‘You have it there too, bravo! How do people prepare it?’

  She wore the nouveau-Turkish high hijab and the conservative grey overcoat.

  Some Black Mestans, like elsewhere in the Mesta basin, had started describing themselves as Turks of late. It was fashionable. They didn’t speak Turkish of course, but ‘Turkish’ stood for ‘I am Muslim and don’t want to feel like a second-class citizen, better to be slightly foreign.’ When they went to work in the capital or abroad, including Turkey, they became Bulgarians again. A conditional identity in a conditional world.

  Except for the Friday prayer when twenty or so men turned up, the mosque was empty, and Alika prayed by himself five times a day. He invited me to see it. The cube-like whitewashed mosque had a blue minaret and naïve painted scenes on its outside walls, and the calligraphic names of Allah. The water of the festive fountain in the courtyard was turned on for special occasions and at night it flashed multicoloured lights. I would not have been surprised to see a dervish by the fountain of an evening, cross-legged in rags, playing the kaval flute. Despite its character, the mosque was only built in the 1990s. With the zeal of the neophyte who had once been an atheist, Alika was proud of the mosque which he single-handedly maintained. It was resplendent with chandeliers from Mecca, carpets from Turkey and worry beads from everywhere. It was a monument to all that had been denied.

  Alika gave me a string of black wooden worry beads like a rosary and told me about the happiest day of his life: when he took part in mass prayer in Mecca. He liked how the men revolved on the outside and the women were on the inside.

  ‘Like sheep in a pen,’ I commented.

  ‘No, we protect them that way!’ he said. ‘Women need protection.’

  His second wife had left him recently, like his first.

  I was picking nettles around the abandoned sheep pen in his garden.

  ‘Pick all my nettles, if you like,’ he beamed, as he brought me something to eat every day: a half kilo of fresh butter; potatoes from the garden; a bowl of green beans. And he immediately offered to cook them for me himself, adding: ‘And if you want to marry me, I’m available.’ And he’d glance at his watch because the prayer timetable was strict. He needed the schedule.

  ‘5:55 is sabah, 13:33 is pladnina (from pladne, midday), 17:15 is ikindi, 20:30 is achsham and 21:55 is aksi. But it changes every day by a minute or two. Depending on the moon.’

  Every month, the country’s chief mufti issued a takwim, an updated lunar timetable for each geographic belt of the country. I’d had no idea that Muslim prayer followed the moon.

  These prayer-time rules came to Muslim communities in Europe from Mecca. The word takwim reminded me of the Arabic alchemists’ takwin – a homunculus. But I didn’t say that to Alika. I couldn’t get a word in edgeways anyway.

  ‘I can give you the train schedule too,’ he beamed. ‘They run as follows –’

  Alika was kept sane by the prayer schedule and the train schedule because the world was chaotic and he was lonely, just as his daughter-in-law was lonely and his son was lonely – a heavy guy who was born sad. It was the Pomak condition: families and communities seemed close-knit, but individuals were trapped in destinies foretold and yearned for a life unlived.

  No, it was the human condition – together but disconnected, a pre-existing condition magnified by the pandemic. The virus gave a name to our shared condition: we are not what we are. We have lived under a false identity.

  Alika had spent a lifetime as a signal inspector along the narrow-gauge railway and could be seen hanging off the train’s loose doors, smiling bravely in the face of bitter winds. His son worked there too. Later, I heard a family tale of hardship and struggle in the post-communist freefall. He had raised the kids after their mother ran away with a gangster. What kept them from poverty was rent from ancestral land in an alpine settlement called The Horses.

  People had come down from their alpine settlements in the last two generations. Until then, they had lived pre-modern lives. Pastoral lives with horses and buffalo.

  Black Mesta was a communist project, built some thirty years after the railway. The line divided the upper neighbourhood from the lower and you had to cross it by foot to move between the two, careful not to be mowed down by the train – there were no barriers or signal lights, just the toot-toot.

