Hodjas are clerics, teachers or just wise men and women who serve the community in some way. The church and the mosque, and especially the Communist Party, had officially frowned on nature veneration, but unofficially made use of it themselves. The way people worshipped, or not, remained deeply syncretic. Ritual and habit were blended in the chalice of time and marriage. Like with place names and people’s names, echoes of things past were heard clearly in things present. The historian Noel Malcolm calls this shape-shifting quality of the Balkan peoples ‘religious amphibianism’. Like a creature of the woods too wondrous to behold by the mundane gaze, this quality was reduced by those whose aim was centralised power. The byproduct and the result of tyranny is homogenisation in humans, plants, all ways of life. Shapeshifting is a threat to tyranny.

  But you could still see it in action. The worship of stones and springs has never gone away here, because wild nature itself has not gone away – it was too great to destroy. And another thing, there has never been organised persecution of folk practices in Bulgaria.

  This is why the stone above the village was visited by countless generations of women. They went to perform rituals for healing and fertility, for the ruination of their rivals, perhaps to bawl their eyes out or make love with the wrong men, anything they couldn’t do in the village. It was a place where human taboo was normalised by nature.

  I asked Djemilé’s mother if she used herbs.

  ‘We do, in cooking. But, I’ve been in herbs all my life,’ she spoke for the first time. ‘And may they rest in peace, those cured by herbs. Sip your thyme tea daily, don’t be a stress bunny and try not to get sick is all I can say.’

  Pixieface had buried her husband, sister and brother. Her husband had worked in a uranium mine upstream and died young from cancer. Her sister had unbraided her hair one evening, turned to her and said: ‘It has come for me,’ and fallen down dead there and then.

  ‘The most medicinal plant in this region is elder,’ said Djemilé.

  ‘Every part is used,’ said Pixieface. ‘Leaves, flowers, fruit. Every plant has its uses. Broom. We used to make sweeping broom and broom chutney. You boil it.’

  The most elusive wild plant was called the enchanter.

  ‘Believed to act even at a distance,’ said Djemilé. ‘But I’ve never tried it.’

  ‘Let me tell you about the enchanter,’ said the mother. ‘A couple came to us, he was looking for something to make her want him again. We gave them the enchanter. Like a joke, but a year later, he came back to thank me. She turned, he says!’

  She rubbed my hip, pretending to hold an enchanter flower, suggesting how a woman turns and laughed for the first time. Enchanter is the charming avens, a small red flower with a yellow centre. It could no longer be found in Old Woods.

  ‘Come,’ said Pixieface and took my hand, ‘I’ll show you my special place.’

  She strapped on her sadilka full of herbs and we said goodbye to the Ayrolevs, whose legacy might be continued by Dejmilé’s son who had grown up in a house of plants, just like his mother.

  ‘Because plants and us go a long way back,’ Djemilé said in parting. ‘And have a long way more to go.’

  Pixieface took me on a goat path along the cliffs to another tributary. Here were idyllic water features, huts and shelters, and a flower garden, where she came to contemplate things. This was her holiday spot.

  ‘I get up at five and by nine I’m done in the garden,’ she said. We sat on stumps by a chattering weir and picked plums from a tree. ‘Then I come here to be alone.’

  It was about the water. She’d spent her life measuring the levels of the Kanina and doing maintenance at the stations upstream. She cleaned detritus in the stream with a hook, monitored the shifts of the river bed and shored it up with stones and sand.

  ‘I worked like a man, but one day I see that my pay is less. So I walk up to the boss and go, “What’s up with the pay, after all the rocks I’ve moved?” He raised my pay on the spot and now I get a nice big pension.’

