Her wish to be buried in the church courtyard was fulfilled and her warning had been: Don’t ever dig me up! She had moved once already and that was enough. Two locals, ignoring the warning, started digging up her bones, hoping to find that they were ‘holy’ – that is, oozing ambrosia – and thus have her canonised and get rewarded for it, but before they finished, one went insane and the other was killed.

  Stoyna’s curses were as potent as her prayers. One night, drunken shepherds tried to break into the church and rape her. The head shepherd was a wealthy Karakachan with 12,000 sheep. They were bivouacking in the valley of the mels, en route from the Aegean to the Pirin meadow called The Monk, of Gyulten’s childhood.

  ‘Stop bothering me,’ Stoyna yelled from her cell, ‘or you’ll regret it.’

  They didn’t let up and even tried to upsail to her room on a rope. So she cursed the leader: You will lose your favourite lamb. They stumbled off into the night, laughing at the feeble threat. He had 12,000, it hardly mattered. A few days later, while overseeing his flock on the high plateau, he had his young son with him. Chasing a sheep, the boy got too close to the ridge of a mel and fell to his death.

  In a later incident, Stoyna was being harassed by some youths who had come to the church. They mocked her for being blind and weird. She warned them to leave her alone, or they would go rabid like dogs. These youths all went to early graves, through madness or opium or tobacco. Don’t fuck with Venerable Stoyna.

  Stoyna was acquainted with darkness because she was on intimate terms with suffering, first her own, then that of her people, of the very land. Yet her voice had been like her presence – a channel of mercy. This is what kept people coming here. The place held mercy. It was palpable.

  While she was alive, a young abbot tried to write down her recollections of the subtler spiritual transformations, ordeals, visions and visitations, but he had been semi-literate and the results were poor. In the days before her death, when she must have been ill with fever, she dictated a few statements to a young woman close to her.

  We will never know her mentally and she would be fine with that. But we may know her through her landscape – the room, the sycamore, the valley of the mels. Thus spoke Stoyna:

  ‘Since I was wee, I sensed that the human soul was akin to water. It walks upon the earth for a time, then rises up and comes back as rain or snow, or wrathful hailstones. That’s why I liked looking at the rain, as a girl. Why, here’s the earth’s soul returning to itself!

  Nourish your souls with faith, and they will grow strong and resilient.

  Love, love is what folks need. Without love, this wondrous land will empty of its people.

  A white bird was born in these lands. It was borne out of pain. I don’t know what kind of bird it is. But in times to come, those who see it and touch it will be blessed.

  Mercy is the part in us which is divine.’

  The white church vanished in the shimmering heat behind us. We drove west in silence, through rolling, sun-drenched vineyard country.

  We passed through a panoramic village once known for its delicious produce and during Communism, for its lunatic asylum, Gyulten said, but she didn’t know if it was still going. I pulled over to ask a young man in a winter jacket with the collar pulled up. But when he turned to me, avoiding my eyes, I saw the face of madness. He shook his head in an all-encompassing ‘No’ and walked on fast.

  ‘Yep,’ Gyulten said, ‘the asylum is still going.’

  There was nobody else about. A time will come, Stoyna said, when bad politics will empty this beautiful land of its people, but a few will stay to keep the home fires burning until the land fills again.

  ‘Here we are girls,’ Gyulten said. ‘In the valley of Spartacus.’

  We were perched on the high doorstep of the Struma Valley. Settlements here dated from antiquity because of the mineral waters and for over a millennium, the main town’s name was Saint Healer, Sveti Vrach.

  Like Mesta-Nestos, Struma-Strymonas is a confluence. Already in the twelfth century, the Sicilian Arab geographer Al-Idrissi described its intensely cultivated hills. This strategic geography and perfect climate is a blessing in peacetime. But strategic geographies and perfect climates attract armies and border-makers. The Struma Valley changed hands between Byzantium and Bulgaria more times than historians could count and in the twentieth century, the sister valleys of Struma and Mesta bore the brunt of three big wars. Today this valley, like its sister Mesta, is divided by the Bulgarian–Greek border. In the 1970s my grandparents brought me here for winter holidays because the air is good for bronchitis. Gyulten and Sanusha hadn’t had childhood holidays. Or bronchitis. They’d worked instead, Gyulten in the animal hills, Sanusha in the tobacco hills.

