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Volume XXI, Number 3 • October 2000
Bulgaria 2000: Two Views of One Hot Tour!
from Wendy Fearing:
“Koprivshtitsa 2000,” read the buttons Martha handed out at the airport-- name tags for us and extras to give away. For the first-time visitors, repeat visitors, or long-time admirers of Bulgarian folk culture gathered in the Sofia airport, our folk arts exposure began when the bus carried us into the city on a brief trip to change money. Never mind that we parked opposite the Alexander Nevski Cathedral, the largest Orthodox church in the Balkans-- the passengers descended immediately on the lace and embroidery stalls lining the sidewalk.
A few hours’ drive southeast from Sofia-- over one mountain range, across the irrigated Thracian Plain, then up into the Rhodope range-- introduced us to the sun, drought-browned fields, vineyards and orchards, goats, and villages with walled gardens that would become familiar in the next two weeks.
During our stay in the mountain town of Velingrad, I had my first multi-sensory experience of Bulgarian culture when residents of nearby Draginovo arranged a bazaar and feast for us. Walking into the local hall, we found walls and tables covered with traditional textiles, newly made or unfolded from dowry trunks: hand-spun and handwoven aprons in stripes with tapestry edging; rugs and cushion covers; purple, green, orange, and magenta overlaid on the basic dark red and intense blue. After this visual feast and shopping spree came the food: chocolate- or jam-filled crescents, large filo dough pastries with cheese, and warm salted sheep’s milk. A brief concert featuring a pair of sisters and a pair of men from Draginovo (joined at the end by some of our own tour members) completed our visit. Too soon, it was time to descend the Rhodope, cross the plain, and climb foothills and a mountain road to Koprivshtitsa. Thanks in part to the physical isolation of Koprivshtitsa and other mountain villages, the Bulgarian language and culture survived centuries of Ottoman rule.
If the Draginovo villagers had given us a taste of traditional arts, then Koprivshtitsa approached immersion. Sound and music filled the four festival days, from pre-dawn roosters (not universally appreciated), to late-night singing in cafes, the bus parking lot, and the performers’ enormous tent city. During the day, performers filled seven stages strung along high meadows above the village, while more performers rehearsed to the side and jam sessions took place in shady spots.
Fittingly enough for songs and processions that originated around village wells, on streets, and in fields, most of the open-air stages were unobtrusive concrete pads with views of trees, village fields, and mountains. With brief introductions and no fussing with sound checks, successive elementary-school-age soloists, mixed youth groups, all-female or all-male sets, and performers of elaborate story-pageants streamed on and off the stages almost uninterrupted. And if the music and vendors weren’t diversion enough, costumed performers walked by in more colored variations on embroidered chemise, overdress, apron, and headdress than I could have imagined.
Getting to the main festival site was an experience in itself. After tearing ourselves away from the vendors of costumes, recordings, and musical instruments in the village, we climbed up the hill among performers in costume who carried stools, water pails, sheaves of grain, and other props for their performances-- even an ox yoke! Fellow travelers had adventures on their way up the hill, stopping at a dooryard to admire a baby and being invited inside by the proud mother and grandmother.
After each day at the festival, we gathered at dinner to trade stories. Stories about using gestures and scant Bulgarian to ask permission to record rehearsing women, and seeing their obvious pleasure at hearing the tape played back. About sitting on a hillside in the shade, listening to music and carrying on a language-limited exchange with the grandfathers passing us bottles of potent homebrew. About the enterprising vendor who demonstrated a gaida (bagpipe) with a plastic bag as a sack and played an end-blown flute made of an umbrella shaft.
I’ll leave to your imaginations the ripe tomatoes and cucumbers, the rewards of encouraging restaurant musicians to switch from American popular music to Bulgarian dance music, and the Bistritsa Babi (grandmothers) on the hillside above us, singing and waving in farewell. We hope to meet you again!
Many thanks to tour originators Martha and Dick Forsyth for sharing their energies, friends, and love of Bulgaria.
from David Johnston & Dana Sussman:
We came to Bulgaria to see living traditions, such as the stooped old woman with a cane living in a house with a grape arbor that is used for both shade and grapes, and herbs hanging en masse to dry-- like dozens of little whisk brooms surrounding the porch.
While there, we came to better understand many of the songs we have heard. For example, at a museum which showed the costume women wore to get water from the well, we learned that women got dressed up to go the village well. They did so because the single young men waited there hoping for their chance to talk with the single young women as they came out to fill their pails with water. The well, we learned, was the Bulgarian equivalent of our singles bar.
We came there to experience Bulgarian life, much of which is rural-- the rooster’s idea of the right time to wake up is 4:15 a.m., and his idea of a fun time afterward is to crow about a dozen times every half hour.
