The Masons was settled in the late Middle Ages by masons from Macedonia. The Macedonians brought a style of construction that was popular and from here they travelled in guilds to the Aegean Coast. The village became wealthy from this and from its herds. In its day, there were 50,000 grazing animals to just 1,500 people. In winter, the cattle were taken down the Mesta corridor to the Aegean Plains and in summer to highlands like Beslet. A supershepherd from the turn of the nineteenth century had for instance looked after tens of thousands of sheep with the help of ninety dogs and nine shepherds on horseback.

  The Masons had thirty residents left, no children. It was an open-air museum. Visitors came for lunch and a wander down the cobbled memory lanes of how mountain village life had been – until the wrecking ball of forced collectivisation smashed it. The dispossessed Masoners took their craft and even their wood on cattle carts and emigrated to other parts of the country; like their ancestors had done. Incomers who started buying houses in the 1980s and 1990s found exactly ten per cent of the inhabitants left. When Communism fell, gangster enterprise finished things off. Houses fell down or were sold for a pittance. Mansions were built in the Masons style by the successful gangsters, but in the original village houses had been touching so that if you were on the run from something, you could walk over the entire village from roof to roof and disappear into the woods. In contrast, the new houses had high walls and didn’t talk to each other.

  The Masons’ little library had been the best in the valley. The library was still open but hadn’t acquired books since the last century. It was all souvenirs and lunches. The capture of the village by absentee owners and hapless tourists was complete. Dogwooders were poorly educated and practically skilled and their ranks had swelled, while in the Masons and the Empty Village, education had given people a ticket out – and killed the village.

  A couple from the ’hood came in a van like an Aladdin’s cave full of the valley’s textile heritage: shagpile rugs; woollen kilims made on looms; long knitted socks; embroidered cotton cloths and thick stripy aprons. Knitted socks here are knee-high and the women snipped the final thread that normally hangs from the top to avoid being followed ‘by snakes and lizards’. Yet they attached long cords to the backs of their tweed waistcoats which swayed ‘like snakes’ as they walked and drew the male gaze. The snake was a trope of secret power here.

  These discarded heirlooms and expired dowries came from households either defunct or ashamed of their peasant roots, something I saw a lot in Muslim homes where synthetic rugs were displayed as totems of aspirational urban modernity. But they were late with modernity because the synthetics would disintegrate in a few years and then their children would have to buy back their own heirloom from the Roma, who everyone despised. The Roma were in fact the last custodians of this textile wealth; they bought stuff wholesale and flogged it. In this way, they salvaged precious handcrafts from the rubbish tip and kept up the trading tradition between lowlands and highlands.

  Until the mid-twentieth century, the people of Thunder and Fire came up in carts to sell vegetables to the cattle-rich Masons. The Masons and the Empty Village had started as a refuge. Here, you could start afresh, back to back with the mountain. To come here was to opt out of the system because the system in all its guises, from empire to dictatorship, had failed to conquer the mountain. Each house had a stash of weapons and if a house caught fire, you didn’t rush to help in case of an explosion.

  I witnessed a house catch fire one day, although it didn’t explode. I’d come to the Masons for lunch. A fire engine made it up the steep road but couldn’t enter the cobbled lane and locals helped take the hose to the house. But the locals were not Masoners because the Masoners were too old. They were Dogwooders who drove up to help their neighbours. Generations before, when the Masons was about to be torched by Turkish irregulars, it was a Dogwooder who galloped to the city like the wind to plead with the Ottoman governor Rifat Bey to spare their Christian neighbours.

  ‘That’s being a Pomak for you’, a young guy I knew said in passing. ‘You help and get no thanks.’

  He was covered in sweat after helping put out the flames while guys from local families sat in the café not lifting a finger.

  ‘But we’re used to it,’ he added.

  It was a play on words and a truth. The word Pomak had started as an informal mark of difference and ended up as an ethnonym. One etymology traces it to pomachen or tormented one, another to pomagach or helper. Both had negative overtones. Pomaks were either the tormented ones (forced to convert to Islam) or the helpers (of Islam).