  The September light turned ripe like Sauvignon grapes. Soon, the storks would head south along the Via Aristotelis. Everything had already happened here, and still the air was full of balmy promise.

  The first thing that struck me about Rupité was its theatrical setting. Rupité sits on the west bank of Struma, in a flat basin that was once part of the riverbed.

  It is surrounded by cultivated fields and orchards, and overlooked by the tree-furred hills of an extinct volcano named Fur Coat. The basin was the bottom of a crater formed by Fur Coat’s last eruption thousands of years ago and the plain is criss-crossed by mineral brooks that reach 75 degrees Celsius. Sulphurous vapours rise from the coloured clay. If you fall in, you will be boiled. But in winter, when snow covers Fur Coat and you soak in the medium-hot spring with a glass of red from the local Mavrud grape, you feel strong like a gladiator. Or so I imagined. Here, you could imagine anything. You were inside the laboratory of a mysterious planet.

  ‘Wow!’ Sanusha said. ‘This is like heaven.’

  ‘Or hell,’ Gyulten said.

  We walked the gauntlet of stalls that lined the walkway from the car park to the complex. Locals sold the produce of the Strymonian country: raspberry wine, plum and grape rakia, honey, jam, pumpkin seed butter and peanut butter, tahini from sesame seeds, peaches, cherries, figs, olive oil from Greece in large tubs, and of course – bunches of herbs.

  Sanusha and Gyulten were interested in everything, because it was slightly different from our valley. Even the names.

  ‘Look, that’s babini zabi,’ Sanusha picked up a spiky bunch. Grandma’s Teeth. ‘I’ve been looking for it for ages.’

  Caltrop. It had small yellow flowers.

  ‘Good for undoing spells,’ Sanusha said and bought a bunch. ‘For when someone has thinked you a thought, done you a deed. You hang it on your doorway.’

  ‘And good for menopause,’ the seller added. ‘A cup a day keeps flushes away.’

  ‘Not to mention men’s problems,’ a male seller threw in, and flushed.

  I remembered Rocky, caltrop and the spare trousers.

  ‘Do you have merciful herb?’ Sanusha wanted to know. The question was passed down the lane.

  Merciful herb was hard to find and it was even harder to agree on what it was. It made sense to talk herbs here, where Vanga had listened to tens of thousands of people and their symptoms, sorrows and secrets – and sent them off with recipes, hard-hitting home truths, warnings and messages from the otherworld. Or other worlds. To her, there were many.

  We entered the park. It was busy, but noise was muffled and movement slowed down.

  Here by the river, Vanga said, had been a city, buried with its people in the last volcanic eruption. Vanga perceived their souls roaming the valley. Souls move just above the ground, she said: the good ones are a translucent white and the not-so-good ones are slimy. Her compassion for the thousands of souls roaming the valley led her to fund the construction of ‘a temple’ in their memory. She funded it with her earnings from the united nations of souls who queued outside her door every day of her life, for fifty-five years, until her death.

  Each year, on 15 October, the name day of Saint Petka Paraskeva in the Eastern Orthodox canon, she hosted a large open feast by the springs. Because on that day, she said, the volcano had erupted and put an end to a way of life. For her, the waters that gush from beneath the earth are full of the transmogrified souls of those people. And anyway, Vanga liked a good party. She was very social, everybody’s confidante, enmeshed in the dramas of her family and community, but also fed up with it all. Her life was a blend of the banal and the extraordinary. The banal has faded, the extraordinary remains.

  Rupité is a peculiar place, Vanga said, it’s like an engine and I get energy from it. And it was, all three of us felt it. A legend claimed that a human-sized horseman made from gold was buried here. Vanga was not interested in literal treasure but she was apparently accompanied by a cosmic horseman made from light and only perceptible to her.

