadiev gave his extra rations to his family and went grazing in the forest.

  There was something going on in Pirin with giants. Giant trees, giant spirits, giant people, giant suffering and giant endurance.

  The retired shepherd’s identity had been changed four times. In his first passport from the 1950s he was ‘Macedonian’. The Pirin region is part of the vast geographical region of Macedonia and the hopscotch politics between Bulgaria and Yugoslavia resulted in people periodically being told that they are not what they are.

  In his next passport in the 1960s, he was ‘Bulgarian Mohammedan’, although the Pomaks never called themselves Mohammedans.

  In the third from the 1970s he had a ‘Christian’ name chosen by the state, though there was nothing Christian about the name other than not being Arabic.

  And in the fourth, he had his birth name again: Ismail.

  ‘I am a Pomak,’ he summarised. ‘Hahahaha!’ he laughed, a hard-earned laugh.

  ‘But do you know who I really am?’ he said. ‘I’m one who was born here and will die here. In Pirin. That’s who I am.’

  I took off my sandals and felt the sandy earth on my soles, and walked back to the hotel. He was happy to see me and happy to say goodbye.

  A hermit is in relationship with the true self. Perhaps that is why I was so happy in the valley and happy by my Scottish river. I didn’t have to be anyone except the one who was born and who would die here. Or there.

  ‘Are monks and hippies and poets relevant? No, we are deliberately irrelevant,’ said the philosopher and Trappist monk Thomas Merton at a gathering in Calcutta in the 1960s. ‘We live with an ingrained irrelevance which is proper to every human being. The marginal man accepts the basic irrelevance of the human condition, an irrelevance which is manifested above all by the fact of death.’

  My walk with Lucky was delayed by lunch with a picnicking family from The Birches who stoked the fire by Fatmé’s fountain to heat a tray of yesterday’s lamb stuffed with rice and handed me a spoon before they even asked my name. The lamb was one of their own, slaughtered for Kurban Bairam in the pagan custom of kurban: sacrifice.

  ‘Eat up, don’t be polite, I can see you’re hungry,’ the matriarch urged me. ‘Let it be halal to you.’ She was a small woman of sixty, a bride artist.

  ‘What is a bride artist?’

  ‘We get the bride ready, luv,’ she said. ‘The bride is called gelina. We decorate her face. Her face is like a painting. Everything means something. And it’s got to be summetrical.’

  ‘Symmetrical, mum!’ her daughter laughed. She was better educated.

  The mother wore a floral headscarf, shalvars, a chain-knitted sleeveless cardigan and the glittery round apron that was not for cooking but for beauty. The daughter wore jeans and nothing on her head. The bride artist’s generation had missed out on education.

  There had been a dreaded dormitory in the city of the valley for schoolgirls from out of town, dubbed by locals ‘Communist Party Quarters’ because its main purpose was indoctrination. Few Pomak families were prepared to send their girls there. In the chaotic 1910s, armed bands and assorted revolutionaries roamed the valley; murdering men and raping women in Pomak communities. Forty, fifty years later these communities were scared to let their girls out of their sight. The memory of kidnappings by bearded men was fresh.

  The forced changing of the names during Communism confirmed that the outside world was a hostile place and the siege mentality became more entrenched. The state decreed that headscarves be taken off, and the long braids that were a staple of Pomak beauty had to go. Caught between tradition and assimilation, clan loyalty and a desire to advance, the brighter girls coped by having nervous breakdowns. Either immediately, or decades later when their children left home.

  Dessert was a watermelon chilled in Fatmé’s fountain.

  ‘Anyway, luv,’ said the bride artist. ‘What about you. What brings you here?’

  ‘I’d like to see a Ribnovo wedding,’ I said.

  ‘Come in winter. The wedding season. Or you can come to one of our performances and see how we do the whole shebang. If the boss invites you.’

  The boss was a folk singer called Kadrié. It turned out that the bride artist plied her trade not at real weddings, but at dramatised folk concerts re-enacting for an audience what had once been real. Pomak weddings had been banned too.

  Once held in the Pomak world all over the southern Balkans, the elaborate gelina wedding has been wiped out. There was just one bastion left: Ribnovo across the valley. The people of Ribnovo had revived the tradition in the 1990s when they restored their names and rights. Gelina meant decorated bride and it had developed into an elaborate rite of passage over the centuries. The wedding lasted three days, though it used to last a week. Once made up in layers of silk, wool, velvet, glitter and a painted face mask behind which all emotion was hidden, the bride went into a kind of mourning and fasting meditation. She didn’t eat, drink or speak for two days – the idea being that she was going through a passage. The hapless bridegroom just got drunk with his mates. And anyway, the husband was likely to spend most of their married life working abroad. She would need to be man and woman in one. Ribnovo was one of those places where you saw women of all ages chopping wood with axes.

