Belogradchik, the ‘little white town’, is both little and white, and dwarfed by a petrified landscape of giant, reddish rock formations thirty kilometres long. This is the centre of Bulgaria’s lovely but unloved north-west, the Cinderella of its tourist industry. Two hundred million years ago, it was the bottom of a sea, and – until recently, as far as the mainstream tourist was concerned, it still was. The on-going New Seven Wonders of Nature initiative, in which Belogradchik was a contender, however, brought the site into the spotlight and dramatically increased the number of travellers both from Bulgaria and abroad who flocked there as a result of the campaign.



In the town’s main – and only – square, there is a festival. White and red-costumed girls are dancing on a podium under the national tricolour, a wind-band of men in poppy-red shirts blow into shiny trombones, families mill about with popcorn and soft drinks. I ask a bent-over old woman if this is some local festival.

‘It’s the 9th of May today,’ she says, blinking incredulously at my ignorance. ‘Europe Day.’ 
 


Of course. It’s the opposite of a local festival – it’s a national obsession, dancing and blowing shiny trumpets on its way to Europe, finally, finally! A group of middle-aged men at a plastic outdoor table overhear this exchange, and raise their beer glasses. 


‘To Europe!’ they shout merrily, and then straighten up and pose gravely for the photo I’m about to take. ‘Take some,’ they invite me to the huge bag of popcorn in the middle of their table. I reach to pick at the popcorn, but they collectively gather it up and hand me the entire bag. ‘Be our guest,’ says a bedraggled man with a handle-bar moustache and smiles with a mouth like an abandoned medieval village. ‘Are you from Sofia?’ I nod, to simplify. ‘We like to have visitors from afar. Even journalists.’




In the valley behind the dancing girls, where the sea of petrified rock begins, I try to make out the best known rock formations: the Schoolgirl with her backpack, Adam and Eve, the Bear, the Dervish. It’s a surreal landscape in the declining light of late afternoon. A road winds past the rock-sea and plunges into a green valley.

Some minutes later I enter the family-run Madonna B&B. The entire family is briskly involved in running it. The mother is the home body, the son is the business brain. The daughter, a slow-moving girl of few words and seemingly few thoughts, waits monosyllabically on the pack of unwashed, wolf-hungry German rock climbers occupying a table with a sweeping view down to the rocks. They are staring at the English menu, where I spot such culinary inventions as ‘kachamak: puree of a flour of a grain of maize’, ‘kavarma: meat with an onion’, and ‘drusan kebab: jogged meat’. I can see why the bewildered-looking Germans have settled for grilled meat and salad in English. The redundant father sits eating spinach soup by himself, served by mother and daughter like the patriarch he is supposed to be. A century ago, he would have been. But now he’s a slow-chewing peasant overtaken by this little brisk kingdom of tourist enterprise run by his wife and son.



‘A million dollar view, isn’t it.’ He’s bored and I’m sitting near-by. We look out to the rocks drenched in golden light. ‘I wouldn’t change it for anything in the world. These foreigners, they don’t have anything like this, that’s why they come here.’ He has nothing more to say, and we eat in silence. The energetic, cosy-bodied hostess, however, advises me to go and see the Mosque.

‘The mosque has a tragic story behind it. Now, the local Turkish ruler, Hadji Hussein, commissioned a Bulgarian master carver to decorate the ceiling of the new mosque. Everything was going well until one day, the carver saw the daughter of the Hadji, and they fell in love. He asked for her hand, but the father would only concede if he converted to Islam. The young carver refused, and the Hadji had him murdered. As proof of the murder, the killer brought the Hadji the medallion from the young man’s neck. Upon seeing it, the Hadji fell to the floor. You see, he had the same medallion around his neck. Now he remembered that as a child he’d been taken away from his family by the Turks and trained to serve the Sultan, he was a janissary in other words. He’d forgotten his Bulgarian roots. He and the young man were in fact family. The Hadji then committed suicide.’

