Week in Review III: Rila + Monastery

 Friday, February 11: Time for a lunch-time walk along the hilly trail that Saint Ivan Rilski followed out of what is now the town of Rila. At the spot where he discovered a spring, water still runs, and a picnic site has recently been added. Except that we didn’t bring lunch… A little further east another sign tells of the legend that local residents prayed six centuries ago that a boulder would hide their church from the view of the incoming Turks,

only to wake up the next morning to find their church…hidden from view by a boulder. Now there is a little chapel in the name of the same saint, Saint Nedelya, at the side of the road just east of Rila. Also along this path are some of the most interesting – and potentially unstable – rock formations in the region, several types of power poles (currently in use and no longer in use), and on this day – after a week of sunny weather and non-freezing daytime temperatures – only a few patches of ice and unmelted snow. 

Sunday, February 13: Today our good friend Susan braved Bulgarian buses with her younger daughter (Ivy, 8 months old) to join us for an afternoon in Rila and at the Rila Monastery. Ivy is the dream baby, and she and her mom clearly have everything worked out so that things like pacifiers and crying seem to be entirely unnecessary! In fact theirs is that deeper, more elemental kind of daughter-mother understanding that looks so effortless and eternal to the occasional observer (me) that I come away convinced that it is just that, allowing myself to forget about the experience and wisdom, the daily discipline and devotion, that lie beneath the surface of this picture-perfect relationship. 

 

We took the rarely-traveled route through Smochevo to give Susan a sense of the 360-degree panoramic view encompassing Rila, Pirin, plus Vitosha and the Macedonian mountains that would have been perfect if the clear skies had held over through the weekend, getting to the monastery after the rush of Sunday visitors had subsided. I was pleased that the monastery's museum stayed open long enough for Susan to see the double-sided wooden cross that a monk named Raphael finished early in the 19^th century. The monastery website describes Raphael’s Cross as

 “a unique work of art…made of a whole piece of wood (81cm x 43cm) ... The monk used fine chisels, small knives and magnifying lens to carve 104 religious scenes and 650 small figures into the cross. The cross was finished in 1802 after the monk worked on it for no less than 12 years, losing his sight upon completion. 

For me, seeing the real thing, in all of its intricate three-dimensional detail, for the first time 17 or 18 years ago was a powerful and lasting experience. This cross wasn’t just creative expression for Raphael, it was his personal form of daily communion, his way of nurturing his religious devotion and giving it an outward form. And this astonishing cross makes that devotion seem to me so effortless, eternal…

Week in Review II: Sofia, Badino, Blagoevgrad

Tuesday, February 8: All-Schubert concert at Bulgaria Hall. For this program we (Sofia Quartet) were joined by pianist Jeni Zaharieva, who is celebrating her fortieth season as a concert artist, and Sofia Philharmonic bassist Ivan Ivanov in Schubert’s Trout Quintet. I first played this piece – many times! – in 1997, Schubert’s 200^th anniversary year and the year that I joined the Dimov Quartet. Later in the week I discovered that, like Rostislav Dubinsky (my chamber music coach at Indiana University), Jeni Zaharieva graduated from the Central Music School, the preparatory division of the Moscow Conservatory. The CMS website mentions her as one of their outstanding foreign graduates, although this is only half true: her mother is Russian. 

Wednesday, February 9: Heading south to Blagoevgrad, there was a little extra time before the concert of the Ebony Hillbillies, special guests of the US Embassy at AUBG in honor of Black History Month. Enough time to turn off the highway 6 km south of Dupnitsa and travel 5 km east (in the direction of Rila mountain) to the village of Badino, a place we had never been before. There we encountered what we later learned was a locally-made (or at least –designed) sign warning drivers to watch out for domestic pets. Baba Vena, one of the village’s 40 or so remaining residents, explained that the sign was posted after a local dog was run over near the village square. We also met several other 80+-year-old residents, several barking dogs chained inside their yards, and one friendly unchained dog called Pirin after another nearby mountain. Pirin followed us to the village square so he could lie in the afternoon sun. From a bench there we saw two younger men on horseback, riding sidesaddle. Nobody else seemed surprised.

 

And we did make it to the concert on time:

Week in Review I: Sofia, Sunday, February 6

 Late afternoon trip to the heart of downtown Sofia to stock up on mineral water at the public faucets currently located across the street from the Central Bath, a building that has been “under renovation”  for as long as I can remember, and, aside from the front facade, fallen into apparent disuse and decay. During the 1990’s the faucets continuously spouting the same naturally hot mineral water that used to supply the Central Bath were located in front of the building, behind the Turkish mosque (see photos below). I didn’t think to photograph the newer fountains/faucets, so busy was I filling up miscellaneous plastic bottles. This water is free to taxpayers, but mineral water is also big business here. Even so, according to Asen Lichev, head of the Water Directorate at the Environment Ministry, as of last April, 60 "of the 102 mineral water springs in Bulgaria...are not being utilized by the state or private concessionaires" and will be turned over to local municipalities over the course of the next quarter-century. 

Finding Myself in Bulgaria

So you’ve been wondering (or not) about the title of my blog. ‘Tuk ne e Amerika’ (Here [Bulgaria] is not America’) is a phrase I used to hear a lot when I first arrived in Bulgaria and was confronted with the realities of trying to get seemingly simple things done, like mailing a letter or paying a bill. Instead of mailing a check – the check has never been a method of payment here – you actually stood in line at the post office (telephone bill) or at a payment center (electric) to take care of the monthly ‘zadulzheniya’ (obligations or debts). So I would reach the front of the line and, sparked perhaps by my obvious ‘otherness’ or my ineptness with the Bulgarian language, the exchange with the cashier would almost invariably include some reference to the fact that things here are, well, different.