  The trail of this rite is lost. Its survival across the mists of time is a mystery, a triumph of creative folk genius. Some trace it back to the Graeco-Thracian-Egyptians and even the Mycenaeans. Others see the hand of syncretic Sufism with all the aesthetic and ritual currents it hoovered up between Persia and the Balkans. When you see the mask that the team of bride artists create out of a woman’s head, it is straight out of a shaman’s rite or some other ancient ritual, half-performance, half-incantation, with the high crown of flowers a totem of fertility. Persephone goes down into the underworld of sexual maturity.

  For three days, the bride holds a large mirror and gazes at herself and her village through her mask. She literally holds up a mirror to her community. And like Orpheus, she must not look back.

  When I returned in winter, the pandemic restrictions were still in force and for the first time in twenty-five years, the Ribnovo weddings were cancelled. It produced an effect akin to collective mourning. The weddings were a highlight of the year. Demeter needs to ritually mourn for her Persephone once a year.

  Otherwise, you don’t know when to start mourning. Or when to stop.

  I said goodbye to the bride artist and unchained an excited Lucky. He pulled me up on his rope, up the forest road so dug-out by spring torrents that you sank into its grooves knee-deep and scrambled out with effort, and we climbed into the forest that wasn’t the original one.

  Still, within ten minutes we were in another world. I stopped hearing the river below and the glade engulfed me with its forking paths that you had to know to trust, its wild flowers and limpid clearings that looked set up for a gathering of nymphs. After an hour in that dense silence of the forest that is so full of sound, which makes space for you and closes behind you at the same time, that fills you with enchantment and primordial fear, I felt closer to Lucky than to many people in my life. Lucky was constantly checking that I was okay and I broke Shefket’s instructions and let him off the rope tied to a chain that rubbed through his neck – they kept him as a guard dog, not a pet.

  Crouching to pick wild mint, I heard crackling in the woods. Lucky growled. I froze, ready to bolt, sure it was a bear. The dogs in my life will accompany me to the grave, an invisible pack that walks with me – not only the two dogs I have lived with, but those like Lucky, whom I met for an afternoon in places where I didn’t know my way. They showed the way, made me belong and asked for nothing in return.

  The forest proper only just began here. The intense aliveness of the mountain could be drunk like a potion. Moving through a wooded mountain where you can only see as far as the path ahead of you is very different from a bare landscape where all is knowable to the eye. Any moving creature or weather can be spotted across the land. The path ahead, and back, is laid out like a carpet.

  In the forest, different forces operate. An arboreal hum surrounds you, eyes everywhere, shapes that look like other shapes, movements that might be sunshine dancing on moss or might not be. Then suddenly a deer appears and looks at you like the eye of God.

  We scrambled down a churned-up path and made it to the river where a pair of shiny horses grazed, different ones, and back to Fatmé’s fountain. I put my face under the spout. The sun had moved, the hotel grounds were in shade again and though the embers of the picnic fire were warm, the feeling of being inside a well had returned. The first two horses had vanished.

  The following year, Lucky would be kidnapped by unknown villains and sold for meat. This happened to unlucky dogs and horses left unsupervised. It was cruelty born of misery.

  The moon looked full of churned butter. I felt the sap rise in the pines as the blood rises to the skin. At full lunations, all that is here is doubly here. In the moon’s surface was a faint topographic contour that reminded me of an old Chinese poem: ‘The rabbit in the moon pounds the medicine in vain’. Our distant ancestors perceived an alchemical ‘moon hare’ with a pestle and mortar in that contour, pounding some elixir of eternity, pounding, just out of human reach.

  Morning tonic

  St John’s wort

  Fig leaf, dried or fresh

  Walnut, whole, cracked

  Honey

  Infuse and sip first thing in the morning. St John’s wort is to lift your night blues. Fig leaf is to regulate blood sugar. Walnut for magnesium, to relax. And honey is for sweetness, the bride-artist had told me, even if you have diabetes, because diabetes is not the worst. The worst is when you have a heavy heart.

  There really was something of the ‘hare in the moon’ about this high-pitched place so like a tonic that Shefket and his family wanted to share it with people, but from which they couldn’t drink themselves. They were busy, worried, overworked.

  In Chinese lore, the moon goddess had an alchemical rabbit companion who ground medicinal herbs, presumably to extract a drop of immortality. That’s why another name for the moon was Golden Hare. Gold of every kind endures; literal gold and metaphorical gold. Treasure hunters want the gold of lucre, alchemists want the gold of truth. Both require digging.