  They have been both, but in a different sense. Helpers needed for their expert knowledge of the land, and yet tormented by cruel policies, mean revisionism, subtle snubs and the ignorance of those in the majority. The majority were fed a malignant historical narrative in which all Muslims, living and dead, were conflated with the crimes of the Ottoman Empire during its tyrannous decay. By this token, if you were a Muslim, you were guilty until proven innocent. This narrative was to reality what the quarry was to the forest: a continuous desecration of truth. Single-minded metal replacing the rich web of wood.

  The truth was that the Pomaks were autochthonous people deeply woven into the land. ‘We are Bulgarians with Turkish-Arabic names who go to mosque instead of church,’ said many younger Pomaks. Most of the young were secular by belief and Muslim by identity. But many in the older generations didn’t identify with this definition. Pomak identity was complicated by compounded trauma. In a typically low-key gesture of self-reclamation, the Pomaks informally referred to themselves simply as ‘Our Folk’. Nashentsi. Such and such married a nashenka, one of ours.

  The Pomaks were incredibly hard grafters. It seemed almost constitutional, but it was inherited. Hard work is what it took to survive and thrive in this mountain. Above the Masons, I stopped to chat to an elderly couple from Dogwood who were pottering in their orchard. They’d built a holiday house here, just a mile from where they lived, for something to do.

  ‘I don’t know why we work, all our lives we’ve done nothing but work,’ said the man.

  ‘Because,’ said his wife who had thick-lensed glasses and a white head-shawl, ‘if we don’t work, all we have left is death and the telly. And it’s a fine day for weeding.’

  ‘One moment you’re young and handsome,’ her husband said, ‘and the next moment you’re old and crippled.’

  They were not into small talk. His wife cut a red rose and gave it to me. ‘Life is an illusion,’ she said and smiled, not wistfully, but the way you smile when you really know that life is an illusion.

  The Masons was an odd place, folded into its past because it didn’t have a present. You couldn’t see anything except the plunge of Kanina and it was easy to forget about the valley. You were pressed hard against Old Woods. The houses were gorgeous but there was a lurking shadow, a malaise I couldn’t explain, and that made me relieved to leave the Masons and head down the road back to Dogwood where people went about their business, and the Empty Village where they didn’t, but where the bigger picture opened up and I could breathe again.

  One rainy afternoon in my rented house, I slept and heard the house speak with a voice. The house showed me people inside it. I saw them. They slept on wide wooden bunks covered with shagpile blankets, sheepskins nailed to the walls, sheep and cows downstairs, chewing, the family on rugs around a low round sofra table, also chewing. I saw how the village had been, houses packed with families, fields down the slopes. Now the slopes have gone wild and the houses have multiplied, but there are no people or animals.

  But it’s all still here, the house whispered, this is not the end. They wanted me to know this. What you think is here is only the surface view of something deeper that runs through us like electricity through the air, the house wanted me to know. Beams that in a flash illuminate the valley and its breathing creatures. Then darkness again.

  The rain storm travelled south, down the Mesta corridor, I could hear it like a galloping army fading away. I rose from my slumber. A massive rainbow straddled the valley. The mountain across it was the outline of a perfect world. I went to see Danera in the tavern.

  Danera had seen the heyday, decline, rise from the ashes and commercial takeover of the Empty Village. My dream was accurate. The houses in the three villages had been the same. The first floor for the animals, the second for storing winter foods like corn, and the third for humans to sleep, cook, keep milk, make cheese and churn butter. A back room was reserved for chests of dowry, extra rugs and dried goods like couscous. Threshing was done with up to three horses. Danera remembered the last of the old people, like the gentle wood carver who was buried with his chisel and transistor radio. It was the custom in the valley to bury Christians with their favourite things, once the dead person had lain at home for a while with a candle burning and a bowl of wheat before them, their hands and feet tied with a handkerchief against vampirism and a coin in their mouth to settle debts in the otherworld. The dead were carried to the graveyard, the procession led by a child who mustn’t turn back – turning back augured more death. The coffin was wrapped in white linen, on which the priest wrote with coal ‘Jesus Christ’, and a cross. Before going inside the coffin, the dead had their hands and feet untied. Family visited the grave for forty days and smudged it with frankincense. Seven years later, the body was disinterred, the bones washed, placed in a cloth bag and reburied with ceremony.