‘No, his daughter committed suicide when she learnt that her lover was dead,’ the son pipes in. He’s busy next table doing accounts on a laptop. 
‘Well, there are different versions,’ the mother concedes, ‘People’s imaginations have embroidered on the story. Some say that when the carver first saw the daughter, she carried a rose, and that’s why he carved a rose on the ceiling of the mosque.
‘It’s not a rose, it’s a crown,’ the son butts in again. Really, he has no ear for a good story. The mother gives up and goes back inside the kitchen.

The other guest, a tired-faced, chain-smoking geologist on a research trip, listens sceptically through clouds of smoke and smiles at me with tobacco-stained teeth.
‘I’m here to look at fossils, stories are not my thing. Do you know that if you look among the rocks long enough, you might find a fossilised snail or two? They’re still lying around. From 200 million years ago. That beats the mosque, doesn’t it.’ 


I’m not in the mood for fossil searching, so the next day, in a fine spring drizzle, I walk the two kilometres across town up to the Belogradchik Fortress. On the way, I find the tragic mosque circa 1751.



It’s completely abandoned to its past, with bars on the glassless windows against vandalism. On the exquisitely decorated flowery doorway, there’s a massive padlock made to last for centuries. Through the iron bars, in the gloom inside, I glimpse fragments of wall decoration and carvings, detritus and rubbish.





The carved rose ceiling however is wisely removed, and I find it later in the town’s museum, leaning unwisely against a wall. This is the heart of the once Ottoman quarter – Turks, shops, the mosque. The Christian Bulgarians lived further below, in houses so whitewashed that the Turks kept the original name of the little white town. The Turks are gone for good now, hence the heavy padlock on the mosque.



The top of the hill and the end of the road culminates in the spectacular Belogradchik fortress. Inside the thick stone gate, two middle-aged men working for the Italian film-set that’s built inside the fortress are having a smoke away from the rain.

‘Terrible weather, isn’t it,’ I greet them.
‘Fate, that’s what it is,’ a wrestler in a worker’s overalls smiles under a bushy 18th century moustache.



The fate of this fortress has been eventful, no doubt. Built by the Romans along the road linking the Danube with Rome, improved by the Byzantines and medieval Bulgarians, used by the Turks post-14th century as a garrison and defence-post; and finally, a popular location for historic Euro film-sets – what could be more typical of history’s eventful depredations on this land? Blood flowed between these walls in 1850 when, in the enterprising spirit of the region, local rebels tried to overthrow the Turkish occupiers – and you can guess whose blood flowed when the favourite dispatching method of decapitation was applied.

A memento of kinder moments and people stands above the main gate: the rocky ‘Commander’ Ali, named after the last Turkish commanding officer at the fort before Bulgarian independence. The kind-hearted ‘commander’ adopted a Bulgarian boy, the story goes, who despite the nice treatment grew up to be a haydutin, a rebel against the Turks, and was killed. When the brotherly Russians arrived to liberate the country in 1878, Ali was forced to flee the fort and the country, but returned later to die in his beloved little white town.

‘Careful out there on the rocks, they’re very slippery. Call us if you need help,’ shouts a young carpenter working on the film-set, and his mates chuckle suggestively. 
 
I slide and scramble up the slimy rocky steps for a while, and catch my breath at the top. Here, geology offers her grandiose artwork. I am so stricken by the vista, I start muttering to myself like a madwoman. If eternity could appear to us in a material guise, this is how it would look. The French economist and traveller Gérome-Adolphe Blanqui passed through here in 1841, and now I understand why he raved about it:

‘The Alps, the Pyrénées, the most breathtaking of Tyrolean mountains, and Switzerland, cannot offer such a sight. The giant red pillars rising on both sides of a carved roadway under which a bubbly stream leaps in tiny waterfalls, the trees hanging at fearful height as if ready to fall at any moment, the endless seclusion only broken by the flight of eagles and vulture: all this would impress even the most hardened of souls.’



