Bulgaria - Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe

Book 24: Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe - Kapka Kassabova

"...Kapka Kassabova returns to Bulgaria, from where she emigrated as a girl twenty-five years previously, to explore the border it shares with Turkey and Greece. When she was a child, the border zone was rumored to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall, and it swarmed with soldiers and spies. On holidays in the 'Red Riviera' on the Black Sea, she remembers playing on the beach only miles from a bristling electric fence whose barbs pointed inwards toward the enemy: the citizens of a totalitarian regime.

Kassabova discovers a place that has been shaped by successive forces of history: the Soviet and Ottoman empires, and, older still, myth and legend. Her exquisite portraits of fire walkers, smugglers, treasure hunters, botanists, and border guards populate the book. There are also the ragged men and women who have walked across Turkey from Syria and Iraq. But there seem to be nonhuman forces at work here too: This densely forested landscape is rich with curative springs and Thracian tombs, and the tug of the ancient world, of circular time and animism, is never far off."

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I struggled to get into this book. Parts of it were, indeed, enthralling. But it's written almost as a bunch of short stories, as Kapka travels across Bulgaria and meets different people, so just as one group comes into focus, she moves on to the next village. It just seems really uneven - some of the stories were horrifying, some magical, some just plain boring, and some were in between. I never knew what I was going to get from one chapter to the next, which made it hard to return to. 

That said, I came to this book knowing nothing of Bulgaria's history, or its present. It's one of those little European countries that kind of gets lost in the shuffle. But it has an important story to tell. The stories of the immigrants and refugees were particularly catching. And I admit that I wasn't aware of the stories of East German refugees and the horrors that they experienced, trying to escape to the West. The Berlin Wall fell when I was 11. And up until the day it fell, there were people trying to escape via the forests of Bulgaria - and there were Bulgarian citizens who had to choose between turning them in or being imprisoned or killed if they let them go. I had no idea. That knowledge alone makes this book a worthwhile read. But it does much more than that. Bulgaria.