  And here was Vanga’s temple. It was one of the first new churches to be built after the fall of the regime and the personal and cultural politics surrounding its construction brought her more pain than joy at the end of her life. Vanga named it Saint Petka, but in the popular imagination, Petka of Rupité is simply Vanga. The church, ugly and full of martyr-faced modernist frescoes painted by a celebrated artist and friend of Vanga, featured Vanga herself as a holy woman, her head covered like a desert pilgrim. Vanga was sensible enough to reject any idea of saintliness projected onto her by people, though she did feel like a martyr at times, she said. Patriarchal monotheism mixed with atheistic materialism – this was her environment and it provided her with a vocabulary to express the inexpressible. The Orthodox Church did not consecrate this building, so it remains just what she had intended it to be: a temple where all faiths gather.

  A larger-than-life bronze statue of her sitting in a chair stands by a small bridge over a brook. These monuments were the work of those who took ownership of her legacy when she was too frail to resist. In the same way, false prophecies are ascribed to her, pseudo-biographical debris and conspiracy theories orbit her name, and random dates are attached to her predictions. Though she did see numbers, she did not deal in years and decades. But people’s need to define reality by their own calendar has debased her cosmic visions into ‘predictions’, the way that horoscope pages in magazines debase astrology. In life as in the afterlife, everybody wanted a piece of her and she attracted imitators, users, parasites and a whole industry of Vanga kitsch. Those close to her bickered among themselves and competed for her attention even posthumously.

  But the rest of the place was still hers. Everything here was water, plants, rock and light. And everything whispered with life. Underfoot and overhead. Flocks darkened our sky momentarily. Vanga often mentioned the birds – she knew that a big migratory route passed overhead, she just didn’t know its name.

  Vanga’s relationship with authority and humanity itself was torturous. She was vulnerable to abuse and seduction. But it is her complexity that makes Vanga such an interesting character, as well as a clairvoyant whose inner reality could not be fully expressed. That is of course the nature of inner reality, just more so for mystics.

  Her humble wooden cottage was here, almost a fairy tale house-in-the-woods with chicken legs, and her grave was here. This was the true temple. The rest of the park was a lawn with trees, magnolia bushes and a hot spring where Japanese tourists were boiling eggs. People moved around silently, trying to take in something of the place. It was very different in the 1980s and 1990s before it became a tourist destination. Local women brought sheep’s wool to wash in the springs before selling it. Villagers came in horse-drawn carts and everything was free. Now you had to pay to sit in the springs.

  ‘It’s so calm,’ Sanusha said. ‘Makes me want to sleep.’

  Gyulten was distracted, still in the land of her childhood.

  ‘Just leave me here,’ Sanusha said, and lay under a weeping willow near the hot spring. ‘And come for me later.’

  Gyulten and I walked around the grounds, grazing on plums.

  ‘When my father got sick,’ she said, ‘my mother came to see Vanga. She arrived at night to get a place in the queue, cos Vanga saw people from five in the morning. When she walked into the room, Vanga shot out at her: “Stop wasting your gold coins on doctors. Your husband’s a goner, you can’t bring him back. Keep your gold for your kids.”’

  Vanga was not polite in delivering the truth. Gyulten’s mother had run out of money for treatments and had started paying doctors with antique coins found while ploughing the furrows. Vanga simply confirmed what Gyulten’s mother knew.

  Before she ailed, Vanga saw up to three hundred people a day. This in itself was an assault. The literature tells us that psychics should only see a few people a day, to leave them time to recover.

  The querent had to bring a lump of sugar on which they had slept overnight. The sugar crystals picked up auric data from the person. When Vanga held the sugar in her hand, she found all she needed in its field of information – from ancestors to scenes that unfolded like a film.

  ‘I wish I could ask Vanga about my problem,’ Gyulten said.

  ‘But you already know what you have to do,’ I said.

  ‘Guess so,’ Gyulten said, ‘but I still need someone to say it. Like Vanga.’

  But Vanga did spare people the entire truth and only gave them some of it, because ‘if I told them everything I see, they’d want to quit this life at once.’