  The 10,000 things spawn from the one and return to the one, says the Dao. Like the morning tonic in my cup with its golden hue. Elixir has 10,000 names, 10,000 roads lead to it. To the zing of fig leaf, the brain shape of walnut, the completeness of honey, the way St John’s wort is yellow but stains red, the shine of a horse’s back in the pines.

  Us and the Ancient Darkness

  It was late morning and I sat in Metko’s courtyard in The Birches. Metko Fettahov, the local chronicler. We watched a cauldron bubble on an open fire. Inside it were sealed jars stuffed with lamb from the neighbour’s kurban. The meat from the lamb was divided into three: one part for friends; one part for the needy; and one part for oneself. In winter, Metko put a jar of pre-cooked meat in a tray and baked it with vegetables. The sterilisation took hours and the smoke made our eyes stream.

  Metko had a large following and was often contacted by researchers, but he was a lone chronicler. Storytelling and story-collecting was cathartic here, where people carried a hundred years of the untold. They had nowhere to put it except bury it under the weeping willow, the birch, the pear, the walnut. If they didn’t cut the tree down in a fit of madness and then forgot, as with the original birch of The Birches. In folk stories when your voice is denied, you dig a hole and shout your truth into it. It becomes buried treasure. Metko held all of that on behalf of his people.

  One of Metko’s fingers was missing.

  ‘A horse bit it off,’ he said. ‘My late wife and I worked on a horse farm near the capital one year. Lots of Our Folk did this in the communist days and later. To make a buck.’

  The people of Mesta were renowned for their skill with animals and crops. I could see Metko shovelling manure and quoting Kafka to the horses: man’s idea of freedom is a way of deceiving himself.

  Metko was a universal kind of person. He could do any work and remain himself, but he’d polished this golden quality with the grit of adversity. In the last year of high school, his life hit a turning point. His school had a bully for a director and a bully for a headteacher. The state appointed fanatics in the Pomak villages, like imperial missionaries sent among the natives.

  ‘Psychos unfit to work with young people,’ he said. ‘The idea was to keep you in the system and brainwash you against yourself.’

  The headteacher had it in for him because he challenged her. He underperformed as an act of revolt, but loved literature and consumed the school library. When he borrowed a book that might be seen as suspicious, he’d wrap it in newspaper and write on it: ‘Geography’.

  We all wrapped our books in paper. Because books were precious.

  ‘There were no books in our house. I educated myself in the library,’ Metko said.

  ‘Books were our only entertainment,’ I said.

  ‘And our only travel,’ Metko said.

  Then came the turning point, when the results were announced. When Metko submitted his crowning essay on the pastoral roots of national literature, he knew it was good. ‘A superior piece of writing is before you,’ the teacher confirmed to the class. ‘It’s worthy of the top grade and shows a writer with a bright future.’ She then read it to the class. Metko sat there beaming, picturing his university life in the capital. ‘But,’ the teacher countered at the end, ‘there is a catch. The alleged author is citizen Fettahov, a well-known reprobate with no respect for authority. Do you think he could produce work of this calibre? I think not. We must conclude that Fettahov has copied it from another.’ For ‘plagiarism and uncitizenly behaviour’, she gave his essay a low grade and blocked his chance of being a candidate for university. Metko’s world collapsed.

  ‘If you wanted to excel, it wasn’t enough to have talent. You had to dance to their tune, swap your identity for a career,’ he said.

  Like the famous folk singer whose interpretation of a Rhodopean song was sent into space on the ‘Voyager disc’ in 1977. She had been recruited from her village, given a new identity so that nobody knew she was from a Muslim background and propelled into stardom under the state’s tutelage.

  ‘She became a manufactured product. The only authentic thing about her is her voice,’ Metko said. A pact with the devil, yet the alternative was painful in a different way, and Metko lived it out.

  One of the nation’s best-loved folk songs was written by a Pomak community in the Rhodope. ‘Rufinka Lay Dying’ (Rufinka bolna legnala) was dedicated to a real girl called Roufié:

  Rufinka lay dying

  High in the mountain

  No one was there

  But her old mother

  She gave her a sip of water

  Rufinka, girl of mine

  Do you love your dowry?

  Do you cherish it?

  I don’t love it, mother, I don’t cherish it

  I am hurt and I am sad

  That all things come up from the earth

  But I am going down it.

  ‘It’s about the transience of human life,’ Metko said. ‘Like in many of our songs and literature. It’s the pastoralist view.’