Now it’s you, now it’s everyone who passed here before you…If I stood here long enough, I might just fall out of linear time and begin to see a ghostly glow from the depths.Īs Kassabova reminds us, however, ‘trespassing borders isn’t safe even for gods, let alone mortals.’ She is led for some of her journey by her guide Nevzat, a Pomak photographer from Armutveren, the village in Turkish Strandja at which the Rezovska River becomes a border river between Turkey and Bulgaria. This place felt to me less like a place and more like a continuing moment in time…you stand in a portal. Ou can almost see the invisible sea border, but then you’re not sure what it is you glimpse in the sea mist, everything looks as if it might be a memory in the making. As she stands there with the ‘Black Sea ahead and Strandja behind, two different wildernesses overseen by the same light,’ she experiences the dizzying borderless-ness of the watery consciousness: Later in the narrative, Kassabova visits the site on the coast of the Dead Sea where the sea border is dissolved by the blending together of the Mediterranean and Balkan waters. In her desire to experience a numinous reality, Kassabova explores the mythic nature of the cult of agiasma, a Greek word meaning a curative holy spring or river - a natural border - which was believed by the ancient Thracians and modern-day borderland ritualists to be a mediator between the material and the magical realms. Kassabova engages with the philosopher Mirea Eliade’s theory of ‘the myth of the eternal return’ - the idea that, as she summarises, ‘by performing divinely inspired rites, “prehistoric man” feels connected to a mythical dimension outside linear time and therefore history.’ She immerses herself within the spirituality of the Strandja region, drawing on ancient customs such as fire-walking and Slavic folklore. Just by being there, the border is an invitation.’ The narrative attempts to understand the concept of a ‘border’ itself - particularly through its examination of the mystical rites practiced across the borderlands.
As she continues to collect stories of human lives disfigured by the border, the divisions between the present and the past, the mythic and historic, begin to dissolve – and this variety of voices and her own reflections bring the landscape alive.įor a visitor, the border zone is an ineffable realm that resists comprehension Kassabova characterises it as ‘so infused with ancient and modern myth, so psychically magnetised’ that even in the minds of its inhabitants it ‘is another country, a bit like the past.’ As she acknowledges in the preface of the text, once ‘near a border, it is impossible not to be involved, not to want to exorcise or transgress something. Kassabova recounts the living oral histories of the people she encounters along the way, exploring the impact stamped into these regions by the brutality of the Iron Curtain, the Balkan Wars, forced resettlements, and divisive regimes dating back to antiquity. Beginning at the edge of the Strandja ranges by the Black Sea, the travelogue serpentines along the natural geographical contours within these borderlands - first descending West into the border plains of Thrace, coiling along the passes of the Rhodope Mountains, then circling back to the Black Sea coast where the Mediterranean and Balkan currents unite. Olly Teregulova celebrates Kapka Kassabova’s travelogue, which attempts to capture the complexities of life between places.Ĭhronicling her own personal journey along the border zone between Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece, Kapka Kassabova’s Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe viscerally portrays the human cost of the cartographical mutilations that this part of the world has suffered.
The lines on a modern map that mark the borders between Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece do not adequately represent the changes and shifting identities that this region has undergone throughout its history.
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