  Vanga’s own husband died at forty-two, after a long illness brought on by malaria contracted during the war. He had returned diminished in body and spirit, but kept his promise of building a house for Vanga’s growing practice. His family house, to which he had brought his bride and her sister at the end of the war (on a hay-filled horse-drawn cart covered by rugs to make it festive), was a hovel where the two sisters found a tubercular, war-widowed household. This was in the green regional town of Petrich near Rupité. Vanga and her sister put the house in order, planted flowers, introduced a routine with fixed meal times and soon enough, Vanga was queen of the proceedings. A long line of people – sometimes a stampede – appeared in the humble courtyard that was soon to become a medicinal garden. Today, her Petrich house is a museum, just like the little house here with Vanga’s possessions and gifts from visitors.

  Vanga plunged back into her practice the day after her husband’s death. She admitted that she had seen the exact day of his death, but had refused to believe it until the end.

  The souls of the dead don’t like it when we grieve for them excessively, she said, because the grief pulls them down with its low vibrations. And they want to be released.

  Next to the shop full of multilingual books about Vanga, a video on a loop showed footage of Vanga throughout her life. Always surrounded by people wanting something from her, small but immovable, Vanga cut a lone figure. She always looked placid, carefully listening – to people, to voices only she could hear, to the music of the spheres.

  There were visitor signs for the nearby site of Heraclea Sintica. The existence of an ancient city, provisionally dubbed Petra, had been known to historians for decades but not its exact location. Some years ago, an archaeologist discovered a lapidary inscription in Latin, confirming that Petra was the city of Heraclea Strymonos (or Heraclea Sintica). Excavations revealed a polis a few kilometres west of Rupité. It was built by Philip II of Macedon and the inscribed stone was a missive from a Roman emperor to the Strymonians, restituting their lapsed civil rights after a crisis. The polis cut its own coins in Greek: ‘Herakleans of Strymon’.

  That hill contains a secret, Vanga had said, before anyone suspected the city’s presence.

  ‘A great woman,’ Gyulten said when we entered Vanga’s little house, the narrow corridor where people had waited, the room with a table and rug-covered bench where she had sat, listening. And sometimes cutting people short, impatient, tired, annoyed at their vanities and self-deceits. She had heard it all before.

  Leave me alone, stop pestering me, what do you want from me, for heaven’s pity, I have nothing left for you, she’d shout, exasperated by the human and non-human voices.

  Her favourite were the voices of plants. Plants spoke to her. ‘There goes the rose geranium,’ she said. ‘I’m nerve medicine, tell people about me, it says.’

  ‘She and Stoyna are still with us,’ Gyulten said.

  Vanga was driven to Gold Leaf, and everywhere else, by a state-appointed chauffeur, a retired bodyguard who became a friend. She was shadowed by state security agents, put on a payroll by the state, who persecuted her in the early years but could not stop her popularity, and ended up using her services themselves. Sometimes, a Soviet-produced Volga sedan with tinted windows, the kind associated with the Communist Party Politburo and the sight of which struck fear into the rest of us, would come and whisk her off to the capital – not asking her, just bundling her inside the car – because someone in the Politburo wanted access to her.

  The dictator’s daughter was a protector – and Vanga needed protection. In the end though, she got too much protection and became the property of the communist elite, increasingly removed from ordinary people. The elite of the country, from Olympic medalwinners to pop singers, ministers, official guests from abroad, state-approved film-makers, writers and scientists – all came to court, record, consult or just gawk at Vanga. She received them. She had her vanities and enjoyed being important. Like any high-profile individual, to survive she had to swim in a toxic political soup. I am surrounded by morally unclean people, they’re all after money, they don’t get it that money has no value whatsoever, she complained to her family.

  Stoyna the ascetic had never been confronted with power in this way. Her life had been pure and obscure, a true mystic.

  Though Vanga was conservative, patriarchal and judgemental, she kept the measure of things, rarely lost her equanimity and sent cynical visitors packing. Because what she could see inside people gave her the last word. There were cases of visitors losing the ground beneath their feet and fainting from the shock of what she had seen inside them – their innermost secrets. The slimy soul inside, as Vanga would put it. Powerful men and vain artists from all over the Soviet bloc seemed especially prone to passing out.