‘Wild cumin. It fetches a high price because it’s sought after in the culinary industry and people overpick it.’

  Fifty euro per kilo was a lot for here, but to get a kilo of cumin seeds took a long time. When I travelled up the Kanina, my guide stopped at a riverside meadow of wild cumin, St John’s wort, mint, yarrow and blue oregano, and we became lost in it for a time, each on different sides of the river. He was keen to find cumin and I was suddenly taken with the mint. It’s common enough but on that meadow, it was flowering like crazy and full of bees and butterflies, a buzzing world of silence and colour. I stepped into the knee-high mint and disappeared from myself.

  ‘Lavender,’ Djemilé continued with the tour.

  The zing of it, like a sigh of relief. You can’t mistake lavender for another.

  ‘Here’s juniper. We sell it to a firm that makes essential oils.’

  But juniper was being depleted by savage practices; some pickers sawed off entire branches, and then boiled them whole for the essential oil. It killed the plant, which has a long cycle of growth. Juniper berries, which are in fact cones, take two years to ripen.

  What was it like to grow up with mounds of plants like this all around you? I was overwhelmed by the signals sent out by the sacks of herbs, as if they all spoke at the same time, each in their own language. And I was unable to answer back.

  ‘It takes practice,’ Djemilé said. ‘Early on I learned to walk into a room, sniff the air and work out what mushrooms and herbs are in the room without seeing them. It’s like blueberry blood runs in my veins. My parents dealt in plants for sixty years and I was around for forty-five of those. I don’t know how else to put it.’

  She smiled her sober smile. Lavish language and overstatement had no place in Dogwood. This place was about survival.

  Waves of institutionalised terror had afflicted the Pomaks, who were a small but symbolic minority, in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. These experiences were not mentioned to outsiders. Where do you begin? And they were rarely discussed within the community. It was too painful. People carried it inside themselves. There had been no process of truth and reconciliation on a national level, only on a local one, privately. You could pass through the Mesta Valley without realising you were treading on trauma. In 1972, the state mounted a campaign to change the Turkish-Arabic-Persian names of all Pomaks. The campaign started with bureaucracy and ended with murder. Shop signs went up in the Mesta region: ‘Persons in traditional dress will not be served’ and ‘Speakers of foreign languages are banned’. They meant women in shalvars and men in skull caps. And it meant Turkish speakers but in a region where Turkish is not spoken, it was staggeringly stupid, like the whole campaign. It showed how little the state knew about those whose lives it wrecked with casual brutality.

  Danera the cook’s mother had been at the spring in the Empty Village when a political commissar arrived with a pair of scissors, pressed her against the sycamore and cut her shalvars up to the crotch. Danera the child witnessed this. ‘She cried with humiliation,’ Danera said, ‘and shock. Because he was from Dogwood and they’d known each other since children.’ The cutting up of shalvars and yanking off of headscarves was government policy and dividing communities by pitting the handmaidens of the regime against the rest was part of the Machiavellian plot against this vulnerable minority. Every family in the Pomak community carried memories like these.

  Djemilé and I left the warehouse and walked to a bench outside her house, where her mother sat with a friend in the morning sun. At their feet were bags of plums, apples, peppers, onions and leeks gathered earlier that morning in their gardens. People’s extensive allotments were away from their houses, up or down the hill. You needed strong legs here.

  Weather-bronzed and blue-eyed under the white headscarf draped around her neck and shoulders, Djemilé’s mother had the expression of one who had seen, felt, understood, forgiven and had no need to add anything further, but she did it out of kindness. She sat, relaxed in her ample shalvars, her face resting in sadness, hands in her lap, though these were not hands used to resting. This latest loss too, of the man with whom for sixty years she’d picked, carried, packed, dried, re-packed, marinated, eaten and talked plants, would have to be accepted because life is an illusion. She smiled at me with ease as if she recognised me. I felt that I should take off my shoes before sitting next to her.

