Saint Elijah was everywhere in the thunderous valley, this avatar of the old shamanic deity of lightning, fire and fertility, Perun, brought into the valley by early Asian settlers. In Greek mythology, Perun’s equivalent is Zeus, and in Norse mythology, it’s Thor. Perun is a many-faced god, a shape-shifter represented with scales of precious metals on his body, like a forger burning in the fire of his own metallurgy or a dragon of creation. The dragon-snake known as the zmey is an expression of this creative fire. The zmey travels across realms like a ball of fire and when it hits the ground, it may turn into a human. Though if you are unlucky enough to see this, you’ll waste away and die, unless a healer is at hand to make you a strong herbal brew. The zmey is a custodian of harvests, weather and desire.

  Every morning the valley opened for the new day like a lotus, the green abyss below ran with sun-quickened juices, the blue outline of Pirin lay ahead like a substance to be tasted, but for now, a spoonful at a time was enough because too much would knock you out. The enchantment was such that part of me lifted off the creaky floor of the veranda and carried on past the Kanina clefts, over the valley, from where I saw a further mountain to the south and another one in the north. The southern mountain was a separate entity, a ring of volcanoes, quivering like a mirage in the bodiless air. That was the oldest massif in the Balkans, Ali Botush, renamed Slavyanka, though it looked neither like Ali’s boot nor like a Slavonian woman. It looked like the spine of a curled-up reptile. The distant blue mountain to the north was Rila (Reela), where Mesta originates below Musala Peak, 2,925 metres high and meaning ‘close to God’.

  My projected self hung over the valley like a swallow separated from the flock, disoriented by so many delicious prospects and for a moment was tempted to fly down the corridor, through the open gate of the mountains towards the Aegean light and the delta, or perhaps the other way, north and head to the source. But it returned to the veranda instead, to have breakfast.

  I spent entire days in the house, sipping oregano tea and moving piles of books from veranda to garden, pretending to do work. All I wanted was to drink in this place. Juicy nettles grew in the plunging undergrowth and I faced bramble and snakes to make nettle risotto. A small scorpion lived in the kitchen sink. Some hefty animal made itself known in the roof every evening, but I only caught a glimpse of it once when it slithered onto the elder tree, looking like an alarmingly large lizard. Big red ants crossed the courtyard. What they were doing, I couldn’t tell. Perhaps you don’t always have to know what you are doing or why, just that you have to. At night, when they went into their hole, I sat on a stump and listened. Poets are always right: the ants were singing.

  The setting sun lit the wall of Pirin. The air was still and transparent, so mild I could drink it like a potion. One afternoon, the air became turbid and sepia-coloured, the mountain more distant and the atmosphere turned poignant as if we’d been sent into the past without warning.

  ‘Desert dust from Africa,’ said my neighbours. It happened sometimes. Saharan currents travelled across the Aegean and up the Mesta corridor.

  Clouds of midge-like flies moved over the green abyss, making and unmaking dark shapes and the moment the sun slid behind Pirin, they were gone.

  Another evening, a sunny rain came down, except I couldn’t see it or even feel it, only hear its drumming on the leaves of the elder.

  One night, I slept on the veranda futon. When I lay down, I was boxed in and all I could see was the sky. The moon was halfway between new and full. I felt halfway too. I dreamt of stars, millions of stars. If you aren’t used to sleeping roofless, it throws you. Because there is no boundary between sleep and awareness under the stars, I dreamt that I opened my eyes and saw millions of stars. I had never seen so many stars, except one winter night on the Hebridean island of Uist. I lay floating above the valley, stupefied by how little I know about stars, about anything. I can’t comprehend where and what I am in relation to the stars. They call me with their star voices and I get up and lean against the wooden railing. The elder strokes my arm in recognition. Down in the valley, the city lights twinkle like glow-worms in a cave. Nikopolis is lit by firetorches. I see horsemen on the floor of the valley, galloping, loaded up with goods. When Nikopolis was attacked, a few of the besieged loaded up the city’s gold on horseback, put the horseshoes backwards on the animals and fled the city through an underground tunnel that led to a cave along the Mesta, nobody knows where. The tunnel hasn’t been found either, but the people of the valley have seen the guardian of the ruined city. Its shadow keeps watch over the remains, it has seen the stone thieves (all of them locals) and one of these days, the guardian shadow will emerge into the light and tell all.