  When new houses were built on old sites, human remains popped up that had to be re-interred in the cemetery above the village, where a path took you into a pine wood so dark, I was afraid to go far inside it even in the daytime. This was bear territory and the occasional gunshot you heard was meant to scare off bears who got too close to Dogwood orchards. My neighbour the painter carried a ‘bear spray’ on walks and we laughed about it because we knew it would be useless in the face of an actual bear.

  The Empty Village enjoyed an eccentric revival in the 1990s. Its main protagonist was a man called Marin. He now lived in Greece but still owned houses and the taverna, and his name floated like a rural legend. One day, I heard that Marin was here and staying in one of his houses.

  We sat with a bottle of wine on the taverna terrace. He was a heavy man with eyes that watered and the look of someone who had lived fully, too fully. By the time he ended up here, he’d been a successful entrepreneur for a decade. But he was jaded.

  ‘I came by accident,’ he said. ‘We’d come for a spot of fishing. My friends and I were looking for the Kanina. But we couldn’t find access to it and ended up here.’

  They stood by the old sycamore and took in the valley. The village was in decline – no modern sewage or electricity, not even cobbles in the streets. Just crumbling houses and old people and chickens.

  ‘It was love at first sight. I bought all the houses for sale. Dogwooders were buying them up just for the roof slates! Then I went down to the Nevrokop animal market and fell in love with a cow. She lived for eighteen years and gave the most aromatic milk. In that overgrown building you see, which is where we kept the animals.’

  Danera’s brother looked after the cow. Marin moved here with his young family and in the following years invested a fortune in turning the dying village into a self-sufficient rural community for the modern age. He created the infrastructure that is here now with labour from Dogwood and the surrounding area. They piped water from the Kanina at a 400 metre gradient and when that proved too difficult, piped it from a spring above the village. They laid down cobble stones, installed indoor toilets and began to renovate the old houses. Marin and other home owners, like my absentee hostess, introduced organic restoration architecture. She too had fallen in love with the valley on a chance visit. Marin employed shepherds from Dogwood to look after the goats, cows, sheep and pigs that he bought. Workers from further afield rode here on horseback across the Rhodope, like in some western. He paid willow weavers to make baskets and fences, bought sheep’s wool from the women of Dogwood for loom-woven carpets and everybody who moved here got into homemade cheeses, churning butter, making sausages and living what Marin called ‘authentic village life’. He drove a busload of Roma from the ’hood to a region known as the Valley of Roses in another part of the country to pick roses and make syrups and cordials, and give them a livelihood. Those were the dusty bottles of rose syrup in my house, which I opened and sipped; the syrup was strong and thick and made you smile with relish. ‘Rose syrup is good for an upset gut,’ Danera said. ‘Rose syrup is good for heart comfort,’ an Irish friend said. ‘Rose syrup is good for emotional stress,’ my herbalist said. In TCM, the heart and the stomach are paired organ systems. The state of your gut and the state of your heart are inseparable. It is difficult to be in a good mood when you have indigestion. Ulcers make you dyspeptic in temperament. And whenever I meet someone miserable, I wonder if they suffer from constipation.

  The old taverna had been right beside the church.

  ‘And everybody there had a glass that sat where they left it,’ Marin said. ‘I got the tail end of the old life and held on to it for as long as I could.’

  Then the old taverna was struck by lightning and burned down. Danera’s brother, who looked after the prized cow, was poisoned by his wife and died. Racketeers came looking for Marin and he went into hiding in upper Kanina like an outlaw.

