This perfect mountain village in Bulgaria's Rhodope range is top of the list for music festivals I've attended (which I wrote about for The Arts Desk; only Svalbard has excelled it for remoteness). I went armed with two books, the only ones I could find in terms of literature translated into English - Georgi Gospodinov's Time Shelter and Kapka Kassabova's Street Without a Name. By coincidence the Piccadilly Waterstone's assistant I asked about them was Bulgarian and came from the village below Kovchevitsa, serendipity indeed. I must go back and see if I can find her. (Pictued below: early morning view from my lodgings).
Gospodinov's masterpiece to date deserves a blog entry to itself, but I want to focus on the mountainous borderlands which have stoked my imagination in Kassabova's travel writing. Herself of mixed Balkan heritage, though born in Sofia, she has the gift of, as she puts it, being present with everyone she meets, telling individual stories of hardship, immense suffering and heroism in stunning but tough terrain.
It had been my intention to explore each volume in some detail, but I finally realised that if I didn't express my admiration in general, I'd never get to praise them at all. Elixir is in some ways the most potent, with the author drawn persuasivaly into the realm of the numinous. But Border, an earlier work, is perhaps the most essential in stressing the oddities of being born one one side of the mountains rather than the other, or even in comunities a few kilometres apart.
These books have given me a thirst for exploring mountain places not so far from where I spent that enchanted time last summer. But an even bigger spell is cast by Kassabova's evocation of Lake Ohrid, split between North Macedonia and eastern Albania, its waters going underground to also feed the smaller Lake Prespa. She paints a supernaturally beautiful picture of the place, while mining the poignancy and tragedy of many of its inhabitants.
The trail here led me to start Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her epic about a journey through Yugoslavia in the critical year of 1937, in the Macedonia section which launches the second volume. Even this most rigorous of writers feels the numinous at the monastery of Sveti Naum at the southern end of the lake.
I think I was very lucky to pick up the two original volumes from different sources, much more cheaply than the asking price for the two. I'm now back at the beginning, in Zagreb, where West's insistence that there is pure, sustained goodness possible in human individuals yields one of her most powerful character studies. She's brilliant on the history, excoriatingly powerful on the flaws of religion and the horror of blood sacrifice (Christ's included), excellent on sense of place and very, very funny in describing singular hotels and rampant egotists. I've left the volume back in London and am now devouring her semi-autobiographical novel The Fountain Overflows. Unquestionably one of the great writers.
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