  Then a gunshot wakes me up. It is still night-time. Out in the cosmos it is always night-time. I have no idea why someone is out in the forest with a gun at this time. I can’t go back to sleep. The stars are under my closed eyelids and I lie there until dawn, as if shot. I see the Milky Way and maybe Venus and Orion. The people of the valley named stars and constellations their own way: The Shepherdess; The Nomads (the Pleiadeans); The Priest’s Hay (Orion) because once there was a priest so thieving that he stole hay from the poor and as he walked, the hay dropped behind him as a reminder of his crime. The children of the valley had been treated with herb poultices and incantations for ‘moon seizure’, a malaise thought to be caused by the moon.

  The birds awaken before dawn. I get up and make oregano tea.

  ‘One night this summer, I woke up and looked at the sky,’ said my neighbour the painter in the morning. ‘And I saw the constellation of Orion the wrong way up. It’s always horizontal and now it was vertical! My God, I thought, the earth has turned upside down, the magnetic field has dropped. I had to wake them up.’

  The three of them stood on the veranda and looked at the night sky. Orion ‘The Hunter’ was in its place, running across the galaxy with big strides, but a colony of new satellites had been launched by Elon Musk’s company and that is what she had seen.

  In Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, Carl Jung cites an early writer who describes the Christ as the one who could ‘join the Pleiades and loosen the bands of Orion’. A cryptic meeting of cosmos and poetry in the archetype of the Christ, who in the context of human consciousness embodies the psyche healed. The whole self. For some reason, I think of this when I think of the three residents of the Empty Village. As the aeon of patriarchal Abrahamic religions wanes, we still have Orion, the Pleiades, Mars, the moon and especially the earth to awaken to. For we seem to have been dozing among the stars.

  I see the three residents – perched on the eastern balcony of the valley, the only humans awake at that hour of the night – the woman wrapped in a shawl, the white-bearded man with bare feet, the Afro-haired boy next to them who would soon leave home, looking for the right constellation. And I know that, like the cosmos, the Empty Village is not empty, not empty at all.

  Brightness of the mountain

  Its heads of purple and white mini-cups make me think not of some Mediterranean place, but of my garden in Scotland. Oregano comes from the Greek oros for mountain and ganos for bright. Its use goes back to remote antiquity. Mythical Olympus was fragrant with its flowers and for millennia oregano has been known to give feelings of well-being. Bright feelings. A cup of oregano lifts you up, as if it knows what you need to feel good and provides it. If you have congestion in your airways, muscles, endocrine glands and if you are overrun with a bad kind of bacteria, which you probably are, oregano will help. Our predecessors used it against convulsions and poisoning. A type of oregano called Amaracus is mentioned by Homer and other ancient writers as an aid for stomach ulcers and to induce uterine contractions. In her twentieth-century plant bible, A Modern Herbal, Maud Grieve mentions that to protect dairy milk from ‘turning’ when thunder struck, peasants placed bunches of oregano and thyme next to it. Here in the valley of Thunder and Fire, it makes sense.

  Looking for a way to the Kanina River and not finding it, I found oregano instead. I waded through the wild growth, where women had spent their lives bent down between spring equinox and the end of harvest with their hands in the earth and their long hair tied up in headscarves, singing and cursing, vibrating with the brightness of the mountain, their men gone down the Aegean corridor, their destiny cast against this flank of the valley for better or worse. And I had no idea whether things were better or worse now, here where the river can’t be reached, only its canto heard and wild oregano still grows.

  Blueberry Blood

  Dogwood was a patchwork of houses that clung to the steep terraces of Old Woods. You entered and exited it through a long street that began and ended with barns, and along that street were two wholesale buyers of plants: Rocky the Enchanter and the Ayrolevs. Ayrolev Senior was the region’s plant guru, but I had missed him by a few weeks. I found his widow, his daughter Djemilé and his son-in-law who ran the business now.