  It was dangerous work, like all forest work. Some traced the name of Kanina to the Arabic for ‘blood’. It ran with blood during a forced Islamisation campaign in the seventeenth century, one story went. It ran red with the blood of men transporting logs, another story told. In the impassable forests, rivers had served as transportation channels. Loggers manoeuvred tree trunks downstream from the shallows with chained hooks and were often swept away and crushed to death. Well into the mid-twentieth century! I learned this up at Beslet and my ex-agronomist guide smiled at my surprise. Yes, he said, rivers went out of use only in the late 1940s when the Communists began a shock mass-scale industrialisation of our agricultural communities, and the first roads were built in the Valley. Until twenty-five years ago, logs were dragged on chains by yoked buffalo pairs, through the forest where no trucks could pass. When they were no longer needed, the buffalo were slaughtered.

  Pixieface often dreamt of the rivers where she had spent her life. The Witchy one moved like a snake through the forest of her dreams. The Kanina was no longer bloody, but it still cantoed.

  ‘Dreams are true, you know,’ she said. ‘Sometimes truer than the rest.’

  That’s why she came to sit here, to be close to the sound of water. Everything here was spiralling, without straight lines, the way it needed to be. It was impossible to follow the rivers all the way upstream because of plunging metamorphic shores. The level had fallen over the decades because of deforestation and the hydroelectric diverting the flow excessively, often to feed into lucrative hydro schemes. Astonishingly, this river was untouched until 1969 when its major tributaries were captured for the first time in its millennial life.

  My guide, the ex-agronomist, showed me where the Kanina was diverted. And he showed me some of the unexpected silver lining of the last thirty years. Self-seeded reforestation was taking place, thanks to the perfect climate, and some harmful practices had stopped. We saw a forest of scarred white (Scots) pines, where the lower bark had been cut and bled through horizontal incisions for resin. This stripped the bark and stunted the tree further up. The resin has medicinal and industrial uses and was harvested in this brutal manner, but no longer. It occurred to me that the prized balsamic oils of myrrh and benzoin were harvested in the same surgical way. The benzoin tree is bled and disabled at the age of seven to make it secrete its resin.

  I saw that meadows, pastures and all forest clearings are man-made, and how the disappearance of large-scale animal husbandry led to slow but natural rewilding. The man-made holes were closing up. Among the monoculture pine plantations other species took root. They travelled on the wind from Pirin across the valley. The forest was healing itself by recovering some of its original variety.

  ‘And we need the same to happen with people,’ said my guide, and handed me a small bunch of wild cumin, on that river meadow where we lost track of time. ‘Those of us who stayed behind have been damaged by the mafia state. If those who left decades ago returned, you’d help rebalance things.’

  I had left the country of my birth thirty years ago. Could I live here again without having my heart broken by all that has gone wrong?

  We walked to the car with our bunches of herbs. His eyes welled up. It was the cumin, the meadow, all that had happened here to animals, humans, plants and that he had witnessed, colluded with, fought against and accepted. Everything vibrated at the merest touch and made me want to save it forever.

  Rewilding and re-peopling. It was about restoring a network of people and plants that understand each other. My guide used to hunt.

  ‘I’ll tell you how I stopped. One day I shot a roe deer. When I approached, she looked me in the eye and she was crying. I saw what a stupid and perverse animal man is, the only animal that kills for pleasure. And I was ashamed.’

  He’d thrown his rifle on the forest floor and sat by the dying deer.

  Back home on the veranda, I drew the network of rivers and the peaks of the Kanina and Witchy rivers. I wanted to capture their shape with my own hand and stay close to them that way.

  That night I had a dream in which a man appeared at the Kanina hydrostation where Pixieface had worked. He wore the overalls of hydroworkers, and a safety helmet. He was telling me something. The thunder of the waterfall was deafening. Somehow, here was the original waterfall as it had been before the hydrostation. I understood him because he could convey things telepathically. He was a custodian and wanted me to know that the river is not what it was, that it’s been reduced, because the forest was reduced.

  Reduced, his mouth kept saying.

  But he also wanted me to know that the river is still great. That’s why he’d brought me here, to show me that the river is still itself. Look, it is still a great river and he shone a torch of white light at the waterfall. He wanted me not to give up on it. I was filled with tenderness for him and his river, because it was my river too and the Kanina waterfalls dammed up were also the Beauly waterfalls dammed up.

