Coming here we have also encountered some of these mental borders: leaving ‘Europe’ for the ‘Balkans’, running up against an imaginary construction that seems to go through infinite changes of shape as you reach out to define it. It has more than a passing resemblance to a Chinese box or, perhaps a more appropriate historical metaphor, with these Russian nesting dolls – the definitions of inside and out alternating continuously. For example, trying to get hold of what Bulgaria is and was and would like to be inevitably leads to a consideration of what has constituted Greece. The latter is already part of the EU. Bulgaria will become so in the near future. This will result in another recasting of political borders, the outer doll being moved, like a chess figure, eastwards to the Bosphorus.

On the other hand, Bulgaria before World War II was always regarded as part of the ‘Balkans’ (here referring to geography as well as the cultural construct) whereas through the 19th century Greece slowly became inscribed as a geographical and cultural part of the Western European heritage. The post-WWII political landscape froze any possibility of dynamic inter-bloc discourse and consigned Bulgaria to the overriding category of ‘behind the Iron Curtain’ on the one hand and, on the other, leaving ‘not-so-Balkan’ Greece as the sole ‘free’ representative of the geographic Balkans in the West. Since 1989 there has been a certain amount of Balkan slippage — the wars surrounding the break-up of Yugoslavia provoked a reawakening of the ‘Balkan’ stereotype in the media and art. At the same time there has been a corresponding weakening of that stereotype because of increasing contact with Black Sea coast complexes, mountain skiing resorts and private house purchases;  media-mediated reality on the one hand and personal experience on the other.

My daily measure of Todorova last night touched on an interesting aspect of this complex.

She points out that while Greece became a major destination for wealthy, aristocratic travellers from England—leading to the construction of Greece as the cradle of Western democracy and popular British support for Greek independence which happened in 1829—the Russians were busily constructing a Bulgaria that was the cradle of Slavic culture pointing to Orthodox Christianity, the Cyrillic alphabet etc as a common bond. The somewhat later Western (British) ‘discovery’ of the Bulgarians as a suppressed Christian ‘nation’ in the second half of the 19th century—especially following the well-publicised massacres after the April Uprising in 1876—sparked a policy reversal as far as maintaining the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire as the strategy of choice to prevent Russian access to the Mediterranean.

From a long-term historical perspective we are continually crossing borders, layers, from an ancient Thracian kingdom to a Roman administrative district; from an Ottoman province to an independent monarchy, a party fiefdom into a democratic republic. At times all within seeing distance.