Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe

by Kapka Kassabova

Overview

“Remarkable: a book about borders that makes the reader feel sumptuously free.” —Peter Pomerantsev

In this extraordinary work of narrative reportage, Kapka Kassabova returns to Bulgaria, from where she emigrated as a girl twenty-five years previously, to explore the border it shares with Turkey and Greece. When she was a child, the border zone was rumored to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall, and it swarmed with soldiers and spies. On holidays in the “Red Riviera” on the Black Sea, she remembers playing on the beach only miles from a bristling electrified fence whose barbs pointed inward toward the enemy: the citizens of the totalitarian regime.

Kassabova discovers a place that has been shaped by successive forces of history: the Soviet and Ottoman empires, and, older still, myth and legend. Her exquisite portraits of fire walkers, smugglers, treasure hunters, botanists, and border guards populate the book. There are also the ragged men and women who have walked across Turkey from Syria and Iraq. But there seem to be nonhuman forces at work here too: This densely forested landscape is rich with curative springs and Thracian tombs, and the tug of the ancient world, of circular time and animism, is never far off.

Border is a scintillating, immersive travel narrative that is also a shadow history of the Cold War, a sideways look at the migration crisis troubling Europe, and a deep, witchy descent into interior and exterior geographies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555977863
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	09/05/2017
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	1,153,241
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Kapka Kassabova is the author of three poetry collections, the novel Villa Pacifica, and the acclaimed memoirs Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria and Twelve Minutes of Love: A Tango Story. She lives in Scotland.

Table of Contents

Map xii

Preface xv

Border 1

Mountain of Madness, I 2

Part 1 Starry Strandja

Via pontica 7

Red Riviera 8

Strandja 14

The Village in the Valley 17

Agiasma 29

Everything Begins with a Spring 30

Cheshma 43

A Man of Leisure 44

415 49

Wire in the Heart 51

Klyon (1961-1990) 55

The Tomb of Bastet 57

Cold water 74

Pilgrims 75

Atonement 81

One Hundred and Twenty Sins 82

Sozialistischen persönlichkeit 87

Riding the Iron Curtain 88

Zmey 107

Ball of Fire 108

Part 2 Thracian Corridors

Thrace 121

The Friend with the Pigeons 124

Memleket 137

Girl Between Languages 138

Komshulak 152

To See a Dancing Priest 153

Rosa damascena 164

If You Are True 166

Corridors 175

Everybody Comes to Ali's 176

Via antica 181

Tales from the Bridge 183

Ghosts 190

A Kurdish Love Story 192

The spring of the white-legged maiden 202

The Chicken Shack 204

Part 3 Rhodope Passes

Rhodopaca, rhodopaeum, rhodopensis 219

The Village Where You Lived For Ever 222

The judgement 235

On the Road to Freedom 237

Tale of two kingdoms 252

Drama 255

Metaxas line 266

Mountain of Madness, II 269

Agonia 279

Hotel Above the World 281

Ursus arctos 287

Goddess of the Forest 288

Tobacco 298

The Woman Who Walked for a Week 299

Part 4 Starry Strandja

Lodos 309

To the River 312

Kaynarca 332

The Monk of Happiness 334

Eternal return 344

The Good Siren 346

Muhhabet 353

The Last Shepherd 355

Uroki 361

How to Lift a Spell 363

Acknowledgements and Sources 377

Editorial Reviews

It's not surprising that Kassabova—who has written three poetry collections, a novel and three memoirs—demonstrates a descriptive sensitivity on the page…But she also possesses the gift that's bestowed on only the best of travel writers: an ability to zero in on characters who illuminate the condition of a place at a moment in time. At one point, Kassabova comes across a fortuneteller who answers her secret, unasked question. "What you have begun you will complete," the woman, reading a handful of tossed beans, assures her, "but you must heed the signs along the way. Never ever ignore the signs." Luckily for both author and reader, Kassabova seems indeed to have heeded every sign and missed nothing along the way.

The New York Times Book Review - Andrew McCarthy

★ 05/22/2017
In this engrossing travelogue, poet and memoirist Kassabova (Twelve Minutes of Love) returns to her native Bulgaria after 25 years to explore its borders with Turkey and Greece, illuminating the area’s often dark history and the lives of the people living in its shadows. Remembering her country as a site of refuge for individuals fleeing Communist East Germany, she interviews a man who was caught, tortured, and imprisoned by the Stasi in 1971. In Strandja she witnesses the ritualistic bathing of religious icons accompanied by bagpipes and fire walkers and chronicles the unbelievable story of a (supposedly) cursed Thracian archaeological site believed to be an “intergalactic portal.” Throughout, Kassabova presents the border as a metaphor for the threshold of human callousness: once the line has been crossed into cruelty, there is no returning to the country of innocence. Wild animals abound, myths mingle with reality, and Kassabova proves to be a penetrating and contemplative guide through rough terrain. Agent: Jacqueline Ko, the Wylie Agency. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

It’s not surprising that Kassabova—who has written three poetry collections, a novel and three memoirs—demonstrates a descriptive sensitivity on the page. . . . But she also possesses a gift that’s bestowed on only the best of travel writers: an ability to zero in on characters who illuminate the condition of a place in time.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Kassabova’s sense of adventure and spontaneity, combined with a lack of artifice . . . are winning qualities in a narrator. . . . Kassabova’s gifts as a poet shine when she describes the mystical, powerful landscape, the book’s true protagonist.”—Newsday

“Rich with a profound sense of the region’s political and cultural history, this travelogue moves at an often meandering pace, its narrative broken up by condensed musings on personal conflict, historical ephemera or folklore. . . . Kassabova devotes herself to intimate vignettes that sparkle with the dark charm of fairy tales and mystical fables. . . . Hosts and drivers, fellow travelers and cynical locals provide a constant hum that reinforces the tension of a territory under constant contest.”—Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

