As we leave Sofia today rain is drumming heavily on the car roof but after we clear the city boundaries the skies turn blue and a hot sun shines overhead. Heading generally southeast we drop off the eastbound motorway very close to Kostenets, driving with the River Maritsa to one side and the railway line on the other. As we approach the town we notice storks on the roof and chimney of an old factory which is apparently still functioning, if only partially.
We stop.  B calls her father who knows the road well and finds out for us that the factory produces detergent. We make some photographs, cross the railway line and explore the outbuildings that are part of the station. Some of the walls have crossed-out anti-Pomak and Roma graffiti on them, along with a swastika or two. Patterns of political ignorance seem to be the same from Kostenets to Kirkcaldy (the birth place of Adam Smith, the ‘father’ of economic liberalism and author of The Wealth of Nations). As if continuing my mental associations into the real world, just along the road to the left, between the road and the river, there is another old factory which used to produce all the matches used in Bulgaria, nine billion of them, as well as export them to neighbouring countries. It was taken over by Swedish Match in 2001. |
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Since then no matches are produced in Bulgaria, instead they are imported from the company’s factory in Turkey where production costs are substantially less. The old match factory now produces fire starters and fire logs which are almost entirely for export to other parts of Western Europe.
Skirting Belovo the next town on the road, there is a paper factory on our right. Established originally in the 19th century for producing cardboard and packing paper, it now produces toilet paper. Tower blocks of toilet paper along the side of the road are for sale, as they were the last time we passed through the area. Then we pass a strange sculpture. L wants to look at it in more detail. It is the equivalent of a photographic negative: the figure depicted is non-material, sketched by rusting steel and exhibiting another form of absence than that represented by the local public obituary notices to be seen through it pasted to the wall of the bus shelter…
A little later we pass through a village called September, which boasts an abstract concrete star rammed into (shooting out of?) the earth. It, too, is delineated primarily by absence – is this a local specialty? It commemorates the deaths, on the 18 August 1944, of communist partisans from World War II. A little later there is a smaller monument marking a battle with the Ottoman Turks.
The valley narrows now, pushing the road into closer intimacy with the river. At a certain point I notice a flash of colour through the separating fringe of trees but I don’t have time to register it consciously before it has gone by. |