  Her friend was a small-boned woman of seventy with a welcoming pixie-like face. She had a sadilka with her – a back harness with long cords cross-tied at the front and round the waist like I’ve seen in the Andes – made from spun wool in vivid stripy colours and used for anything you like, a baby, a newborn lamb, herbs, hay. These were once used by all country women, but only the more traditional Pomak women of Mesta used them today.

  Pixieface was known for her bread-and-vinegar recipe that cured plantar warts and I’d heard that, while tilling the land, her husband had found an intact Thracian iron helmet, now in history books.

  Both women’s hands were large and thick like men’s.

  ‘She’s interested in learning about plants,’ Djemilé said.

  ‘Which ones?’ smiled Pixieface. ‘There’s a lot of them.’

  Djemilé’s mother handed me an apple from a bag.

  Djemilé’s father had ‘contracted’ a passion for herbs as a boy. He’d disappear for days in the woods and return with a distant look and a bagful. His talent was spotted. He and his young wife became a star couple in the vast, well-structured plant industry where the workers were many and the buyer was one: the state.

  ‘Ask us specific questions because plants are us,’ said Djemilé. ‘It’s like talking about ourselves. We’re not used to it.’

  I asked about quantities because the quantities impressed me.

  ‘Things have shrunk, big time,’ Djemilé said. ‘Not the plants, they’re still there. And those that are over-picked do recover. And there’s more and more interest in natural products. People are returning to something they’ve forgotten. But the way of life has shrunk.’

  A horse-driven cart trudged by and everybody waved.

  ‘The Gypsies are the last ones,’ she went on, ‘but until twenty years ago, the whole of Mesta decamped to Beslet for the summer. Folk from upstream and downstream met at the top of Old Woods.’

  The communist state had successfully streamlined nature’s production chain in the Mesta region, giving communities employment and filling its own pockets many times over. Beslet had been one gigantic bivouac from June to September, a beehive of tents, government-regulated hotels, bungalows and kolibi, the Balkan shepherd huts. The logistical centre of this organism was the state forestry base. Thousands of families worked for them. Horses, flocks of sheep, goats, cows, all farmed in industrial-sized barns. There were farriers, foresters, canteens, warehouses for drying and processing plants, workrooms where tonnes of pine branches were boiled in cauldrons and pine oil was extracted. And crucially, a sapling-growing station with greenhouses that employed hundreds of expert agriculturists and planting hands whose task was reforestation. People sang by the evening fires, children rode horses, there were summer romances and quick sex among the berries. Overseen by the all-seeing, all-providing, all-grabbing commissars of the state who ran the whole show.

  I saw the remains of that vegetal-human web. The day before, my ex-agronomist guide and I walked around the gutted buildings of Beslet and climbed higher up to a place where he’d been manager at a cooperative, managing one hundred shepherds and several thousand sheep. The derelict animal barns were on the path to the Thracian sanctuary, Goat Stone.

  Goat Stone was a 30-metre-high labyrinth made from monumental stone slabs that appeared to be piled by an intelligent force. Over 300 cup marks were carved by a human hand in patterns that have not been deciphered yet, but archaeo-astronomers speculate that they represent constellations and were calculated to coincide with celestial movements at equinoxes and solstices. The cup marks were used to place objects and lights.

  We sat and ate lunch with a view to die for – literally, if you placed a foot wrong here, because the plunge was final. Please don’t fall, my guide said, and we munched our shop-bought cheese that tasted like plastic, not like the sheep’s cheese we made up here back in the day, he said.

  ‘And could make once again, in the right conditions,’ he added.

  I placed my water bottle inside a cup mark chiselled by unknown hands and we gazed at the black-green patch of Dark Wood Reserve, 30 square kilometres protected by the state since 1948, and where a mature mixed forest was untrodden by human feet. Beech, fir, spruce and oak. It was the last surviving patch of the original biosphere.

  ‘Dark wood once covered the whole of Old Woods.’

  Old Woods sprawled on all sides. Its bristly spine ran from southwest to northeast with an average height of 1,600 metres. We were just below the spine, on one of the ribs. It was alive, mysterious, breathing.

  ‘This is Dabrash. Old Woods,’ said my guide. ‘It could twitch and throw you off, if it felt like it.’