  The following summer, I came to see Pixieface again. She was making pastry with a friend for a grandson’s wedding. They invited me to learn how to roll pastry.

  ‘No, we’re not afraid of death,’ they said when I mentioned the pandemic, by then in its first season. ‘We get together and enjoy our little selves.’

  Pandemics come and go, but the main event is to have no fear and enjoy your little self, they said. ‘Well done, you folded that bit nicely,’ they praised my pastry-making efforts. Did they mind that the young women of Dogwood no longer wore traditional shalvars, the same shalvars they’d suffered so much for the right to wear?

  ‘Ach, no,’ they said. ‘That was then and this is now. The young must do what’s best for them.’

  These women had seen through the veil of nostalgia and rejected it for something more nourishing: the present.

  Until the late 1950s the people, like the river, were untouched by industry.

  ‘We had no jars, no tins, no plastic,’ said Djemilé. ‘And no pesticides.’

  ‘Everything was sundried,’ said her friend. And completely organic.

  The communist state introduced mechanisation for a few decades. Once the Soviet system fell apart and the economy went into freefall, the mountain and its people were left to survive any way they could. Things drifted back to their default condition, then globalisation and digital technology opened the door to the wider world.

  This generation of women, born in the mid-twentieth century, had weathered historic eras, political regimes and environmental change. In addition to the terror campaigns, there had been two shocks. First, in the 1950s, the forced nationalisation of land and animals to create the totalitarian economy. And second, the collapse of that way of life forty years later. The planned economy eventually ground to a halt. It meant living with a chronic deficit of everything, except propaganda. In the 1980s we lived with empty shops and shortages of everything, from cars and furniture, to food and clothes. There was no choice to speak of. People were grateful to have one type of everything, as opposed to none. It was permanently pandemic-like conditions for all, except the governing kleptocracy. Bulgaria was reknowned as the garden of Eastern Europe but the bulk of crops, forestry and other natural products was exported. The food you couldn’t find in the shops, you found in the allotment of your country relatives.

  In 1932, a correspondent for National Geographic magazine travelled through the country and titled his essay ‘Bulgaria, Farm Land without a Farmhouse’. The absence of American-style farmhouses puzzled him, then he realised that the farmhouse was the entire village and its countryside. Here, the village was always a place of production and self-sufficiency. To be a peasant or villager meant working the land and often, that was your own land. To be a villager was by no means to be a serf. The merchant class in turn linked producers and consumers. My Danubian grandmother’s father came from a clan wealthy enough to send him to study viticulture at Heidelberg University for a few years, after which he co-founded the hugely successful Gamza wine cooperative with his fellow villagers. It was thriving at the time our American correspondent visited. And less thriving once it was nationalised twenty years later and experts like my great-grandfather were banished. The family was stripped of their houses in the village and he was even stripped of a pension and lived out his days in the capital, sharing a one-bedroom flat with his other daughter.

  A man said to our American correspondent: ‘Our poverty is our wealth’ and this holds true once again nearly a century later. Back then, it was about a non-industrial nation weathering the Great Depression through self-sufficiency and the source of resilience was the working village. Between national independence in the late nineteenth century and the arrival of the Soviets, this was a prospering agricultural economy. The vast majority of people owned land and cultivated it. The shock industrialisation and urbanisation imposed by the Soviet system wrenched people from their ancestral lands. The Soviet machine ploughed into living flesh. To own land became ‘bourgeois’ which made you an ‘enemy of the state’. The state then took your land. This is how a new ‘working class’ of dispossessed people was beaten out of the agricultural and merchant class: with theft and murder. And this was the beginning of the shaming of the village. Something similar had taken place generations before in Western Europe during Industrialisation, when villagers were conscripted into the ghettoes of new mining towns to fill the pockets of Empire.