  Entering their warehouse was like stepping into a temple. The first thing was the smell. A busy smell of wormy soil and whispering roots, of shrivelled buds that resurrected in water, of dried petals that turned your head with their pheromones and glossy berry leaves that looked ordinary underfoot in the forest, but could poison you or save your life, depending on the dose. A smell of vegetal beings, ancient and immutable. A smell that said ‘Stop and take off your shoes’ and also, ‘Come in, come in, come in’.

  The warehouse, once used as a barn and then a saw-mill, was stuffed with jumbo sacks. Djemilé took me a on a quick tour while her husband and their son itemised stock. The couple were teachers in the village school, and the business was done on weekends and late evenings. He looked tired if dapper, with a paisley cravat, and she was a relaxed-faced woman in floral shalvars and a blue overcoat that she wore undone. I saw what an ingenious piece of clothing the Pomak mantle was, with its pockets and back cover. Underneath it, you could carry any amount of stuff on your person, dress as you pleased and shelter from sun and wind. You looked like a cross between a factory worker and a bee keeper.

  ‘Thyme, an all-time favourite. Take a pinch.’ The half-wood, half-flower fragrance that always delights. ‘People drink it for everything.’

  We moved to the next bag.

  ‘Calendula?’ I tried to show off. I had only recently started recognising common herbs. Or almost recognising them.

  ‘Marigold,’ Djemilé buried her fingers in the dried yellow heads. ‘They’re related.’

  ‘Bearberry!’ I couldn’t help myself. She smiled at my enthusiasm.

  ‘Mountain cranberry, stems and leaves. Uva ursi, or bearberry, is banned at the moment. Ruthless picking. People pulled it up by the roots. Careless government policy contributed. But we do have bearberry over here. From Spain.’

  I kept quiet about the fact that the previous day I’d gone up to the Thracian sanctuary of Goat Stone by Beslet and picked some. My guide had shown me how to tell uva ursi – ‘bear berry’ because bears eat the fruit – apart from cranberry, whose leaves and fruit are similar. Both have made a huge contribution to the health of humans’ urinary tracts, and presumably bears’. They were so abundant that he encouraged me to carefully cut a handful of leaves from both with my pocket knife. ‘You can nip bladder infections in the bud with a strong brew and avoid antibiotics,’ he said, and it’s a fact.

  ‘Bearberry is our most sought-after plant,’ said Djemilé in the warehouse.

  The bearberry they sourced from Spain was sold to pharmacies and herbalists here. People don’t discuss their urinary tracts much, but these infections are more common than you’d imagine, in people of all ages and genders.

  Other medicinal herbs on the red list were yellow gentian, and blue gentian was on the brink of being endangered. Also on the list was golden root or rhodiola, a highly prized herb.

  ‘Golden root is a powerful immune booster and mood regulator. Known as Bulgarian ginseng but we haven’t dealt in it for some time. It was exhausted by incorrect picking.’

  ‘The biggest problem is there’s no gatherers left,’ her husband came over, covered in fine vegetal dust after moving sacks. They were both slender people with an alert intelligence about them. Their son hovered in the background with a notepad.

  ‘The shortage of qualified pickers, plus lack of regulation on the ground, led to poor picking and general shambles,’ said the husband.

  ‘The irony is, everybody goes to pick berries and mushrooms in Western Europe instead of here. We fall back on the Roma. Without them, we’re lost,’ said Djemilé.

  The roots of this trade are deep. Plant gathering and dealing is passed down through the millennia by people like Djemilé who live in wild-ish places, and that means high places. Only high places survive plagues, floods, invasions and industrialisation. Because industrialisation came very late, wild plant harvesting and dealership survived. I sensed the stakes of this trade were as high as its roots were deep – but just how high and how deep, I didn’t yet grasp.

  We stopped by a bag full of the yellow-green tips of mursala. Known locally as Pirin tea, this rarefied plant looks the way it tastes – of the higher realms. It is endangered in the wild, but cultivated in Pirin, Rhodope, Slavyanka and Shar Mountain in Macedonia, and this batch came from there. Perhaps it was cheaper, or perhaps the large quantities they needed could not be supplied by local growers alone.

