*Thank you, Bulgaria.
Why would I thank this mountainous Central European country?
Well, seeing as you ask...
My husband Jon and I first came to Bulgaria in 2005. He’d done a work-related whistle stop tour (we are tour operators) and I met him in Sofia. Neither of us, though pretty well travelled, had ever been to Bulgaria before. If we’d played that word association game, communist, yoghurt and a certain Womble would have rated highly.
He was enthusiastic after his tour. He babbled about mountains, Thracian tombs, rivers, fresh grilled river trout (from a man who normally avoids fish), shopska salad, grilled and roasted meats, grilled capsicums, WINE - so cheap! so good! - medieval history, traditional architecture. More food. And yes, yoghurt (the best yoghurt. That particular cliche is true). And maybe the people were not naturally effusive - Slavic, rather than Latin in temperament - but once you got to know them, they were heartbreakingly warm and welcoming. The smiles did come, and when they did they were like sun after rain.
So we explored Sofia, with its crumbling grandeur, its chess players in local parks, its solemn changing of the guard, its gypsies, and saw a city that charmed with its many sides. We continued to Veliko Turnovo, a university town that had been the old medieval capital, with steep cobbled streets that plummeted to the Yantra River far below, red tiled roofs jostling with brutalist Soviet sculptures and street art, all topped by a fairytale castle and an impressive fort. We drank good coffee, ate kilos of shopska salad (a bit like a Greek salad, bursting with freshness) and fish and grilled and baked capsicums, vegetables and salads and meats. The cucumbers! The tomatoes!! And the wine. Mavrud! It was a revelation. I still have not seen Mavrud and its companions outside Bulgaria - those locals know a thing or two. A delicious red wine, reminiscent of Bordeaux. We went house hunting and looked at house after house. Houses that had been empty for years, decades old furnitures sometimes still in situ. The young Bulgarians didn’t want to live in the old houses in remote villages. We fell in love with many crumbling places but wanted something with space, and views, and somewhere within a thriving village near to lovely Veliko Tarnovo.
Reader, we found it. We had made friends with Rossen, our hotel owner and he told us the mum of his son’s school friend had a house with her brother that she had been trying to sell. It was in Merdanya, a good working village - ie, not a dying village (a problem in Bulgaria as the young left the countryside) - just 14km outside Veliko Tarnovo (VT). It wasn’t on the market yet so Rossen drove us to have a look. We bumped along unpaved roads to the top of the village. There it was, perching with its lime green edged windows on the very edge of the village, looking down over red tiled roofs of the neighbour (Nico, we would soon learn) and over the foothills of the Stara Planina. A traditional brick village house, charming but falling down, with a crumbling stone barn and pig pen littered with hundreds of ancient corn cobs. We met the brother of Rossen’s school mum, who gave us eggs and honey from his garden, and we stood and stared. We listened to the wind in the trees behind us and the goat bells of the herd coming back from their day at the meadow, wafting their feta cheese smell behind them. We looked out over countryside unscarred by fences and we decided that this was where we would build our house.
Long story short, we did. It was an adventure and a learning experience in various ways, but that is a story for another day. We ended up with an airy, open house with stunning views, and in 2015 we finally built the pool we’d been dreaming of - sunk deep, concrete and tiled, overlooking those peaceful views. We got to know our neighbours, and the local honey man and goat lady, and became good friends with our agents. We learned that Bulgarians are kind and warm and generous to a fault - our 70-something neighbour Nick is forever hoisting produce from his farm of a garden onto not only us, but our house guests. We fell in love with this slow, deeply traditional place, where people are delighted when you try to talk to them, even as you massacre their language, where horses and carts are still part of the scenery, where every villager has a beautifully tended kitchen garden, and where cucumbers are knobbly but taste more cucumber-y than any others I've ever tried. It is a poor country, and the local shops are limited to what is in season - but whenever we go there, especially in September when the walnuts are dropping onto the ground all around us and the mellow autumn sun turns our bright yellow house even more golden, we can feel our shoulders drop and our pulse slows to Bulgarian time.
So yes, thank you Bulgaria. You may not have been a great investment from a commercial point of view, but we no longer want to sell. We don’t want to give up the goats and the views and the local honey and even the barking dogs. We don’t want to not jump in our pool and soak up sun that shines 300 days in a year. We don’t want to stop battling a garden on land so fertile you spit and it grows. We don’t want to stop buying bottles of Mavrud for a few dollars from the local shop and pairing it with grilled capsicums and white cheese, and drinking salted yoghurt. We don’t want to stop sharing homemade raki with Nico, or having Dimitar, our self appointed taxi driver, throw out his arms in welcome and proclaim “Life is WONDERFUL!”
It’s our place now and we love it. We hope you do, too..
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