This is by Bulgarian-born author Kapka Kassabova, and it was published in 2017. I found it both informative and moving, and will definitely read more of her work.

It is subtitled A Journey to the Edge of Europe, and the "edge" in question is the Greek/Turkish/Bulgarian border.


Photos from Didymoteicho, very much in that border zone

But we're actually on the edge of lots of things. The book is a meld of genres: Part travelogue, part memoir, part oral history, part reflection. It's poetic, and highly evocative at times, but also down-to-earth. Many of the villages the author stays in or passes through are leaking people: "There were no champagne socialists in the Village in the Valley, no anti-globalists, no anti-communists, no anti-capitalists. Just survivors. The women were old, the men were lonely, and the children were gone."

Kassabova's fascination with borders goes back to her days as a young Bulgarian in the early 1980s, holidaying with her family in the very region where others are desperately trying to escape to Turkey (on the other side of the Cold War divide). She recalls: "As it slowly dawned on you why the border was there (so that people like us couldn't leave), you developed a permanent border-like feeling inside you, like indigestion."

Kassabova and her family migrated to New Zealand just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and she moved to Scotland in 2004 (all of which explains why English is her main literary language). But there's an unscratched itch inside her that crystallizes around the concept of borders. Thirty years later, she returns to the three countries that share the border area she remembers so powerfully. But she is accompanied by a hunger and a hauntedness that communicate themselves powerfully to the reader. This is a quest: "None of us can escape boundaries: between self and other, intention and action, dreaming and waking, living and dying. Perhaps the people of the border can tell us something about liminal spaces."

Travelling back to Bulgaria, she muses on the tragic irony of this particular border: "When the Ottoman Empire was slowly dismembered and the Balkan Wars ripped people from the land, they were forced to cross this border under pain of death. Then for half a century, they were prohibited from crossing it under pain of death. That's why it was important to come here, so close to the border in space yet so far away from it in time."

I have a bit of a border fetish myself. So, of course, I was drawn into this theme. All the more so as I read it while in an area that formed part of the book's world. Namely, Thrace.

We'd actually been in historical Thrace every time we'd visited the European bit of Turkiye, but this time, for the first time, I knew what Thrace was. The ancient Thracians left few written records, Kassabova tells us. Instead they left megalithic cult sites, painted tombs, and golden artefacts. They are "perhaps the least known of the ancient peoples of Europe". But something still remains of this identity. One of her respondents insists: "We are not Europe and we are not Asia. We are Thrace."

Moving east from Macedonia, we probably hit Thrace somewhere after Kavala. By the time you've gone east as far as Xanthi (which she mentions several times), you're definitely there. The islands we saw -- Thassos and Samothraki -- are deemed to be part of Thrace (it was Samothraki whose moods we loved to document from Alexandroupoli).



She talks of the Maritsa River, which "became the Greek-Turkish border for 135 kilometres under the name of Evros". She talks of Soufli. And there's another silk-making town, over the border in Bulgaria (just north of that Greek finger of land that we travelled up as far as Didymoteicho). It's called Svilengrad, which means "Silk Town". Now, though, what she observes are its 21st-century "ghosts" -- people who pass through without being seen, and hail "from places with ancient names: Babylonia, Mesopotamia, and Kurdistan".


There's an obvious military presence in this region

This is in many ways a book of fragments. Short chapters take the account forward; even shorter sections consider the vocabulary ("agiasma" = the Greek word for a curative holy spring; "klyon" = the local name for the fence, electrified and alarmed, that sealed Bulgaria off from its neighbours; and so on).

But the fragments are joined with great care. A person is mentioned in passing, and then s/he is tracked down, talked to, fitted in. Words and concepts are explained, and then illustrated.

I wondered if it would have better to organize the material thematically rather than geographically (as certain themes keep reappearing), but in hindsight probably not. This is how you live, after all. You go somewhere, and knowledge accumulates around and inside you, layer upon layer. And this is very much a book that's rooted in "somewhere" -- in this stretch of earth. So, place must come first, even if that makes life difficult for note-takers and category-makers like me.



Of the recurring themes, I would single out five:

1. The Cold War

The Bulgaria/Turkey border had a reputation for being easier to cross. Much easier, say, than the Berlin Wall. Between 1961 and 1989, 415 foreign tourists went "missing" here, many of them buried in unmarked graves by the border security forces who shot them. About 4,000 East Germans made the attempt, of whom 95 per cent were arrested and imprisoned (the East German authorities even ensured that the available maps of this area were inaccurate). But those most frequently tempted by the border were Bulgarians: "Over the course of the Cold War, hundreds were shot, sometimes women and children. Hundreds escaped too."

Inevitably, she encounters people who were involved in the administration of that border. Some won't -- or can't -- talk about it, can't bring themselves to express regret or even acknowledgment. Some are still menacing presences. She meets, for example, a man who used to be on the payroll of State Security:

"'In the good old days, we had methods for the likes of you,' he said.
"'What do you mean, the likes of me?' I had already understood methods.
"'Progressive types,' he said. 'Who go round asking questions. It's a shame. In many ways, those were the golden days... Don't go round digging up old graves, my lovely. Nobody's interested.'"

He later gives her a scrap of paper on which he has written the words: "You only have one life."

She talks to two contemporary border guards. The older one clearly remembers "the fugitives from the old days". His description is chilling: "Two German guys in their twenties... We surrounded them, eighty of us with dogs and just two of them... But what can you do? Fate. They had signed their own sentences." (The younger guard, in his twenties, remembers nothing of all this. His focus is the current wave of refugees: "They give themselves up and we do the paperwork and they end up in the refugee camp... You learn one thing in this job. People survive things you can't imagine." He's a bit chary of Kassabova, though, and runs a quick security check: "An old chill crept in," she admits, "The chill of being found out, hunted down, a searchlight shone on you. A border chill.")

On another Cold War note, in light of my recent reading of A History of Yugoslavia, I was interested in her comments here: "In my childhood... we visited the family across the border in Tito's Yugoslavia, a land of plenty to us poor cousins, practically the West. They had everything there."



2. The long, long history of people movement

Kassabova talks often of "the mirthless merry-go-round called 'exchange of populations'", and its effects in this area are colossal.

In the wake of the Greek-Turkish war, Anatolian Greeks left Turkey; Muslims from Greece went in the opposite direction; Greece also expelled 0.5 million Bulgarian speakers.

Then there's the tragedy of the ethnic Bulgarian Muslims -- about whom I'd known nothing. Bulgarian Turks had lived in the country for generations. In the 1980s, alarmed that the population of this minority was growing (to something like 10 per cent), the Bulgarian communist government embarked on a campaign to rename them and Christianize them. Under the bizarre title of the "Revival Process", this programme kicked off in 1986. But renaming was only the tip of the iceberg. There was also grave-desecrating, beating, and raping. Many simply headed for Turkey. An exodus of 340,000. The older border guard remembers that the "road was black with cars, carts, buses, taxis". It was the largest movement of people in Europe since WWII, a peace-time example of blatant ethnic cleansing. These people were, in Kassabova's words, the "last victims of European communism..., the last cretinous crime of twilight totalitarianism".

Then we have the Pomaks. These are the descendants of Slavic people who converted to Islam centuries ago. They ended up in a real bind: "Just as the communist Bulgarian state had been paranoid that the Pomaks were the fifth column of Turkey and Orientalism, the Greek state had been paranoid that the Pomaks were the fifth column of Bulgaria and communism. To reflect the paranoia of each state, in the second half of the twentieth century the names of the Bulgarian Pomaks had been Slavicised (that is, de-Islamicised), while the names of Greek Pomaks had been Turkicised (that is, de-Slavicised)."

From all this has arisen the phenomenon of "ancestral tourism". Based in Turkey for a time, she writes: "While we had tea in the square, two Greek cars arrived. The visitors got out and looked around, dazed. They were from Kavala, come to see their grandparents' houses. This was the ancestral pilgrimage of Thrace: every summer cars and busloads arrived from Greece and Bulgaria. It was harder for a Turk to travel to Europe than vice versa, so the locals went through all the emotions with the visitors as if they were their own. Because they were."

From all this, too, we have the "fractured families" of the region. Some of the Bulgarian Turks ended up returning, because "the strain of remaking themselves in a foreign country -- Turkey -- had been too great".



3. The people movement of today

It's not long before Kassabova's journey is punctuated by encounters with today's asylum-seekers -- Kurds from Iraq, or escapees from Syria -- and with the people-smugglers who feed off them, "sealing deadly deals with the already-robbed of this world by robbing them further".

There's a vivid depiction of Ali's Cafe, a Turkish establishment not far from the European border, which inevitably recalls filmic renditions of impermanence and temporary comfort: "Perhaps there is a Casablanca for every moment in time when war exiles people from themselves and catapults them to transit realms. A place with Rick's Bar, or Ali's Cafe, a safe house where the homeless of the day come in search of passage. Or just to sit and take comfort in something that never changes: 'One more tea, Murat!'... 'When I close up at night [Ali says] and everybody's gone, you won't believe me but that's when the cafe really fills up. With ghosts. Twenty years' worth of ghosts, coming and going."

Later, on the Greek side of the border, she finds herself staying in the vicinity of a refugee camp (the hotel where she is lodging does the catering for the camp). She describes it as a maximum-security facility, and it glints in the sun "with its new wire, the same shiny wire that made the new wall between Greece and Turkey". She's writing at a time when there was a surge of migrants to Europe. And the asylum-seekers in this camp are fundamentally stuck. Denied entry to Europe, but with no possibility of going back to where they started, theirs was a "wasteland of days and nights that led absolutely nowhere".

There is a spectral quality to these wanderers, says Kassabova: "These ghosts -- men, women, children -- walked along rural roads between the border towns of Europe, with plastic bags and eyes that locals didn't want to look into for fear of seeing all the world's trouble." She empathizes with the daughters of a Kurdish family she meets, remembering her own experience of migration: "I ... felt everything with them: the humiliation, the injustice, the mindfuck of having to hate where you come from but having nothing new to love... The sensation of being invisible, unwanted, speechless, a disembodied soul waiting in one of history's drafty corridors."



4. The unfathomability of the border area

There is a fey quality to this whole region, Kassabova repeatedly shows us. Rites and beliefs that have disappeared in more "central" areas have survived here. This is the land of fire worship, fire-walking, and fire-balls; layered rituals with an unmistakable "whiff of paganism"; curative springs; healers; and mysterious happenings.

Nothing is played up, or over-dramatized, but the author has many experiences that are at heart inexplicable.

And the ghostly atmosphere comes through very strongly. As Kassabova explains in an interview, "There was this kind of hauntedness, this sense of being stalked, this sense of silent screams and mouths full of earth that haunt the landscape. And also the sense that memory may not have a voice, but it's there. It's there in the land, it's there in the ruined houses and in the initials scratched in the trees."

"Sad and haunted" doesn't live far on the emotional spectrum from "dark and menacing". And sure enough, there's a powerful and wholly believable account of a sudden loss of trust in a particular person, Ziko, in a place that is wild and desolate and uncontrollable.

We never totally understand what happened, although it's true that Ziko doesn't totally inspire our confidence. An opportunist, he's done a bit of treasure-hunting and smuggling (of all kinds). But he doesn't actually DO anything specific here. So what we have is a really good description of the kind of blind, panicky fear that does seize you sometimes as a traveller -- the sudden feeling that something is not right, and you badly need to get out, which may be totally valid, or may be just a creation of your paranoia. When Kassabova meets Ziko again, he's hurt and bewildered: "'Will you forgive me?' I asked, suddenly appalled by his face... And I was appalled with myself: that my good intentions had backfired, that I had made a mess of things, that it wasn't just Ziko who was full of shadows, I was too, and my shadows were even more treacherous than his because they were undeclared. He owned up to everything he did in life, but I had projected my own darkness onto him."

The spiritual undercurrent to which Kassabova is so sensitive also feeds some wonderful description, however. A couple of examples:

"The night swallowed the village, window by window, until it was gone, and it if wasn't for the smell of woodsmoke, you could believe that no houses had ever been here. Only cold stars and distant barking dogs..."

"From Needle Point, you can almost see the invisible sea border, but then you're never sure what it is you glimpse in the sea mist; everything looks as if it might be a memory in the making. This place felt to me less like a place and more like a continuing moment in time, a single perfect Pontic note. Lashed by the lodos from the south and Siberian currents from the north, you stand in a portal. Now you're mortal, now you're not. Now it's you, now it's everyone who passed here before you."



5. Stories within stories

Historian Mark Mazower remarks: "Kassabovas story ... is full of restlessness. It shows more starkly than anything else I have read what the border did to the people who lived along it, and how its legacy endures."

And Kassabova gives us many examples of the way people have processed their experiences. In another interview, she says: "As soon as I started hearing peoples stories, it became obvious to me that this book was also going to be about how people narrate their lives, about how we all narrate our lives. In a place like that border, where extreme things have happened and theres a great saturation of human experience, its particularly interesting to see how people survive their story."

Fresh from Yellowface, and its exploration of the theme of WHO has the "right" to tell WHICH stories, I found myself wondering whether she should have been telling Ziko's story... Did he consent? How does all this consent business work in non-academic writing? The power differential is so skewed, after all...

On the other hand, she gives a presence to so many whose own voices were prematurely and violently silenced.

The line I found most poignant of the whole book was this: "Perhaps the story of all our lives is the story of what is lost and how we go about looking for it."

How true.