  It was only now I saw the multiple meaning of Old Woods. Dabrash is an ancient word that means three things in one: oak wood, dark wood and old wood. To the people who named it, oak was life itself. And there was a long-standing cult of the oak, just like in Scotland. The Gaelic name for oak grove (diure) shares a root with druid because oak trees were seen as magical portals. Oak was believed to attract lightning and Celtic festivals like Beltane at midsummer burn an oak log. Fire, passion, power. In the natural mind, the oak is a conduit of the sun.

  ‘A single old oak tree supports up to a thousand species of plant and insect, did you know this?’ my guide said.

  Of course I didn’t. I am trained to think of species separately. The tree, the mushroom, the person. My Beauly River is lined with individual oaks hundreds of years old. They are what’s left of the giant oak forests of Scotland. There is a timber spell once spoken by wood carvers, who incidentally knew not to cut a tree during a waning moon because at that time the sap goes to feed the roots and makes the body weak:

  Choose the willow of the streams,

  Choose the hazel of the rocks,

  Choose the alder of the marshes,

  Choose the birch of the waterfalls.

  Choose the ash of the shade,

  Choose the yew of resilience,

  Choose the elm of the brae,

  Choose the oak of the sun.

  We descended Goat Stone. Even after seventy years of depredation, this realm of pine and sycamore felt awesomely remote. We saw where the Kanina was fattened by a tributary, Witchy River, with thrilling meanders and secret meadows. The place where they forked was marked by the cement and iron remains of a collapsed communist-era bridge. Upstream, the Witchy River was a demilitarised site from communist times called the Army Barracks. Here too, the forest had quickly swallowed up the politics.

  At the Beslet station, Gypsy tents were scattered on the meadows. Some of the Roma pickers squatted in the gutted buildings of communist-era hostels and festooned the rusted railings with laundry washed in the river. Horses grazed. Children ran around bare-bottomed with T-shirts on and women had long Gypsy skirts and tresses. It was a tatty, timeless tableau. There were a few tourist tents too.

  ‘Yes,’ my guide said. ‘Life was lived up here like this. This region is the richest in wood in the country, if not in the Balkans. Or was. There were many more hawks and eagles too, now you barely see them. There was more of everything.’

  Communist-era signs hung on broken nails.

  ‘IN THE FIGHT AGAINST NATURE, WE SHALL BE VICTORIOUS!’

  My guide smiled sadly. ‘They failed, but didn’t fail enough.’

  The destruction of native forests began during Communism and with it, the cycle of erosion and micro-climate change. One day in 1985 my guide was riding his motorbike along Bear’s Creek, returning from a visit to the shepherds on Beslet, when a tornado hit the mountain, one of those that go down in history. Old Woods was famous for its once-a-century cyclones.

  ‘I felt it approach like a beast, something was sucked from the air, then the whole forest leaned on the ground and everything went black.’

  He ran under a bridge that we passed, an old little bridge you wouldn’t notice even as you crossed it because it’s part of the landscape. That bridge had saved his life. In the deafening crash he saw his motorbike fly through the air. When the storm passed he walked down to Dogwood, across a battlefield of uprooted pines. It took brigades of forestry workers years to clear Old Woods.

  ‘But at least there used to be strict reforestation,’ said Djemilé on the bench.

  Whole villages were roped into replanting campaigns. The men made holes in the soil with iron spikes and the women planted saplings.

  ‘Now there’s no replanting,’ said her mother.

  I remembered those childhood brigades. How we collected recycled paper at home and sold it in bundles for small change at school (the children of intellectuals always had the largest bundles because of our parents’ old academic manuals for which there was no space in small flats!). How we had rubbish-collecting Saturdays in the neighbourhood and I liked it because we were outside on the grass among the concrete buildings. True, these were compulsory activities, but we relished the results. You also knew that if you threw a wrapper on the street, it would be you that picked it up later.

  ‘When I smell pine, it takes me back to those summers,’ said Djemilé. ‘You asked about quantities. We picked tonnes of blueberries every summer. Literally tonnes. Our fingers were permanently blue. Blueberry is sticky. Cranberry and bearberry are easier. A skilled gatherer could collect 50 kilos of berries a day.’