Sometimes it was ‘Tuk ne e Amerika, na li?’ The last words turned the phrase into a well-meaning question with an inflection suggesting sympathy for my supposed suffering in a strange environment. If I had a complaint, it was ‘Vizhte kakvo, tuk ne e Amerika!’  – an all-purpose explanation or excuse for the way things stood, offered in lieu of an apology that nothing could be done, usually because ‘ne zavisi ot men’(it doesn’t depend on me); or it was served with a side order of ‘kakvo iskate, 500 godini…’ (what do you want, 500 years…) All of these statements had so many hidden implications, of a feeling of undeserved inferiority or subservience, of a national history of oppression (500 years under the ‘Turkish Yoke’, then 50 of Communism, now 20 of Transition), of a feeling of disorientation during the early, surly years of the Transition to Democracy. Their message to me was that I, a priori as an American, had unreasonably high expectations that needed to be shelved, discarded, or at least rethought to conform with ‘Bulgarskata deistvitelnost’ (the Bulgarian reality)

One of the thematic threads of Bulgariana, Randall Baker’s engaging account of living as an ex-pat in Bulgaria, is that so much that is so typically Bulgarian – and so different from what we experience in the US – is actually showing us how misguided the American lifestyle really is. Baker's narrative is infused with that hopeful sense of embarking on each new day in Bulgaria as a fresh adventure, of relishing in the small – and usually pleasant – surprises that you are sure to encounter here.  As an American living in Bulgaria, I share a similar MO, and see it not as a set of survival skills, but as a redefining of who I am and what my life can be, both on a short- and long-term basis. Here I have learned that the real nature of a situation is determined by how you choose to look at it ('zavisi i ot men!'); that great joy can be derived from things that from another perspective would have gone unnoticed; and that the concept expressed by G. B. Shaw (or was it Anonymous?) that “life isn’t about finding yourself; it’s about creating yourself” is worth embracing.

February Blues in Sofia

It’s been a rough winter week here. No new snow, just temperatures that are consistently well below the freezing point. Nothing that compares to New England of course, but still…

I was surprised that Monday, Jan. 24 was reported in the press as the annual “Blue Monday.” For me it was a Manic Monday. But this week has been depressing, not least because of several different scams that ‘izpluvaha’ (floated up) to the forefront of my consciousness.

The scamorama began on Wednesday, when I drove to an afternoon quartet rehearsal at our regular performance venue in the center of Sofia. I had planned to stop long enough at the Bulgaria Hall performers’ entrance to get my cello safely out of the cold before parking as close to the hall as possible. This changed when I spotted a free parking space on Aksakov Street, a short half-block from the entrance. I could not however determine whether or not this was a “Sinya zona,” the Blue parking zone where you need a parking voucher or to send a text message to pay for your parking space. The signage was not helpful (see photos below), but the fact that other cars were parked along the left curb seemed reassuring. But as I later learned, the most likely reason that the space I found was empty was that the previous car to occupy it had just been towed away. Because that’s also what happened to my car while I was rehearsing. Later, when I went to pick up my car from the towed-away lot (and pay the "relocation fee" and fine), the police officer cited the law that makes it illegal to park on the left-hand side of a one-way street and, he said, unnecessary for there to be any kind of no parking signage. I had major two problems with this. First, there had been a no-parking sign there, and there should still be such a sign there (except that "somebody" took it down), because there’s an exception for cars of a certain government ministry, which can park there, thus furthering the false impression that a ‘payak,’ a "spider" tow truck, won’t be along shortly to scoop up your vehicle. This sign, further down on the same pole, is still there, but turned around so you can’t see it. Second, there are many one-way streets in Sofia where the parked cars are always on the left, without any special signage, and no ‘payak’ ever makes off with them, because on most such streets, it’s not a sure thing that the owner is going to notice a missing vehicle on the same day. So to keep the wheels of the parking violation ‘reket’ (racket) turning, they’ve made a little web on Aksakov Street, in the heart of the Blue Zone, where nobody parks for long and most are in a hurry.

Scam No #2: Customs is holding ALL packages from abroad, no matter how small, and requiring their recipients to make a special trip to pay a 20% import tax on the value of the contents. Cello strings are expensive, and yet wear out after a few months of playing on them. According to the unwritten rules of Bulgarian ingenuity, I need to concoct a fake invoice showing a very low value for my strings in order to avoid a large tax. Unless I forgot to tell the sender to not include an invoice in the package – very depressing.

Scam No. #3: Begging in Sofia is a more lucrative profession than most “honest” jobs in these parts. And, according to a bTV investigative journalism program that I tuned into once I got the car back, many Sofia beggars are not desperate, undernourished, and poorly clothed individuals with disabilities, but have been trained by a ring leader to look like they are. At home they walk normally and wear clean, brand-name clothes. But of course the ring leader is taking a large cut of the take, reported to be as much as 100lv (60 USD) a day per beggar. A well-paying job for which a college degree is required is likely to pay less than 1000 lv per month, depending on the sector. Members of the government and parliament are paid much more, whether they “earn” it or not.

Normally I wouldn’t mention such undignified monetary matters. I like to think that I am ‘nad tiya neshta’ (above these things). But this week it's too cold, and I’m depressed...and disgusted.