My hardened soul is impressed, and I wonder whether on starry nights, the Roman legionnaires had sat here playing dice, and thought about eternity. Did the Turkish soldiers smoke hashish up here, while contemplating the brevity of their lives? On my way out through the gates, a different pair of middle-aged men in overalls are smoking. One is ferociously hairy and has forearms tattooed with mermaids, the other is two sizes too small for his overalls. True to my Anglo-Saxon reflexes of small talk, once again I resort to the weather:

‘Yesterday was so warm and sunny, and look at today!’ 

‘Yesterday we were also a day younger,’ the ferocious-looking one gifts me with a tobaccoey smile.
‘Yesterday was altogether a different story,’ the other one waves a small cigarette stub dangerously close to his fingers.

I search for something suitable to add, and give up. We nod manly goodbyes and they continue to puff on their stubs, gazing into the misty drizzle. And so in a drenched, historical kind of mood, I board the fittingly ancient mini-bus which will take me to the train which will take me back to Sofia. On the bus, a woman behind me is eating a banana. I’m hungry and turn, drawn to the scent. 
 


‘Would you like some?’ she offers. She is in her fifties and has a handsome, open face with disconcerting pale blue eyes. 

‘No, thanks.’ I lie.
‘I’m a diabetic. I have to eat complex carbohydrates every two hours or so, to keep my blood sugar in check.’ 
 


Health problems: the provincial Bulgarian’s second favourite topic of casual conversation after money problems.

‘It must be difficult.’ 

She shrugs, and delicately lies the banana skin on the torn vinyl seat beside her. ‘It’s the least of my problems. It’s all from the camps.’ 

‘Which camps?’
‘Mainly Skravena.’

Skravena? The only Communist concentration camp I know of is the most infamous of the lot - Belene, a large Danubian island. My grandparents had a friend who’d been deported there in the early 50s. He was a bit of a clown; when he laughed, his face looked squashed. Years later I learnt why: they’d broken his jaw there among other things, and for some time after, he ate only mashed-up food through a straw.

‘When were you there?’
‘I grew up there,’ the woman says breezily. ‘My first ten years. I was one of the one thousand six hundred and forty three babies and children in concentration camps at the time. Did you think they only interned adults?’ 

‘Well I didn’t know. Why, why were you there?’ 

‘I was there with my mother, and my grandparents. And they were there because of my father. My father was the one supposed to be deported, but he did a runner on the eve of our arrest. Went across the border into Yugoslavia, and then to Germany.’ 

‘And they deported you instead?’
‘Yes, it was his punishment,’ she laughs briefly, mirthlessly. ‘The whole family went on the trains. Actually, I’m lucky to be alive. Because at the train station, on the way to the camp, some commissar picked me up from my mother, I was a year old, and tossed me into a barrel of dirty water on the train platform. Children were a nuisance at the camps. My mother screamed and cried but they bundled her onto the train, and she thought that was it. But after her train had gone, another commissar picked me out of the water, he felt sorry, had a bit of humanity in him. And he made sure I was sent on to Skravena, to join my mother and grandparents.’ 
 


We pass through glorious, spring-lush mountain scenery, and for a mute moment, we look at it.

‘What was it like living there?’ 

‘Have you seen films about the Nazi concentration camps? I remember for example waking up one night, I must have been six or seven, and finding myself outside among lots of bodies. My mother was there too. I thought she was dead. They’d left us for dead, you see. And the dogs were eating the fingers of the dead. Crunch crunch, I can still hear it. That awful sound, crunch crunch. That’s why I can’t stand bones in meat, and I can’t stand dogs. Every time I see a dog, I hear crunch crunch. But my mother was alive. We all came out alive. And there were good moments too. Kids’ birthdays for example, my mother always tried to organise a cake for my birthday. All the kids, there were about ten of us at the camp, different ages, they had birthday parties whenever it was possible. I mean, it wasn’t like a normal party obviously, because we had rations, but the mothers really tried.’ 