  Morning and evening, the village philosopher’s voice carried up the street – a smart alcoholic with a boiled face and dirty blue eyes, fond of reciting obscene poems. He had a large repertoire. Working as a hydro engineer in a kanton (forest station) had driven him to the bottle. Looking at the level of the river and looking at his glass had become the same thing. His wife disappeared to a shepherd’s hut high up, alone with her cows and dogs all summer. Cattle and sheep had been a major livelihood, but husbandry had all but disappeared. One hundred men, out of a population of four hundred, worked as builders in England. Inside the shop that sold sugary snacks and carbonated drinks, the poor man’s foods, were notices:

  ‘Farm hands urgently wanted in Belgium, England, Spain. No language required. Departure date – Hourly rate – Plus overtime.’

  Apart from the hydro and logging, there was no human activity above the village, which some said kept the river clean enough to drink from, but others said it was polluted by plastic. It was both: rubbish-clogged downstream and pristine upstream. In the company of the locals, I began to climb to the upper realms by car, motorbike and foot. In Upstream Black Mesta and White Mesta, there was no timetable.

  The interior of Rila was wild and empty of dwellings. This kept it pure. The lower slopes were dotted with near-defunct pastoral settlements, kantons, hydro-stations, dams and mountain chalets. Then there was Rila National Park and Musala ‘close to God’. Under Musala sprang the springs that made the Mesta.

  Black Mesta village had its timetables too. From 4 p.m., the mushroom buyers’ house became busy. It stood where a riverine inn for forestry workers had stood. Today, the Gypsies were the last of those. Inns along the river and pastoralist settlements above – that’s what Rila naturally allowed. All else was afterthought, with mixed results.

  The mushroom pickers arrived on motorbikes or in cars so saggy that their bellies bumped the road. Here, there was a mushroomer look different to that of Old Woods and The Birches. Here, it was like a religion. The classic mushroomer was skinny and looked at the ground. They were older married couples, or pairs of friends, or solo men. They wore baggy old clothes and oilskin jackets, wellies or hiker’s shoes with gaiters, clothes in which you can crawl along the forest floor. Some arrived with pine needles in their hair. They appeared on the road in the evening with bags strapped onto beat-up motorbikes. Or they popped out of the woods and walked with their rucksacks. They had a remote look I recognised – it was obsession. But it was also the musical meadows of Rila, they did that to you. The alpine chords continued to play in your head when you came down.

  They said: ‘I’m going out for mushroom’ – always singular, as if mushroom was not a plant but a state of mind. Unlike hunting, it was not a social occasion. It was not about leisure or bonding. It was unlike any other form of foraging. Berries and herbs were done en masse – once you found the blueberry bushes or the field of St John’s wort, that was it, you were there for the day. ‘Mushroom’ required footwork. Mushroom was spread out in mysterious ways. Mushroom liked to be near oak, pine, birch – but often it wasn’t where you expected it to be. Or someone else had passed through before you. The mushroomers didn’t like banter. Even the chatty ones became silent when they disappeared up the hills. They went into a kind of communion. It was between them and the mushroom. The only reason they went in couples was for safety – where there were mushrooms, there were bears.

  The mushroom dealers were a couple in middle age. The corpulent man sat in a chair in the courtyard and commented on the state of mushrooms and the world, while his wife did the work of weighing deliveries, noting them down and dispatching them next door to the warehouse where drying and cutting machines were operated by two other women. Before he’d got into local politics and bitten off too much of the pie, the mushroom dealer had also been a lean mushroomer.

  ‘I hope that in twenty years’ time, there will be no more mushroom pickers,’ he said, munching a pastry and watching his wife lift crates. ‘I hope my children won’t be picking mushrooms anyway.’

  His children were scrolling on their tablets.

  ‘But who will pick mushrooms then?’

  ‘Whoever wants them, let him pick them himself.’

  ‘Fair enough, but why the bitterness?’

  ‘Because! Who is picking mushrooms in Germany and Italy? It’s us. The Germans and the Italians have better things to do.’

  ‘Like what – what is a better thing than spending the day in the forest?’

  ‘They have good chanterelles in Germany,’ said a skinny man. He came to deliver and have a pint. He was happy to be home after decades of work in Germany as a picker, packer, cutter. It was good to go out on mushroom in his home mountain, return before dusk and watch the sunset over the hills.

  ‘Black Mesta is a grave pit with living people in it,’ he grinned. ‘But it’s home.’