  ‘I didn’t mind,’ he said. ‘When you lie on a meadow, everything changes. When I first came from the city, I was numb. Here I learned to feel again.’

  He’d gone from being a hunter with a rifle, to hunting with a bow and arrows, to photographing, to nothing. Now it was enough to look at an animal.

  The success of his project had delivered it into the hands of developers. The social, cultural and ecological revival of the Empty Village drew the sharks of profit who started building it up. When Marin arrived, a house sold for 150 euros. Now it sold for 150,000 euros. From a thriving modern village, it had turned into a resort. Nothing was produced anymore, only consumed.

  My neighbour the poet had a poem called ‘The Ants are Singing’, an elegy for his village where ‘everyone diverts the water to his own mill’ until there is no water left and then no people, only an ant heap slowly demolishing the wall of the last house. Once it was the people who sang as they harvested the fields, their hair down to their knees, and now it is the ants. The ants are singing.

  Marin had run away, unable to stop the building frenzy or convince this second wave of incomers who were after profit, not after community, that there is enough water in the hill above, but only through a shared reservoir and that by building hotels, they were destroying the very thing that people came for: village life.

  Now he had found an unspoiled coastal patch in Greece, but he was also tempted by a ruined mountain village on the other side of Old Woods. It wouldn’t take much to get it up and running, do up the houses, a couple of families, living off-grid with some animals …. Seeing a ruin and turning it into its best self was his life’s mission. He hadn’t given up his dream of organically recycling the ruins of yesterday, and yes, it was a rich man’s dream, but if more of the rich followed his example instead of owning shares in quarries that rip the guts out of forests, the bountiful empty villages of this world would be repeopled.

  ‘It used to make me mad, but I’m resigned now. It’s just that, by the time people see where the answer lies, it’ll be too late,’ he said. The answer, for him, was in making human beehives, sharing resources.

  We took in the human-like contours of Pirin and the reptilian back of another massif at the far end of the valley.

  ‘Even now, with this monster of a hotel, with everything that’s been spoiled, all I see is this mountain. This is still the purest place in Europe, for me.’

  Marin showed me the old beams of the terrace. They were the work of the last of the old masons, Ibrahim Zelenko ‘Greenie’.

  ‘Greenie told me that every piece of wood has a heartbeat. And I can feel it,’ he said, his hand on the warm oak beam. He left the next day and I didn’t see him again.

  I could feel it too, a deep pulse. I drank from the spring that Marin had unblocked and that watered the weeping willow and the shady sycamore, where the women of the Empty Village had gathered of an evening to sing and knit knee-long socks for the winter. The fatal flaw in Marin’s project had been the people. Not just the profit chasers who’d taken over, but also those involved in the project in the first place. The insular Dogwooders had not supported the venture enough, suspicious of anything new, even if it benefited them. And the cosmopolitan urbanites who came to repeople the Empty Village had the choice of leaving when things got tough. Only my neighbours had stayed, with the disappointment, the crass hotel, the water shortages.

  ‘You have to let things decay in their own time,’ said the poet, handing me a bunch of fresh oregano. ‘Without blame.

  ‘And hold space for joy, no matter what’s going on around you,’ he said. ‘With your work, you’ll get to a stage where you lose yourself. To disappear into that which you love, that’s the destination. That’s Nirvana.’

  We ate cherries from the tree. They left wine-like stains on the flagstones. The couple had found their destination. I drifted into fantasies of buying a little house in the Empty Village, but all the houses were big. And what becomes of a dream house if you have no running water and the river is out of reach? You are left with the view and the dream.

  On Sunday mornings someone tolled the church bell but there were no churchgoers. Swallows murmured in the crystalline air. The church had been restored and its central piece was a large fresco of the patron saint of rain, thunder and lightning, Saint Elijah, flying in a chariot pulled by four fire-red horses. The village of Thunder had a ruined hilltop monastery dedicated to St Elijah and there’s a long history of humans, animals and trees struck by lightning in the valley or nearly struck, like me.