After breakfast we go into town – to the area around the market place. Here there is a large building filled with women sewing and we notice a shop at street level selling textiles. The woman owner tells us she used to work in a factory which is now defunct. She also says that the area supplies multi-nationals like Marks and Spencer in England (which, we later find out, list a franchise address in Sofia on their website). We cross and recross a bridge over the river above which a sculpture hovers: a blue iron girder construction tensioned on wires like a tightrope walker who lost heart and froze in the middle yet subject to gravity.
After drinking something very Bulgarian in an empty market café we set off again. The taste of it instantly wiped its name from my memory. Looking at the map I notice that we are only a handful of kilometres from the Greek border. In fact, if this was flatland and there was a direct path to the south-west, it would take less than an hour to walk it. This is pure geography now but it had a quite different significance in the past. That past becomes clear as we drive along a ridge and come across the remains of an internal border control.
