Border by Kapka Kassabova

Author:Kapka Kassabova [Kassabova, Kapka]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55597-978-2
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2017-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

Silk Town drew me in the first place for two reasons: because of its silky name, and because it had been one of those unvisitable places in the barbed grip of the klyon when I was growing up.

The caravanserai was long gone, the mosque was a church, the hammam an art gallery, and the communist-era silk factories lay gutted. Instead of production, Silk Town had consumption. Instead of the centuries-long trade in watermelons, sesame-butter, cotton, tobacco, figs, and silk, now there were services. All kinds of services.

One road into town was lined with today’s caravanserais – the hotel–casinos. Ali Baba, Pegasus, Monte Carlo, and Pasha all promised ‘Shows, cash prizes and many more surprises!’

Another road was home to a refugee camp that promised nothing. These were once the buildings of the border army.

A third road led to a hill called Hissar, or Fortress, where treasure hunters from three countries buzzed with metal detectors over bumps that contained thousands of human years.

And just behind Silk Town are the low-lying karst hills of Sakar, a natural continuation of Strandja to the east: a realm just as riddled with antique tombs, subterranean passages, sanctuaries, and mystical theories of a Swiss-cheese nature.

A sanctuary recently excavated by archaeologists threw up artefacts dating back not three thousand years, as had been thought, but six. The local museum director confided that treasure hunters had come to her with mind-boggling finds, but the museum had no budget to buy them.

‘This Turk came once,’ she said. ‘A treasure hunter. He had nothing to sell, but!’

But he had a tale to tell. There’s a rock niche nearby, he told her, deeply hewn into the rock face. A treasure hunter in Athens had told him about it and they had travelled here together to look for it because it was said to contain a hoard of ancient gold-crafted jewels. They had found it. Steps cut in the rock led up to it and the Turk, picking up a bad vibe, had waited at the bottom while his Greek colleague had climbed up. The Greek didn’t come out for ages, and when he finally emerged, something had happened to his skin. They ran. The visitor wouldn’t say what his friend had seen inside, but he was keen to impress on the museum director that they should seal that place off because it was cursed.

When the museum director asked him to take her there, he said he was too scared.

‘The thing is,’ she said to me, ‘we know all the rock sanctuaries in the region – some Byzantine, some Thracian – and the one he described is unheard of. We’re still looking for it. But that’s what you get with Strandja-Sakar. A mystery inside an enigma.’

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