The building is also draped in signs offering houses for sale for as little as €4,000. The waiter in the café tells us that the multi-storey building has been closed for years, that unemployment is between 15 and 20 per cent even though many people are moving away to larger towns or even abroad.

Setting off again east and then north-east, we are running almost parallel to the Turkish border that is only about 30 kilometres away. An hour and a half later we arrive in Burgas and I catch my first-ever glimpse of the Black Sea. As we cross the bridge into town the port looks quite busy, with container cranes silhouetted against the water and sky. We visit the railway station located almost on the sea front. It was built in 1903 and has been restored to its original glory. Then we head inland into the pedestrian zone, along Hristo Botev. There are some 100-year-old house wrecks in the side streets but a lot of new buildings too. I get the double feeling of a town on the sea and a university town, a little as if it might be a hot-climate version of my home town of Aberdeen – they seem to be about the same size. Of course the large number of posters and advertisements for houses and flats here and in the surrounding resorts, in English, heightens my awareness of the lack of written feedback I would normally take for granted. On some of the side streets, on our way to the Museum of History, we notice a lot of work for the EVN, the ‘normal’ sort of electrical spaghetti looping overhead and decorating the facades of the houses. Then we visit the Ethnographical Museum across from the Church of St. Cyril and St. Methodius. It seems both absolutely logical (monkish manuscripts etc.) and simultaneously very strange to have a church dedicated to the inventors of literacy. The disquiet is probably due to my entrenched attitudes of separating church and secular learning. If you are brought up here, it is probably not an issue, just a fact. A comparable situation happened when we were involved in planning a project for Nepal. We were looking at some Sherpa wooden ceremonial knives with triangular cross sections.

When we asked a Sherpa about what the shape and carving meant he gave us a prosaic answer: ‘If my tap doesn’t produce water, I call the plumber. If I have a spiritual problem, I call the priest. I don’t need to know how it all works.’