  The Ayrolevs bought herbs from Macedonia, Albania, Spain and here, and sold them to big producers in Bulgaria and Greece. From Greece, they often travelled repackaged to America and Western Europe, renamed and with a much higher pricetag.

  The mursala grown and picked in Bulgaria and Macedonia was sold internationally as Greek mountain tea.

  ‘I can’t drink mursala,’ Djemilé said. ‘It’s too stimulating. I get jittery.’

  Months later, when I found myself feeling a little too invulnerable, I reviewed which herb I’d been drinking the most. It was my favourite: mursala. I went off it but then found myself throwing a tip or two in my daily brew again. When you ingest the emanation of a plant, your body becomes coupled with its essential body. Mursala gave me a sense of how Balkan warriors from Alexander the Great onwards must have felt before going into battle, fortified by this velvety plant. It was the Balkan equivalent of whatever the Vikings took to make them berserk. Its official name, Sideritis sciardica, means the iron one for a good reason – it makes you powerful because it strengthens the blood, the immune system, the waterways and the respiratory tract.

  Could I buy some mursala off them? No, they were wholesalers.

  ‘We deal in large quantities only,’ Djemilé said.

  Commercial clients drove here and filled their vans. Or the Ayrolevs filled up their van and delivered.

  ‘This is a competitive business. Everything must be freshly dried.’

  If a plant was over a year old, you couldn’t sell it.

  ‘This is St John’s wort. It was almost extinct. It fetched a high price in America, so people went crazy picking it. Fortunately, it restored itself.’

  Everywhere in the mountains here, I saw its distinctive yellow florets with faint red spots perched along long stems, but they were not distinctive to me straight away. It took a while to tell it apart from other yellow-flowered plants of the same height. The clue was in the leaves, which gave the plant its Latin name, Hypericum perforatum, because the minute sweat glands along the leaves’ edges look like perforations. In Scotland, I found it a few metres from my door. It had been there all along, delighting the bees. Drunk as a tea, it has an almost instant uplifting effect, like sunshine. I don’t imagine there is depression among the bees that hang around it. In Britain, people found it was most potent when picked on summer solstice. That’s why it was later called St John’s, because that saint’s day is around solstice. Wort just means plant or herb in old English and many things are called ‘wort’. A simple salve of this noble wort helps with burns and cold sores.

  ‘Once there was a red variety, but it’s rare now,’ Djemilé said.

  That’s European centaury. It was revered as a panacea in antiquity and it’s still known to be an exceptional plant, especially for the gut and for fever, hence its folk name, feverwort. I’ve taken it in a tincture for a sluggish liver. Its taxonomic name Centaurium erythraea literally means ‘red centaur’ (though its flowers are pink). Its cure-all reputation is in its name, after Chiron – the wounded healer, wise centaur and teacher horse-man. Chiron is the original healer of the forest who passed on his knowledge to his human students, including the healer Asclepius. He was of the mountainous Thessalian tribe of half-humans, half-horses and it seems apt that he died after being accidentally poisoned by one of his own students: Heracles.

  Centaury is of the gentian family and has nothing in common with St John’s wort which is of the Hypericum family. But their leaves and flowers are similar shapes and perhaps that is why here they are called red centaury and yellow centaury. In the Bach Flower Remedies, centaury essence is given to those ‘willing servants who find it hard to say no’. The Bach Flower Remedies is a system for emotional balance where a plant essence is matched to an emotional problem. It was devised by the pioneering English phytotherapist Edward Bach. Most people know of the trademark Bach Rescue Remedy.

  ‘Yarrow,’ Djemilé walked on past the mounds. ‘Oregano.’

  The bags were dense and heavy.

  ‘Restharrow. The roots are dug up.’

  Restharrow? I’d never heard of it.

  ‘It has a long history. Mostly used for urinary problems. It has diuretic and antiseptic properties. I remember learning from my father how to dig it up. It’s easier after rain. The whole plant comes to you without force.’

  Restharrow was the bane of farmers during ploughing season. Its roots are deep and get tangled in the teeth of the harrows, and it was named thunder thistle in Bulgarian and Spanish because its spikes crackle when it is crushed.