Greek soldiers got into a skirmish with the marauders and saved the Birchers from further violence.

  ‘And the stragglers in the refugee group saw a Greek officer on a horse, holding a baby.’

  The fate of that child is unknown. The bey’s daughter never saw Petar-Yusuf again.

  ‘I remember her as an old woman in my childhood,’ Metko said. ‘She remarried but always said: Petar was the best, there was never one like him.’

  Birchers had good memories of the Greeks from those years. During the First World War, Greece had claims over the valley because of its Greek minority and the Greek Army arrived in The Birches under orders to torch it. But a man spoke Greek and managed to charm the command into not only sparing the village, but helping a mission to a Christian village upstream that had stolen the Birchers’ kurban cauldrons. Every village had its own set of these ceremonial cauldrons and they were highy prized.

  ‘The cauldrons at least were saved.’

  One way or another, Our Folk felt the earth shift beneath their feet for the whole of the twentieth century. That they managed to salvage anything is remarkable. The mountain helped them.

  ‘Here was the old hodja’s house,’ Metko pointed out a large house with a garden. ‘When the bandits returned to terrorise people again, this is where the forced conversions took place. They gang-raped women including the hodja’s wife. This broke the hodja and he converted.’

  The original houses were made by builders from The Masons across the Valley. Only five survived, which is why The Birches was not an architectural reserve. There was no one to protect it the way that Rifat Bey had protected The Masons.

  Rifat Bey was the last Ottoman-era governor of the valley. A polyglot dervish politician who played nine instruments, remained celibate and lived with his mother and adopted son, and made his own herbal balms, he was the complex product of a cosmopolitan empire in its tyrannical twilight. After fighting in the Russian–Turkish war of 1877–1878 and spending seven years as a Russian prisoner of war, he earned his sabre back by applying a herbal balm against foot-and-mouth disease to the Russian imperial horses. Rifat Bey ensured the peaceful handover of the valley from Ottoman to Bulgarian rule. When he died at almost a hundred, the entire region sent him off – Christians, Muslims and Jews from the community of refugees from Russian pogroms, and who’d been welcomed to the valley by Rifat. Two of his herbal recipes survive to this day.

  ‘I was telling you about the saddle with the fortune inside it,’ said Metko. ‘When the komiti raided The Birches, the woman with the saddle avoided rape, but they took her saddle. And she died of a broken heart.’

  She was the great-grandmother of Metko’s late wife and of the petrol station owner. He in turn married a woman from a wealthy family. Every family has a theme. Rags and riches was a theme in the family with the saddle.

  ‘And in our family, it’s tough women,’ Metko said. The name Fettahov meant ‘big’.

  ‘Women have power here.’ Metko smiled. ‘Male power is a veneer. The Birches is a matriarchy. I don’t quite know why.’

  We went past the house Metko was decorating. It was in place of the old school, built during the reign of the komiti with desecrated Muslim tombstones. Today those tombstones were salvaged in the mosque courtyard. We climbed the steep streets.

  ‘My grandfather’s house.’

  Across from it was a wild mound. A pagan temple had stood there, then a chapel and though the chapel fell into ruin, an old pear tree marked the holy site.

  ‘A holy pear. My grandfather worshipped that tree. Literally. One day in the 1930s, he heard a rumour. A new church was to be built for the refugees. The pear was to be cut down.’

  The new refugees had come upstream from Greece following the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 and its ‘exchange of populations’. Over the same Drama Mountains familiar to the Birchers from their own exodus ten years before. The refugees settled among the locals with whom they shared a language, if not a religion. The Birchers made space for them. They knew what it was like to run for your life.

  ‘My grandfather got up one night, climbed the mound and cut the tree in a rage.’

  Full of sorrow, he then planted a cutting from it in his own garden. But the sapling didn’t thrive and the church was never built after all. It had just been a rumour.

  We swung by a football match in the stadium at the end of the village. The Birches were playing Kornitsa and the running joke was that the first had quantity but the second had quality. That’s because Kornitsa lost half of its people in the exodus thirty years ago.

