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. |
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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. |