  Today, the large-scale manufacturing of Communism is gone, agriculture is ten per cent of what it had been and it is back to self-reliance in these almost-working villages. Women like Djemilé’s mother and Pixieface were at the heart of it. It was women and men of their generation that had the skills to pass on. And in a depleted natural world, there was the added value of rewilding through neglect. The problem was that the next generations who were meant to receive these skills were working in foreign countries, or not interested. They had inherited the shame of the violated. Every family owned land but the young didn’t want to be landowners. The transmission chain was hanging by a thread. Djemilé and her son were the exception.

  When a village loses its earth experts, it becomes an empty village. The nature culture link is uncoupled. It turns into a resort, or becomes a satellite suburb, or goes feral; a place neither cultivated nor wild, with ruined houses, heartbroken old people and illiterate youths from the nearest ’hood looking for something to sell, recycle or steal.

  When I visit my grandmother’s ancestral village and see the handsome houses that were once full of people and plants, I find derelict courtyards where wild vines grow, and the silence of a graveyard. Homeless dogs howl at night. History is a feral creature.

  This is how the land that was once a giant farm without a farmhouse became a land of empty villages. Something tells me that the collapse of our consumer civilisation will fill them again. Where else would we go but back to grandma’s patch where things still grow among the ruins?

  When you wander the haunted hills of the Scottish Highlands you feel this too; there are no highlanders left. The working crofts are gone. The crofters became Lowlanders and immigrants during the Highland Clearances that began in the mid-eighteenth century and whose official name was ‘the improvements’ and ‘the enclosure movement’. The people were replaced with sheep. The ecosystems were replaced with nibbled pastures and stayed that way. The Highlands were reduced. Today, the hills are for hikers and hunters. The hills are orphaned.

  Pixieface saw me admiring some orange-red flowers that turned out to be nasturtiums. I like eating them. She took a handful of nasturtium pods from the pocket of her blue mantle and gave them to me.

  ‘I’ll sow some marigold instead. Now, when I take a plant from the ground,’ she said, ‘I put something in its place. It keeps everybody happy.’

  She had tended to her losses by replanting them with healing daily routines. That’s how she had accommodated death and the loss of her life savings to a scam, a personal calamity she didn’t mention but I knew it from others. I also knew that every week she put tomatoes, peppers and stuffed pastry in her sadilka and went to visit the poor and lonely of Dogwood. To put something in places where it was lacking.

  We walked back along the goat path with the late sun on our faces.

  I saw myself planting the pearl-like pods in my garden in Scotland to the noise of a gravel-crusher where the forest used to be and how the following season when they open up, I’d see her pixie face again, and enjoy my little self.

  Botani

  ‘I take you, botani, whose name is [say the herb’s name]. I take you with my pentadaktilo, I whose name is [say your name]. I take you with me, so you will help in my hour of need. I swear in God’s name that if you don’t hear me, may the soil that birthed you never give you moisture again.’

  Botani means plant in Greek. Pentadaktilo means five-fingered hand.

  So went a prayer for collecting herbs with magical properties before dawn. This, and the following ritual, come from the Greek Magical Papyri, scrolls found in Egypt that date from the second to the fourth centuries. These are among the oldest written records of ritual plant picking.

  ‘The gatherer first of all smudges herself and the plant with pine resin, by walking around the plant three times. She then pours milk and pulls out the plant by the roots, while saying: “You were planted by Cronos, conceived by Hera …”’ The prayer lists a dozen deities of the Graeco-Roman world and ends with “Be purified through my prayer, and give me strength […] I take you in good fate, with a good spirit, at a good hour, on a good day, to make all good.” After that, the gatherer wraps the plant in a piece of linen, and drops in the hole seven grains of wheat and seven grains of rye pre-soaked in honey, then covers up the hole with soil. And leaves the scene.’

  Here is an extinct Scottish ritual for collecting juniper or ‘mountain yew’. You collected juniper by dividing the branches into four bunches between your five fingers and pulled it by the root, saying: