Thessaloniki, Passover, Lazaruvden, Tsvetnitsa

I apologize for the fact that this is two days late in coming (my endeavor being to publish over weekends), but in my defense, it was kind of an eventful week, and my normal three-day window for starting, developing, and finishing these well-copy-edited, insightful articles was pushed back. But instead of rambling on with another tired excuse, let's just cut right to the chase.

Chapter 1: Thessaloniki

One recent seminar already under my belt (read about it here), the Fulbright Commissions That Be saw fit to send me off to another one, balancing my trip up to the frozen wastelands of Northern Europe with one to Greece, the quintessence of Mediterranean life.

Leaving my packing, in typical fashion, for the morning of our departure, I hastily threw together the necessary items, caught a cab to Jamie's apartment, and he, Fred, and I set off on our 5 hour, 20 minute road trip to Thessaloniki. In spite of a couple of (very) wrong turns, we made it mostly without incident, and were welcomed that night with a reception in the art studio of the Thessalonian artist Soros. Much like Berlin's, this welcoming event served as our first contact with the other Fulbrighters in attendance, though instead of being charged with the Herculean task of meeting 500-odd people, we had simply to meet 30 or so, this conference comprising only that miniscule amount of wide-eyed wanderers.

The next day, with a good night's sleep under my belt (beginning to sound familiar?), I--much more happily than on the previous day--partook in the Seminar's festivities. These included presentations from 8 of the other Fulbrighters, which were both engaging and gave me some ideas about my own work, the author of a forthcoming book on Thessaloniki sharing excerpts therefrom, lunch in the swanky dining room of the hotel, and an after-dinner trip down to the White Tower, where I and my companions made merry--in the medieval sense--and furthered ourselves in the cause of meeting everyone else.

The next day's activities began at the Museum of Byzantine Culture, and the morning progressed in much the same fashion as the the previous day, comprising project presentations and the offering of another speaker--this time Athens' Deputy Mayor for Finance--who spoke to us about the current debt crisis. After a tour of the museum and a small lunch, we got to go on a bus tour of Thessaloniki, which contained some extraordinarily cool things. But instead of tell you about everything we saw, be it that the thing I leave you with from this fly-by of history is that I saw my first blooming tree of the Spring, so--poof!--there went my martenitsa.

Tying it to the branch

This would be the natural place to share any and all of the gorgeous pictures I took, but I, in my sometimes-staggering boneheadedness, neglected to bring my camera along for this tour, thereby relegating the spectacular views I witnessed to virtually certain forgottenness. Later, though, I would atone--at least with my own self--by venturing out, along with some new friends, on an ultimately-rewarding quest for gyros, which I found to contain, to my immensely pleasurable surprise, thick, American-style fries, which, when complimented with thick, American-style ketchup, transported me, in my mind, back to many a happy day under the Los Angeles sun.

As Wednesday dawned, we had come to our Last Day. After gorging myself on another large breakfast (I have really come to appreciate hotel breakfast buffets in the last 3 weeks, both German and Greek), I and the rest of my compatriots boarded a bus to visit the dubious purported tomb of Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great. Before we did that, however--and after one wrong turn dropped us right into the middle of a convent--we ended up at a little monastery nestled in the Greek mountains, which we toured, to the accompanying explanations of the abbot, Father Panteleimon. Check it out:

The view from the monastery. Seriously.

Inside

Leaving the monastery behind to a now-steady drizzle, we continued our journey to the Vergina Tumulus, whose curators insist contain the tomb of Philip II, though thorough scholarship makes a strong case against this possibility. Nonetheless, there is some very cool stuff housed therein, including, but not limited to, several relatively-intact tombs from the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, which made for an interesting, if a tad too-long, excursion.

It was nearly 3 by the time lunch rolled around, and we were all exhausted, resulting in the collective lucidity and order of said meal being reduced by half, give or take. Returning to the hotel, and eschewing the proposed walking tour--which would have had to take place in the rain--we instead rested up before our final communal dinner. Some food and several bottles of wine later, we were transformed into a band ready to head out for one final night in Greece, which many of us did, and deep into the night, at that. While less of a raging affair than was our final night in Berlin, it was still fun, and to be sure, the next morning arrived far too early.

After breakfast, Jamie and I--Fred having departed late on Tuesday night--loaded up the car, and headed back the way we had come. Or so we thought. Making a wrong turn outside Thessaloniki, we ended up traveling more than halfway to Kavala before we realized that we were headed in the wrong direction. But, as with many wrong turns in this serendipitous universe of ours, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

After stopping at a roadside service station to get a map and figure out where the hell we were, we decided that the best course of action was to continue in the direction we had been headed so that we could pick up the highway that would lead us back to the E79, the freeway that would take us back to Sofia. And, as we made our way down the highway, passing from small town to small town, the Greek countryside opened up as I had always envisioned, but never got to witness; rolling hills and vineyards splayed before us like something out of a made-for-TV-movie on BBC. After 4 days in Greece, we were finally seeing what we--or, at least, I--had come with the expectation to see.

Stretching into the distance

Mountains

And this was only the beginning. Crossing the border back into Bulgaria, those fields and vineyards turned into the types of mountains I never expected to see in this part of the world, so much like the beautiful, rocky, sparsely vegetated hills I had grown to love in Southern California they were. The air was warm; the colors stark. Spring had reared its gorgeous head once again.

At the border

Seriously, Topanga?

The Pirins

Finally arriving at my apartment many hours after we had departed (with a good in-car nap to my benefit), I was feeling better, and ready to take on the next challenge: preparing a Passover seder in 24 hours.

Chapter 2:  Passover

Mere minutes after returning to my house, I threw open the windows (this day offering sun, warm air, and a light breeze), put on some music, and began to clean. Winter dies hard in this stalwart of the former Eastern Bloc, and 6 months of having the windows shut against the snow and wind will allow quite a bit of dust to accumulate. The time for Spring Cleaning had come.

So I vacuumed the floors and washed the walls, cleaned the bathroom and mopped the kitchen, moved furniture around, and put my winter blanket away. The sheer exuberance of a warm April day notwithstanding, I also had company coming in short order.

Every year, my family gets together on the first (convenient) night of Passover for a seder, something I haven't been able to be a part of since 2006. This year, being abroad, I wanted to try my hand at hosting one, hence all the cleaning. The cleaning ended up being just the beginning, though.

After doing an initial round on Thursday night (while listening to the first game of the Phillies' 2012 season on the radio, a textbook 1-0 victory), I woke up early-ish the next day to finish what I had started. Emerging from my now-pristine apartment around 1 PM on Friday, I headed out to buy the assortment of vegetables, fruits, wines, and matzah that would constitute the ingredients for my share of the Passover cooking. Arriving back at my apartment, I spent the next couple hours whipping up matzah-ball soup, potato kugel, xaroset, and the various other accoutrements of the seder plate.

And people came, and food, and wine, and pretty soon, 11 of us were seated around the periphery of my kitchen/dining room, reading from the Haggadah and singing the songs, making one of probably four seders in the whole country. It was an immensely nice experience, especially being so far from my family this year, and successful to a detail. Exhausting, but totally rewarding and gratifying.

Chapter 3: Lazaruvden/Tsvetnitsa, or, The Bus that Wouldn't Come

Lacking the opportunity to sleep in this past weekend, I arose on Saturday to go out into the field for my research for the first time since I narrowed my focus specifically to Shopski dvuglas. And though, in most places in the world, it should have been relatively straightforward to get to where I was going, it was anything but.

After calling up Alex, an American law student living in Sofia this semester, to accompany me--with getting lost a near certainty--we made our way down to Петте Кьошета (The 5 Corners) to catch the #17 мартрушка, the mini-bus that, I was told, runs to Gorni Bogrov, the village I needed to get to. Pulling up in my own bus just in time to meet her and clamber aboard the martrushka, I paid for our tickets and asked the driver to tell me when we had gotten to Gorni Bogrov. He replied that his route didn't include a stop in Gorni Bogrov. Thinking I had misheard him, I asked again, and annoyed, he replied that we needed bus 118.

Hopping off at the nearest convenient point, we then proceeded to mosey our way down a street that looked as though it ran in the right direction. After being supplied with fresh information in the shadow of the crumbling apartment blocks by another local, we hopped a passing bus and took it the four stops to where she had said to go. As this was the end of the line, we again hopped off and found ourselves in the middle of nowhere.

Trudging to the main road, we happened upon yet another bus stop and asked an overly friendly teenaged girl how to get to where we were going. She told us to head back to the stop where we had gotten off and take bus 14. This we did, when it finally came around, but to our chagrin, the end of its own line was a mere 2 stops hence. This stop, at least, was populated, and fortuitously replete with a scheme of Sofia's public transportation. It appeared to us as though we could get to the stop where we could finally board bus 118 via one final connecting bus, so before we boarded that, we bought day passes for ourselves, unsure of how many more trials we would have to go through before we reached our day's land of milk and honey.

Hopping on the appropriate bus for 2 more stops, it dumped us off at a remote terminal past which we could make out the tracks of a tram line. Upon further inspection, we discovered that it was tram 22, which happens to run directly in front of my apartment. 5 stops away. We had made a large circle.

Refusing to despair, however, we trekked up the road to a bus stop that looked like it could have been the right one. Instead of the promised 118 line, however, it showed only that bus 90 ran there. I was on the verge of giving up, when, perusing the list of stops along the line, I caught sight of the most blessed words I had ever seen in my life. Село Горни Богров - Village Gorni Bogrov. We had found our bus.

From there, it was simply a matter of waiting for it to show up, passing the time en route chatting with a rather nice fellow whose rudimentary command English was the result of many hours spent playing Starcraft with "millions of Americans," and getting off at the appropriate stop. Once we did that, though, the day became eye-opening.

I had come to think of the concept of the small Bulgarian village, tucked away in a remote corner of the landscape, as extinct, or, at least, so far removed from the bustling metropolis of Sofia as to be effectively out of reach to me. But ah!--such is the wonder and mystery of living overseas--how one is constantly surprised by any new culture amongst which one lives. 

One of the extraordinarily refreshing things I have recently discovered about Bulgaria is that there are no suburbs here, in stark contrast to the urban sprawl that has become the common plague of the American city. The city here literally fades away to countryside in a matter of meters. So there we were, less than 20 kilometers from the city center, surrounded on all sides by fields and small, ramshackle houses.

And it was beautiful. Before sharing the pictures I took, let me just note that the thing that really got me about this village was the juxtaposition of ancient and modern here. For starters, consider that we were standing, in the year 2012, in the midst of a tiny village that had probably been there for hundreds of years, with a European capital a few kilometers away. And within the city itself, the combinations of old and new were striking. To be sure, we found no mud-brick huts, but we found more than our fair share of old houses, and standing neatly next to them was a row of--there is no other word for them--mansions that would have fit in perfectly along the back streets of West LA. Most houses here, instead of a lawn, had a garden, neatly plowed, some with sprouts emerging from their soil, and I imagined that this was their modern-day adaptation of the subsistence farming paradigm that has been the hallmark of agrarian Western Bulgarian society for centuries.

Let me waste no more words on the subject:

Gardens

Note the secure fencing on the left and the tumbledown houses on the right

Alex and I just wandered around the village for a while, taking it all in. After a few minutes, though, we remembered the purpose of our, or, at least, my journey: to capture the performance of the Lazarus Day customs. And if the first half of our day had been marked by wrong turns, bad luck, and getting progressively more lost, the Great Forces of Equalization decided to make up for it during the afternoon hours, as we rounded a corner and stumbled onto the village's singing troupe.

We followed them for about half an hour as they went house to house, singing songs specific to the day and collecting food, hard-boiled eggs (traditional for this holiday), and money. When it was time for us to part, they cheerfully replied that I could take their picture.

The keepers of the tradition

Not quite having gotten my fill of the rural landscape, though, I wanted a few more pictures before we departed.

Mt. Vitosha across the plain

The old section of town

A shepherd with his flock

It ended up being a very interesting day.

The next day served much the same purpose, but with far fewer complications and far less drama. Heading out to the village of Jelyava--in the same direction as Gorni Bogrov, but further out--I went, alone this time, to attend the celebrations put together by the chitalishte, the community center, for Tsvetnitsa, or Palm Sunday.

After my trip on what must have been the oldest and slowest bus in existence, I finally arrived, 30 minutes late, to the village, and proceeded up the winding road to the chitalishte. When I got there, I found, instead of folklore, a junior cheerleading squad doing a dance routine to a techno remix of the Popcorn Song. Though initially a bit confused, my patience was ultimately rewarded by 10 minutes of authentic dvuglas from a sextet of babi, though to my annoyance, the crowd apparently did not find it engaging enough to give them their attention, talking loudly over their performance.

Thus went these particular praznitsi - vestiges of tradition mixed with the modern. It seemed to be a microcosm for how Bulgarian society has appropriated tradition today--by diluting it, with an amount, that I have yet to ascertain, of disregard for it, with the modern--but this will be the subject of its own post at some point in the future, as it is a crucial and interesting point of this culture, so I won't get into it now.

After making my way around the inexplicably cold village (believe me when I say that winter dies hard here) to take some more pictures, the bus mercifully came around again, and I went home.

It was quite a jam-packed week, and it contained a lot of new things for me to assimilate. I'm still working through them, but ultimately, I think it will prove to be one of those weeks that help to crystallize my experience here. So there's a good chance I may be revisiting it in the coming months.

That's about all for me this week, and with good reason, as I'm catching a flight to Vienna in a few hours to visit Austrian Fulbrighter and friend from home Andrea. From there I will hop to Munich for a couple of days before returning to the friendly confines of my adopted home. So until the weekend, stay happy, stay healthy.