Balking at the Balkans

I first entered Bulgaria in August 2007 as somewhat of an afterthought on the tail-end of an extensive Romanian excursion. I took a series of trains and minibuses to the border crossing at Vama Veche and from there flagged down a bus taking me to Varna. What followed was a week long whirlwind of the best food, most excruciating stomach pain, and a firm resolve to return and see more of it. And while my hardiness prepared me for the snow and cold that awaited me in February, 2010, the Bulgarian transportation network wasn’t exactly on my side. However, I was absolutely desperate to eat my favourite dish, Boyarski Kavarma, at one of the many terraced restaurants in the city of Veliko Tarnovo, and would stop at nothing in getting there. Two days in VT I spent morning, noon and night dining on Kavarma and finally, on the last day, my charm broke through to the saucy waitress who divulged the secret recipe to me. After cracking the code for the mysterious ingredient and my appetite sated, I was off, following the spring thaw through the wild Bulgarian hills (which may as well have been southern British Columbia) towards Sofia where I plotted my assault on the Western Balkans. After a brief Wikitravel of Macedonia to a) confirm my visa-free entry, and b) confirm its existence as a country, I bought a train ticket to the far southwest corner of Bulgaria to a town called Petrich, despite the hostel receptionists’ almost shrill demands that I merely take the bus to Skopje for 18 euros.

Having once written a review paper on the Balkans in the Western geographical imagination for a Fourth Year Seminar course on Post-Communist Europe, I was naturally the best-prepared person in the world to be visiting the region in February of 2010. What I was not expecting was to be immediately have this extensive knowledge put to the test by a local physicist-turned-taxi driver with whom I shared the train carriage. He insisted that young people, and in particular young Westerners, knew nothing about history or Bulgaria, and I was forced to defend my reasons for travelling alone, travelling to Bulgaria, and travelling to such obscure Bulgarian destinations as Petrich. Taking this as my queue, and drawing inspiration from Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans, I launched a counterassault that, by the end of my diatribe on the Berlin Treaty of 1878, cemented for me a permanent invitation for homemade wine and a free pickup from the Sofia airport next time I was in town.

Armed with the confidence to debunk the Balkan Myth, I was prepared to cross into a country once fo forbidding and inaccessible due to its 80 euro visa bill in 2007. Macedonia has always had a certain allure to me, mainly because I have consistently overlooked it as a country. Like the majority of Western observers in the 1990s, I paid so little attention to the Balkans that every time I heard the name mentioned, I assumed it was a province of Greece or still part of Serbia. A note of caution to prospective travellers, however, is to NEVER say either of those things in the presence of a Macedonian. In fact, avoid the name F.Y.R.O.M. (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia), do not say their language is similar to Bulgarian (much less IS Bulgarian), and do not question their lineage as Slavs arriving in the 7^th century who lay claim to the ancient Hellenistic name. Just a few things to watch out for.

If I had a difficult time explaining my route to Macedonia to the hostel receptionists in Sofia, then the sight of me strolling up to the Macedonian border, in gumboots, at dusk, was nearly impossible to articulate to the border guard. Luckily, border guards are some of the most pleasant people I have met in my travels, and even their limited grasp of English is enough for their sharp wit to shine through. The guard asked my purposes for visiting, for visiting on foot, for visiting in February, and what could have possible led me to want to visit Macedonia in the first place. And while he clearly was at odds with the Macedonian Tourism Bureau in terms of upselling his country, he was my first, Macedonian encounter, and an incredibly pleasant one. He told me that it was dangerous out and he would stop a car that would drive me to Strumica, the nearest city. I initially thought this was incredibly kind and generous of him, but it’s altogether more likely he was simply hoping to wipe his hands clean of any potential paperwork that would have inevitably arisen due to an English-speaking tourist dying on his watch. Still, the ends justified the means for me and I was happy.

I sat and had coffee with an elderly Macedonian man who spoke Russian to some degree, and when a car pulled up, I assumed it was for me. I approached, said “Dobra Vechera,” and when he opened the trunk, I went to put my bag in. The man stopped me, first pulled out a bag of wine from the trunk, went into the shop, came back, shut the trunk, and drove away. Evidently he was not my ride. Then a bus showed up and I was ushered in. As it turned out, it had come directly from Sofia, and left about 4 hours after I had. It also cost 10 euros the full way. The man wanted 5 euros from me to drive the remaining 20km leg of the journey, but taking a leap of faith that arbitrary pricing schemes rarely have any legal recourse, I gave him a 2 euro coin upon exiting the vehicle in Strumica, and walking away. What I had not expected to meet on the bus was an American who had flown in from Paris for the weekend. To visit Strumica. In Eastern Macedonia. In February. This naturally piqued my interest, and made me realise I needed to up my own aura of intrigue.