  Fifty kilos!

  ‘Wild strawberries are the hardest to pick because they bruise,’ said her mother. ‘You pick them in a vessel, in small quantities.’

  Strawberry leaves were picked for tea too, like raspberry leaves.

  ‘There was a hierarchy, so only a few pickers dealt in soft fruit,’ said Djemilé.

  The Ayrolevs were top of the crop and could pick twelve whisky-sized barrels of raspberries in a single day and have them clean by the small hours. They’d stay up at night processing berries or mushrooms because they couldn’t wait.

  ‘At dusk, you’d see stags cross the river,’ her mother smiled at the memory. ‘Slowly, slowly. Kings of the forest with a crown of horns. Now the hunters shoot them all.’

  During Communism, environmental and human crime had strictly been the domain of the state and its servants. Now, crime was not just endemic, it was ubiquitous. ‘Because of their productivity, my parents had certain privileges,’ Djemilé said. ‘They were paid in hard currency and given bonuses like the odd holiday abroad.’

  They’d been under the patronage of cooperative directors who made the fattest cut without having to lift a finger.

  The pixie-faced woman had worked with her husband at the hydroelectric stations in upper Kanina and the Witchy River. They’d lived there all year round in basic accommodation. In winter, she’d break a hole in the snow, put a cauldron inside, light a fire underneath and wash her children’s nappies.

  ‘Life was tough and I was tough, and the children were tough,’ she said fondly. ‘Even the bears didn’t faze us.’

  Djemilé’s mother nodded. But in the 1980s, a double blight struck the family. Ayrolev Senior had elderly grandparents and one night their house caught fire. Another grandson who lived next door dived into the flames and found them hacked to death with an axe. He carried them out of the flames and laid them out on the street. Private murders were unheard of during the dictatorship, precisely because crime and power converged and in this community, everyone was disempowered except those who went around cutting up women’s trousers and being promoted for it. The murder remained unsolved, but the backstory tells of a hoard of gold belonging to the matriarch’s clan and that the thief-murderer allegedly wanted. But much more likely, and darkly, the secret police had orchestrated events. Their agents were everywhere and the Pomaks were marked for extra harsh treatment. The grandson who found the couple and who’d been a notorious gambler and entrepreneur, and overplayed his luck with the authorities was instantly framed and spent a year in jail under torture. He was made to stand in freezing water and deprived of sleep. The secret police could do anything to you if you were awkward. The hoard of gold was never found.

  Djemilé’s father had insisted on burying his slaughtered grandparents the traditional Muslim way, without a coffin, wrapped in canvas. But the state had outlawed all Pomak customs: funerals; weddings; dress; names, so he was sacked from his job. But Djemilé’s parents bounced back and found jobs in the plant cooperative in Thunder, which harvested up to 1 million tonnes of Golden Delicious apples per season. No doubt the Ayrolevs contributed to that Stakhanovite output.

  ‘Then democracy came and they set up the family business,’ said Djemilé. ‘Going for thirty years now.’

  Her mother gave me a plum. Other women came and went to our bench for a spot of gossip, all in shalvars with bags of garlic, tomatoes, oregano and mursala tea which was cultivated here. These latest harvestings were discussed, munched and recipes were shared. I couldn’t buy anything here, but I ended up with a bag of edible gifts, given to me with hands that were as brown, veined and great as the earth.

  I asked Djemilé where her favourite place was.

  ‘Pine,’ she said. ‘When I step into a pine forest, it’s like going home.’

  ‘Many used to go up to the stone. That was their special place,’ said her mother.

  The stone was a cult site in the hills with a submerged cave containing ‘treasure’.

  ‘A snake guards that rock,’ said the pixie-faced friend matter-of-factly. ‘A girl was snatched from the village dance by a nymph who lived at the stone. She was the snake in human guise.’

  ‘Aye, my great-grandmother worshipped that stone, the murdered one,’ said Djemilé. ‘Even if the hodja told her off.’