  ‘We have become slaves to the West,’ said the stately looking father of the mushroom buyer.

  The family name Karafaiz meant ‘black tax’ – a perfect name for a clan living in a mountain pass. A name that told a story: generations of riverine traders, tax collectors and ransomers had weighed mushrooms, milk, logs, ore and gold, and paid the going price. Or not.

  The older Karafaiz grandchildren picked fruit on a Scottish farm, pandemic or not, fourteen-hour days, rain or sunshine. This lowering of their status abroad pained them.

  ‘Two hundred,’ the wife said and handed cash to a bald young man in wellies and oilskin who sat down with a beer. He’d delivered 25 kilograms of ceps.

  ‘Tell me the oddest thing about mushrooms,’ I asked him. He was shy – visitors were rare – and didn’t say anything that evening.

  I went home and fried a sliced cep in Alika’s butter. It was rich like a steak.

  Ruined fortresses sat above the western exit of the gorge, and by the river – hot mineral springs. In a cypressy road cemetery with the best view in the world, the Christian and Muslim sections were joined by a path. The mosaic of Slavic, Arabic and Greek names told a story. Agapi, Assen, Ahmed, Aishe, Assia, Agapia rested together by the river. A silent memory of the long presence of Byzantium. The Greek language dried up in Upstream Mesta at the same time the Bulgarian language dried up in downstream Mesta – after the exchange of populations across the border.

  The oldest known inhabitants of these ranges were the Bessi – a fierce Thracian tribe who practised cruel ritual sacrifices, but later produced a priestly caste that contributed to the rise of Orphism that replaced the orgiastic sacrifice with the vegetarian libation. Despite the remoteness of these ranges, foot traffic had been lively for hundreds of years. An old ore road climbed over Rila. Caravans with mined goods had used it. This is why the main town here was called Yakoruda – Great Ore.

  Yakoruda was a pretty mountain town with a square full of cafés, a busy weekend market, pink sunsets, a church whose bells once sang with human voices and a mosque. Several Greek-owned sewing factories gave women jobs – in one of them lingerie was made for a French label. To enter the town, you crossed one of several bridges. Looking at the shallow water in the concrete basin, it was hard to imagine that in the last big flood the tributaries merged and swept away the road.

  ‘But overall, the water is decreasing,’ said Feri.

  Feri’s café was in the square. Feri took me under his wing as a rare visitor to his town and presented me with plates of tender highland beef, mushrooms in herb butter and juicy tomatoes, and my favourite, the bean soup and potato salad.

  ‘To show you that we still have good organic food. Even if there’s no jobs and everyone has gone to pull asparagus in Germany.’

  ‘The snow is gone. We remember snow 3 metres high,’ said Ibrahim.

  Ibrahim was just back from pulling asparagus in Germany. He was a hard-faced but emotional man who was blind in one eye after an industrial accident. Once an athlete, he was now looking after bedridden parents who couldn’t live or die and by lunchtime he was ensconced at Feri’s and had set up his drinks before him like a solitary game of chess, moving the glasses strategically as they emptied, and remaining desperately sober.

  ‘As a boy, I fished in Black Mesta,’ said Alish, the blind osteopath, who sometimes came to town for lunch to escape his stream of visitors.

  ‘I could catch up to a hundred with my bare hands,’ he said. ‘Their backs glinted. It’s like they were calling me. Then, I’d take two home, no more. There’s fuck-all left now.’

  ‘They’ve wiped out the trout, even upstream,’ said Redjep. ‘Overfishing.’

  Redjep drove Alish between here and Black Mesta. He sat while Alish ordered pint after pint trying to get drunk. Redjep was a quiet, youngish guy with a dazzling smile, known as the best mushroomer in Upper Mesta. He had picked tonnes of mushrooms over the years, people said, literally tonnes. I never saw him at the mushroom buyers’ because he went early in his beat-up old Lada – although he also had a vintage Mercedes in which he brought Alish to town – and delivered his hoard early. He spent most of the year on a German pine plantation with his wife, planting saplings and cutting branches for Christmas wreaths. She stayed on but he returned in summer because he liked to be here for the mushroom season. They had resisted going abroad for as long as they could, even trying subsidised highland cow farming to give their parents a livelihood too, but it was too much for too little. His hands were like Ibrahim’s and the honey sellers’: older than his face.