"Kassabova is local enough to dig out the details, and at the same time detached enough to see things without judging them. She observes, listens, and narrates without distorting the story with her opinion. She’s a messenger. A very fair one. In the current state of the world’s refugee crisis, Border is a reminder that those who cross the borders are not just numbers. They are people, and bearers of stories that deserve to be heard."—The Christian Science Monitor

“It’s the story of migration, both modern and historical, of boundaries crossed and crossed out, a story as old as the soil itself.”—Literary Hub

“[A] marvelous new travelogue. . . . Border is that rarest of things: a travel book with a conscience that is also a compendium of wonders.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Kassabova’s sense of adventure and spontaneity, combined with a lack of artifice . . . are winning qualities in a narrator. . . . Kassabova’s gifts as a poet shine when she describes the mystical, powerful landscape, the book’s true protagonist. . . . We are left with a clear emotional and sensory imprint of the Balkan borderlands.”—Pioneer Press (St. Paul)

“A poetic, thoughtful, and timely exploration of the borderlands of the eastern Balkans.”—Geist

“An ethereal siren’s song woven from the myths, legends, and languages that converge in the borderland. . . . The result is a portrait of a place out of time, separate from the countries the speakers inhabit—a distinctive space that the reader can enter too after falling under Kassabova’s spell. Reading Border is a dizzying reminder of the common humanity found on either side of any border.”—The Christian Century

“This may very well be the best book I’ve read this decade.”—Alex Balk, The Awl

“Kassabova’s book is closer to a superbly executed work of anthropology. What sets it apart is the brilliance of her prose: time and again the lurking poet bursts forth.”—Current History

“[An] engrossing travelogue. . . . Kassabova proves to be a penetrating and contemplative guide through rough terrain.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“As Kassabova travels through the hinterlands of Bulgaria, along the border where that country meets Turkey and Greece, she discovers that borders shape the lives of both those who attempt to cross them and those who live nearby. . . . Border offers a dark look at a world of smugglers and spies, where the past maintains its hold even as people struggle to reach a brighter future."—Booklist

“A dreamlike account that subtly draws readers into the author’s ambivalent experience of a homeland that has changed almost beyond recognition.”—Kirkus Reviews

“This is an exceptional book, a tale of travelling and listening closely, and it brings something altogether new to the mounting literature on the story of modern migration. . . . [At a moment] when asylum-seekers are adrift from one end of the world to the other, Border makes for timely reading.”—New Statesman (UK)

“Riveting, beautifully written. . . . Kassabova, a poet and novelist as well as an essayist, is ideally placed to take us on a journey to a corner of Europe that even today seems exotic and little known. . . . In this region nearly everyone is at only one or two generational removes from exile and displacement, scattered among three alphabets and several nations; and along the way Kassabova meets treasure-hunters, refugees, retired spies, smugglers, hunters, botanists, healers, artists, Gypsies (Roma), forest rangers and -border guards. . . . Her wry wit leavens the narrative and keeps it from collapsing under the weight of cumulative tragedy. . . . This is travel writing with lexical precision (“transhumance”, “karst”) and a sense of adventure, but with a distinctively female slant. . . . With the best of travel writers, Kapka Kassabova is an explorer, viewing everything with the eyes of discovery, even as she uncovers strata of history and legend. She makes us long to peer closely at the map, and see these wondrous places for ourselves.”—The Times Literary Supplement (UK)

From the Publisher

2017-07-03
A writer who has lived in Scotland for many years chronicles her return to her birthplace to explore the idea and reality of boundaries between nations.Poet and memoirist Kassabova (Twelve Minutes of Love: A Tango Story, 2013, etc.) left Bulgaria with her family when she was a child, eventually settling in the U.K. She returned to the Balkans, where "Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey converge and diverge," to explore tiny, almost-abandoned mountain villages and border points where, in the communist era of her childhood, those who attempted to cross in either direction might be killed. She found a new group of immigrants, from Syria, in the region, trying to get to Greece or Bulgaria but stuck either in camps or trying to make a living as individuals in Turkey. This is far from a conventional travel narrative. The book is as much about Kassabova's emotions and misgivings as the world of the senses, with digressions about dragons, magical springs, ghosts, and the evil eye. A woman traveling by herself in a part of the world where doing so opens her to being perceived as a prostitute, the author met and talked to men while the women stayed hidden. These men, whose real names she alters, are shepherds, ex-spies, Eastern Orthodox priests, smugglers, and former border guards. They told her long, complicated, and possibly true stories. She suspected two, probably drug dealers, of kidnapping her and fled in terror to the safety of three strangers living in "a paradise of lemon balm and fig trees." Telling her story, she includes bits of the layered history of the region, not so systematically that an outsider can piece it all into a coherent narrative but nonetheless studded with flashes of insight. A dreamlike account that subtly draws readers into the author's ambivalent experience of a homeland that has changed almost beyond recognition.

Kirkus Reviews

Kassabova’s travelogue of Bulgaria, where she spent her early years, and its Balkan neighbors is given an effective narration by Corrie James. Kassabova describes the Balkans as the place that delineated the communist from the non-communist, and still delineates the Christian from the Muslim, Europe from Asia. It is also an area where place, people, and ideas interact. Many of the historical incidents described are tragic—for example, many East Germans tried to escape from communism via Bulgaria into Turkey with often tragic consequences—but we also hear of the farcical as well as the sublime. James’s English accent is precise in enunciation, pacing, and expression. Overall, her delivery is academic in tone and sometimes a bit monotonous. Still, the work is fascinating, and one will learn much about an area that is often overlooked. M.T.F. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2017 - AudioFile