  ‘The kids you see here,’ Metko pointed at the well-groomed teenagers, ‘were all born in Turkey. But they speak Bulgarian.’

  They came to their mountain villages every summer for Kurban Bairam. The old wounds were not discussed. For the new generation, it was all about opportunity and choice.

  But I noticed the freakish incidence of early death in the three rhyming villages. Metko’s friend, an Arabic linguist, had died at just fifty-two of cancer. Every third person I met had lost a parent when they were small, a spouse when they were still young, or an adult child.

  ‘What is it with The Grim Reaper here?’ I asked Metko.

  ‘I’ve wondered the same,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s Chernobyl. It’s the generation who were teenagers. Maybe it’s the Transition that’s killing us. Or some ancient darkness.’

  We walked away from the football match of the exiles. Chernobyl was blamed by many for the inexplicable rate of cancers among people of mine and Metko’s generations. The radioactivity levels here following the blast were 1,000 times the norm, but it was hushed up by the authorities and people found out while eating nuclear salads. Auto-immune diseases shot up among children and teenagers in the late 1980s, and I was one of them.

  We climbed above the last houses, wading through a spiky plant that scratched my shins. Metko found the remains of a concrete bunker from the 1970s. It had been fitted with machine guns trained on The Birches. The army carried out drills here in the 1980s, complete with bomber planes as a form of routine terror against the insurgent Pomaks.

  We climbed the former tobacco fields, sweat dripping into our eyes and ate blackberries sweet with sunshine.

  ‘My happiest times were up here with Asiné and the boys, picking berries all day. And as a child, my mother would put us on muleback and we’d trek to Snake Creek to pick cornelian cherries.’

  Snake Creek was a remote gully. The Birchers had no fear of the wild. But back then, it hadn’t been wild. There were herds, people, horses, plantations.

  My shins were bleeding.

  ‘Spiny restharrow,’ Metko said. ‘We collected it as kids to sell to the cooperative. One kilo gave you ten pennies.’

  The odd enthusiast still dug up restharrow roots in winter, just like Zaim, the spahi’s elderly mother, in that song. It was sticky with oil, with small pink flowers. You got 50 cents for a kilo.

  ‘We gathered walnuts too, by the tonne. Each autumn, we brought them to an area the size of a stadium and piled them up in pyramids. They were then loaded on trucks.’

  Children had done this unpaid, sometimes during class hours. Just like the digging up of antiques. Slave labour for the ring of power.

  After the fall of the regime, the walnut economy collapsed and the walnut trees were cut down and used for fire wood. It was revenge of the slaves.

  A brook gurgled and we crossed a small bridge with a weeping willow.

  ‘We had this stubborn mule. It stopped on this bridge just to annoy us.

  ‘Every time I cross this bridge,’ Metko said, ‘I remember a tall guy. He was just back from military service and came with his mule to the family field. They said he had a heart attack. And his mother started coming here. She’d sit by the brook and sing, but it was a wail that froze your blood, I can still hear it.

  ‘Have I overdone it with our stories? I don’t mean to traumatise you,’ Metko said. We stopped to recover our breath.

  ‘Well, you’re not big on jokes,’ I said and finally, he laughed.

  Everything happens twice. Once as life itself, and twice as memory – or forgetting. Metko remembered it for those who were too busy surviving. It was his act of love for his village, his mountain, his valley and his way of staying connected to his first passion: literature. And ironically, even without a university degree, what he did was more vital than many a university professor’s collected tomes. Because it touched the lives of others.

  We could hear the pulsing beat of a band that went around the village at Kurban Bairam, playing loud ethno-pop during the afternoon heat.

  ‘When the ring of power wants to control the population, they start giving out free entertainment. Bread and circuses,’ Metko said. ‘Shiny things. To turn people into sheep and buy their votes.’