  ‘That’s Trendafilka the herbalist,’ Erol the photographer pointed at a relaxed woman who walked past us and sat in another café.

  Erol owned a grocery shop with his wife but his passion was nature photography. He was my only contact before I arrived – I’d seen his photos. It was him that introduced me to people. The hospitality was immediate.

  ‘They say she’s very good,’ Erol said.

  ‘Aye,’ Alish said. ‘But herbs ain’t gonna fix my eyes. Is that Elijah’s voice I hear?’

  ‘Elijah works for Rila National Park. Anything you want to know, and more, he’s your man,’ Erol said.

  A man in hiking gear bounced up to our table. He beamed, though he was in a rush. He was always in a rush and beaming. Elijah owned a mountain chalet and had two projects in life: ecology and Thracology. The first was his job, the second his hobby. He led two types of treks – ecological and esoteric. But they were in essence the same trek because the same passion fuelled them. Elijah was an ecstatic of the mountain, almost a fanatic.

  ‘Rhodopa is where there will one day find the Temple of Solomon, inside sealed mines,’ he said without preamble. He’d identified the location. ‘And the main temple of Dionysus is in Rila.’ He’d found that location, too.

  Our lunch party looked up at him in astonishment from the table. Me especially, since the others had heard it all before and didn’t dare raise any doubts because Elijah was better educated. ‘Herodotus wrote: the Bessi worship at the main temple of Dionysus, which is on the highest mountain in Thrace, near Orbel.’

  Orbel was the ancient name of one of the Mesta mountains but it was not clear which one. Herodotus went out of his comfort zone to meet the world (he claimed to measure Cheop’s Pyramid himself!) but he never came to Europe. So, he didn’t know where Orbel was either.

  ‘Rhodopa is Mother Earth. Rhodopa is Evropa,’ Elijah leaned on the table.

  He was a decoder of place names, measurer of leylines, decipherer of the mountain. His imaginatio ran away with itself, but he also had a kind word for everyone. Each morning, he’d rush past Feri’s tables where men battered by decades of underpaid labour at home and lonely labour abroad drank coffee, and he’d wave at them:

  ‘Good morning gentlemen! Looking good, the ladies love you.’ The men couldn’t help but smile.

  One day, with Elijah as a guide, a small group of enthusiasts walked across vast meadows and remote glades. We found white truffles, the rare purple Rila primrose, a poisonous cep-double delightfully called Satan’s bolete and a broken horseshoe. Elijah took us to stone sites that he believed to be ruined cromlechs, dolmens and stone circles, once used at Equinox and Solstice. ‘Seven vestal virgins’ served as priestesses and sacred sites had their own ‘orpheuses’ – young male initiates of the mysteries, possibly eunuchs, he said. Orpheus was not a single person, he said, there were orpheuses. It was like Hermes Trismegistus. This is how over time, a human being became an archetype; the Hermetics, the Orphics. It’s an androgynous archetype – Orpheus and Hermes are male and female in one. Herodotus takes a waspish swipe at the Orphics and the Pythagorians when he writes that the Egyptians were the first to come up with the idea of the soul’s immortality, that the period of a soul’s full cycle of transmigrations is three thousand years and that ‘certain Greek writers’ have in fact stolen this from the Egyptians. ‘Their names are known to me, but I refrain from mentioning them,’ he quips. But he was not always right, even if he was always witty. Each ancient culture arrived at the same conclusion: the soul is peregrine.

  ‘So, the Orpheus climbed a special stone,’ Elijah showed us a stone in a meadow of late summer bliss, ‘and sang and played his lyre made from a turtle shell. Animals and humans came out of the forest, lay down and became blissed out.’

  In another glade, the four in our group took turns to sit and ‘meditate’ in a stone seat with a sweeping view over Rila. ‘What did you feel?’

  ‘I went into a vortex like dark water,’ said the archaeologist. ‘It was awful.’

  ‘I was immersed in pure ether,’ said his dreadlocked son, a poet.

  Me, I flew into the blue abyss below, like a bird going home.