The story is superficially quite simple. Once upon a time there was a young man who fell in love with a young woman but because she was properly demure she always wore a headscarf in such a way that he could only see her eyes. He began to pine for the girl and prevailed on his father to pay a large dowry in gold to make her his wife which the father accordingly did. At the proper time the wedding guests came for the bride and they set off for Zimzelen. However, a maliciously playful wind sprung up tearing away the bride’s headscarf and revealing a face of stunning beauty. This left the groom and the groom’s father totally speechless. The latter’s thoughts quickly turned to the unthinkable. The wind grew angry and turned first the bride on her donkey, then, one by one, the father and the other guests to stone. Finally only the bridegroom remained. He begged the wind to turn him to stone too, so as to be with his bride, a wish that was promptly fulfilled. And there they stand to this day. It’s a story that is completely foreign to my sense of justice. The bride and groom are a one-to-one fit with the Romeo and Juliet story (as is the ending) but I find it difficult to understand why the first person to be petrified is the innocent bride. Is she being made responsible for the wind’s antics? And what about the bystanders, the wedding guests, in what way are they to blame?

Or is it simply the notion that if one person (especially a woman) infringes the moral code the whole moral order is threatened, the community as a whole subject to punishment? It seems appropriately oracular and I am more than happy to get away from a sun that doesn’t only beat down on us from above but seems to screech at us from the white rocks too, like the proverbial bad tempered mother-in-law.

Northwards again. We decide to have coffee and walk around the town of Haskovo when we reach it. Up on a hill, the Hill of Youth, overlooking the town centre, there are two cultural monuments – one is a sports stadium and the other is a recent, gigantic statue of the mother of Jesus, privately financed, M tells us.