  The destruction of the valley’s cultural heritage was done in several phases, but all along its aim was monoculture. Sufi monasteries were wiped from the land and from the mind. The city in the valley once had twelve mosques and destroyed them all in less than a century, down to a stump of a ruin with a broken minaret and swastika graffiti that nobody washed off. It stood by the river and the market like some barbarian totem.

  The commissars of twentieth-century homogenisation were as pitiless as the Latin crusaders and as systematic as the Inquisition. Into the traumatised hole left by a syncretic, home-grown Balkan Islam, two genetically engineered crops moved in: Atheist materialism with polyester mantles and fake names. And when that fell, Islamic materialism with uniform new mosques that shone with the cold glint of amnesia. Our Folk don this synthetic mantle because after all the injuries, it’s all they can do to survive.

  Metko possessed a valuable document – a thick book recording the crimes of the communist regime in the three rhyming villages, complete with letters by state security agents, orders of arrest and the code names of protagonists. It was incriminating for those still alive but he hadn’t done anything with it. Holding it was enough.

  ‘The world is stuck in a cycle of victims and persecutors. Victims who become persecutors. Persecutors victimised by their own crimes. And I want to challenge this by stepping out of the cycle and becoming a free human being.’

  He’d been invited to join political and business cliques. But his freedom was not for sale, it was too hard-won. It went back to that essay on the pastoral story.

  And that was the whole point of coming out with your lantern. Even as he cultivated the collective conscience of Our Folk, he would not join any club except that of humanity.

  It was a generous day, birds everywhere. Here began people’s abandoned fields and beyond them, the hills of burned grass that if you hiked for two or three hours, tapered and fell into Maiden Gorge via precipitous ridges. We surveyed the rooftops of The Birches with the jagged peaks beyond.

  ‘Did I say that the Latin graveyard is down here!’

  Inside, an overgrown patch with a brook. Nobody knew who was buried here. Perhaps straying crusaders who deserted and married locals. Upstream was a tributary called Latin River.

  Time, treasure and trauma had accumulated undisturbed. Only the odd chronicler or treasure hunter noticed things, picked them up and polished them. Chroniclers were thinner on the ground than treasure hunters. The fact that those in power have been in the category of treasure hunter rather than chronicler made history rather feral. Neither justly cultivated, nor gone wild. It was down to individuals like Metko and I to wade through the remains, looking for what could be salvaged in the wake of the last barbarians.

  Yet I understood the urge of the treasure hunter.

  ‘You and I are treasure hunters too,’ Metko grinned. ‘But for stories.’

  Where there is ruin, there is hope for treasure, said the Persian poet-wanderer Rumi.

  Has there been a time without ruins? When the only ruins were geological, the earth’s works rising and falling in their own time. We gave up trying to access the Latin tombs.

  ‘On the other side of the river by St George’s Church is the plague cemetery. Mostly children.’

  The plague last struck in the 1830s and Valley people climbed to the mountain villages to wait it out, bringing it with them.

  We passed the Libyan’s abandoned allotment. Despite his paranoia, he’d leave the gate unlocked and a pair of small galoshes – for children to come and pick strawberries.

  The hills were too scorched to trek, so Metko called someone in a Jeep to drive us. We bumped over clumps of burned grass. The mustard-coloured hills rolled out like an arid carpet.

  ‘This was all tobacco fields,’ Metko said. ‘The whole Mesta basin smelled of tobacco.’

  You get up at three in the morning, the whole family. You load up the mule and trek in the dark. The only light is the moon and a gas lamp attached to the mule. Gas lamps attached to unmanned mules: the Bulgarian highlander ruse that got the Germans over these mountains into Greece in 1941. After decades of deadly hide-and-seek games in the hills, the people and animals of this region were experts at guerrilla tricks.

  Well into the 1990s, the tobacco fields were ploughed with ox carts.