Communication was creative. We stayed at a farmhouse during our time in Koprivshtitsa, and David wanted to give the figs and peach, which had gone slightly off in the hot bus, to our hostess to feed to the chickens. While she spoke more English than he spoke Bulgarian, this was too complicated a concept to convey with spoken language. Finally, after David pantomimed “smelly” for the fruit and made a chicken noise, she understood, smiled, and thanked him.
Koprivshtitsa is in a valley between two ridges, with the festival held high above the town on the far ridge from where we stayed. On the way to the festival the first day, we walked just behind one of the many groups of performers that made up the festival. Being in the midst of the village band playing music as they danced along the road to the festival enlivened the whole walk.
There is intense competition to get into the festival as a performer, and every village wants to send its group of performers to the festival. This has resulted in performances going on simultaneously at seven stages during the entire three days of the festival-- when you’ve heard enough of one style, you can just wander down the path to the next stage, where there is music and dancing from a different region.
We were moved by many of the singers, such as the Shope performance of close harmony (“crunchy,” as Martha Forsyth calls it). In what was a hopeful sign throughout the festival, there were incredible performances by children who seem to be keeping up the tradition. We saw earnest 10-year-old girls standing on tiptoe to reach the microphone while belting out clear renditions of the traditional songs, and a 9-year-old boy, already a master of the gaida.
The highlight of the festival was, for us, the Samokov singers. We happened upon some costumed old women singers practicing wonderful mountain music. Delighted with their sound, we asked by sign for permission to record them. They stopped the practice, got two more members to make up the set of five, performed two songs for our benefit, and then indicated that they were done. As had been suggested by Martha, we then brought out pictures of ourselves to use as ice breakers. Boy, did that break the ice! They practically exploded with conversation and smiles, sang many more songs, shared bread and rakija (a potent local liqueur) and eagerly listened to the playback of themselves singing, listening intently for a few minutes, then breaking out in the smile and side-to-side head bobble that indicated their pleasure. Before it was all over, they had told us their ages (one was 72), asked ours, described their village, given us their addresses to stay in touch, and parted with handshakes and kisses. It was wonderful to be amongst so much warm and welcoming talent.
After the festival, the grandfather of the family we were staying with gave us a ride to the bus in his donkey cart, and we were off to see the rest of Bulgaria. And much of Bulgaria did we see. From the rebuilt castles in the old Bulgarian capital of Veliko Turnovo, to the busy sea resort of Nessebar, and back to Sofia, we saw a broad cross section of Bulgaria. We swam in the Black Sea in Bourgas, and walked along the promenade at night, where it seemed everyone in town was showing off their best clothes and meeting old friends. We experienced the welcome of the villagers in Elena, watched native craftsmen working in their shops, making everything from copper coffee sets and pottery to handwoven rugs. The rug factory in Kotel was particularly interesting, with three women sitting next to each other on benches working on the same huge rug, helping each other with shoulder rubs to ease the tension of the long hours. Of these places, Plovdiv-- with its elegant old architecture, huge Roman coliseum carved into the side of a hill, and grand views from one of the six hills that make up the city-- was a favorite.
Crafts were everywhere: certainly at the festivals, where we found elegant embroideries and carved spoons, but also in the cities. There is a permanent lace market in Sofia, where you are practically accosted by vendors if you show any inclination to buy anything. We learned the art of walking slowly past the tables, not stopping enough to give any one person the idea we were paying particular attention to them, and then going back and revisiting the ones that were appealing.
Our tour guide amazed us all-- his English was flawless (turns out he was heading for grad school at the University of Pennsylvania in comparative literature) and he had apparently memorized a library’s worth of facts about the history, architecture, local customs, and sights of every place that we visited and many more that we didn’t. Pointing to any random building in Sofia, he could tell us what it was, when it was built and by whom, and what had happened to it since. In addition, Zhozef entertained us on the bus with descriptions of the places we were going through and of life in Bulgaria. We also spent some bus time learning songs from Lidia and Veni Hadzhieva, whom some of us had met when they visited Boston in the spring. The glow that these two young women give off is enough to brighten anyone’s day, and they sing all the time-- there were impromptu concerts on the bus, walking down the street, and once (by invitation, of course) in an old church that had special clay pots built into the walls to enhance the acoustics.
Finally we came to the last party, a feast put on by our friends the Bistritsa Babi (grandmothers). Bistritsa is located high on the side of the mountain next to Sofia, and the feast was held at the crest of a local hill there. We ate delicious home-cooked food, listened to their songs, and joined together in turn to sing the songs we had learned for the occasion. When it was all over the babi gathered outside the gate at the top of the hill to sing us down the mountain as we walked back to the bus that would take us to the airport for our flight home. Articles are copyrighted by the Folk Arts Center, and may not be reproduced without permission of FAC. |
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