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On what must have been the coldest night of that January I travelled by train from Belgrade to Sofia. I wrote my name in the ice on the windows. I shivered under a thin blanket. Snow was leaking from the ceiling of the toilet. But I arrived. And then I got lost ...

Blind & Old Shatterhand

May 21, 2008 • Comments Bulgaria

I once lived under the honest impression that the people in the Balkans loved Westerns.

A lot of shooting has been going on here – and I guess that this fact unconsciously played on my (creative) mind when I was trying to interpret the name that so many restaurants in the region here seemed to have.

This was during my first trip ever in the Balkans.

Everywhere I saw bars or restaurants – the distinction not always clear – named PECTOPAHT.

This name PECTOPAHT rang in my ears like Winnetou and Iltschi – my Apache hero and his horse from the books of Karl May about Old Shatterhand.

Bursting laughter followed my suggestion – after a week of travelling – to try out one of these country & western bars. Maybe there we’d be able to order a good steak – nowhere else to be found in the region !?

PECTOPAHT proved to be – as the more serious and better informed readers amongst you will have guessed by now or even always have known – the Cyrillic spelling of the word restaurant !

So I was stupid – and to be honest : I feel I still am.

Because I haven’t been able to master this alphabet that is so different and at the same time so similar to the Latin one I grew up with. I can more or less read road signs – but not in one swift go. I have to identify and “translate” every symbol separately.

Even when driving by at a mere sixty kilometres an hour this is no sinecure.

Luckily – in quite a lot of places there are signs in the two alphabets. Otherwise I would be doomed to become a hopelessly slow traveller. Which is not a bad thing – but not when it’s for the wrong reason : Cyrillic illiteracy.

I hope that one day I will be able to read Cyrillic at a glance. But my hope is not very high.

I fear I will keep on seeing drawings instead of meanings. Beautiful mysterious symbols – because that is the other side of it : because they don’t come naturally with a meaning to me the signs I see along the roads I travel hold a strange dancing attraction.

Why would one arrive in Sofia when one can knock on the gates of София ?

Some mysteries are better kept a mystery - my lazy mind whispers ...

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