  ‘Because no machinery can climb here. That’s why it fell to us highlanders to sow the small-leafed Basma,’ Metko went on. At high school, he’d studied tobacco as a subject and knew its economy and agronomy, as well as the muddy practice. ‘In one year, our family of six produced 800 kilos of dried tobacco. We were paid 2–3 lev per kilo. After tax, that gave us something less than subsistence.’

  One year in the 1980s, The Birches produced 520 tonnes of tobacco! The state was raking it in.

  ‘Our fields were at the far end. Two hours’ walk in each direction.’

  ‘Wow,’ said the driver, who looked like he spent his time eating and drinking.

  ‘Now, see our friend here,’ Metko turned to him. ‘His ancestors hail from The Good Place upstream.’

  In 1912–1913, the Muslim quarters were torched. There were three children whose parents were massacred, but not before they’d packed the children off into the hills and instructed them to keep walking south. Over the jagged ridges, past the glacial cirques. Keep the sea ahead of you. The three orphans made it here, God knows how. The Birches, freshly pillaged, took them in.

  ‘Our friend here is the great-grandson of one of those kids.’

  We said goodbye to the driver who was beaming because the hunting season was starting today, which meant male parties in the forest and lots of food and booze. We continued to the ruins on foot. Sheep and goats were scattered in the distance like white stones. At dusk, I heard the call of the shepherd rounding up the animals.

  ‘Ayeeee! Ayee yaaaa ya-ya-ya-ya ayeeeeeee!’

  The call resonated in my chest as if I too was shouting. The human voice of the mountain.

  ‘Now I see why people shout,’ I said. ‘It’s the hills.’

  I almost expected to hear the sound of the kaval flute. The instrument of the mountain shepherd.

  ‘There was a guy who played the kaval,’ said Metko. ‘You could hear the melody like a running stream over the hills. His name was Ismail ‘Atemin’ Kalyor.’

  Because his mother was Atemina, he was known affectionately as Atemincheto, ‘little Atemin’, though he was not a small guy.

  ‘When he passed us in the fields with his flock, he always stopped to chat to my grandfather who was also Ismail. I picked up their anxiety. They could feel the gathering clouds. He was a handsome fair man with a curly moustache and an expressive face, and he wore pure tweed. He and his mother Atemina ground their own flour and he refused to drink water in the village, only from the hill springs.’

  Because he only trusted the hills.

  ‘He was devoted to his animals, apolitical. Sometimes in the village they bullied him into singing. I listened to him in awe. But he preferred to sing to the hills.’

  When the name-changing commissars arrived to crush the revolt in March 1973 and men with Kalashnikovs were posted in every street, it was decided that two men here would be executed in cold blood as a showcase. To show the rest what would happen if they didn’t sign the register with their new names. The local party commissars of The Birches helpfully singled out two celibate men. Without families to feed. The first was not at home. The second was Atemin. He had come down from the hills and was lunching with his mother behind a locked door. When they tried to kick the door in, he leaned against it, so they fired through the door and killed him on the spot.

  Then they placed an axe in his hand and photographed the body to show that he’d been a terrorist. Atemina witnessed this, just metres away. I see her collapsing, then neighbours, Christian and Muslim women, coming to help her mop her son’s blood as the executioners took the body away for a needless autopsy.

  Atemina and Atemin’s story really got to me. In the same instant that he had lost his life, she had lost her son and they had lost their name.

  ‘The hills remember him,’ said Metko. ‘Silently.’

  I was conceived at the exact time the sound of flute ceased in this mountain – March 1973.

  ‘There is one last Mohican,’ said Metko. ‘A reincarnation of Atemin. After him, there will be no one.’

  Who was it?

  ‘Can’t remember his name. He’s a marginal character. Lives in the Ranger with his mother when he’s not with his horses. But I doubt your paths will cross.’

  The view from the stony plateau was worth the sweat. To the south, the glow of the sea somewhere beyond. To the north, Maiden Gorge and distant blue Rila.

  ‘Across is Ribnovo, of the weddings,’ Metko pointed. Ribnovo looked like a fortress hewn into Old Woods.