‘What happened to your father? Did you ever see him again?’ 

‘He settled in Frankfurt. In the 60s, I wasn’t allowed to go to university here, as the daughter of an enemy of the people, but I was given special permission to visit him in Germany. You see, they didn’t mind if enemies of the people left the country for good. So I went to University there, my father put me through university.’
‘Why didn’t you stay there?’ 

‘Well, I stayed for a while. Then I came back.’ 


I push for more but she’s elusive, just as she’s not letting on why her father was dubbed an enemy of the people back in the late 40s. He could have been a minister in the Tsar’s government, or an outspoken intellectual, a Nazi sympathiser, or simply a man hated by a secret informer. Like in any terror regime, ‘informing’ was an excellent way to get rid of people you didn’t like.

‘I’ve been trying to get compensation for the last fifteen years, since they opened up the secret files. Still haven’t got it, but I’m determined I’ll get it. I went to court and do you know what they told me? There’s no compensation for minors, because apparently we were, and I quote, too young to experience the effects of the repression. Too young! The arrogance of these people. There’s one thousand six hundred and forty three children, all of us refused compensation. But I’m not letting this pass. We have an organisation, Children of the Camps, and we’ll get our way. Justice is on our side.’ 
 


The three other women on the mini-bus are unmoved by all this. They have their own diabetes, their own money problems.

‘You know, I mentioned the films about the Nazi camps just to give you an idea. But of course you know that the whole thing with the Jews is exaggerated.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘They didn’t kill 6 million or whatever the Jews claim, it’s exaggerated. They killed some, probably, but the whole thing is blown out of proportion. It’s a Zionist conspiracy, the Holocaust and all that.’ 


I stare at her for an incredulous moment. Her angelic blue eyes suddenly take on a fascist tinge. She’s unhinged, I knew it.

‘And where did you study, at what Nazi university?’ I hear myself say. She shakes her head, as disappointed in me as I am in her. 

‘I was educated in Germany. And where were you educated? At what Communist university, huh?’
‘I’ve studied abroad too, but what I received is an education, not Nazi propaganda.’
‘Why are you so worried about the Jews anyway? Are you Jewish?’ 


I look at those disconcerting blue eyes again, and all I can see is the one thousand six hundred and forty three children of the camps. This is where her tragedy begins and her compassion ends. Either way, we are not going to be friends. We sit in spiteful silence all the way to the Oreshets train station. 
 
It’s in the middle of what can only be described as nowhere. Along the platform which looks as if a train might have passed here once – but not actually stopped – cargo trains rust in the drizzle. There are five of us from the mini-bus, plus a group of Gypsy men drinking coffees in plastic cups in the station’s café. I buy a ticket from the misted-over glass counter. I flee from the camp woman to the café for a plastic cup of herbal tea, which I immediately spill on a couch and on myself. The Gypsy men at the table timidly offer a paper napkin, without a word. The old man at the counter pours me another tea, also without a word, and waves away my proffered coins.

And we sit there, in thick smoke and manly silence - the resigned old man in an ancient ski jacket, the five young Gypsies with battered shoes and thin, worried faces, and me in my tea-stained trousers – looking at the rusted wagons outside, plunged in a timeless railway station blues.

*Kapka Kassabova is a poet, novelist and travel writer. Currently living in Edinburgh, Scotland, she was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria, but moved to New Zealand in 1992. Her latest poetry collections - Someone else’s life and Geography for the Lost, hint at her “preoccupations as a writer, traveller, and cultural mongrel,” while her new memoir Street Without a Name: childhood and other misadventures in Bulgaria, is a coming of age story at the end of Cold War, and a journey along the edges of post-Cold War Europe. More about Kapka Kassabova and her work can be read at her website.

Read more about Bulgaria on BalkanTravellers.com
Use BalkanTravellers.com's tips to organize your trip to Bulgaria