Friday, 1st June, Kazanlak

At the hotel there is disappointment at the booking situation for the Rose Festival – apparently a large block booking has been cancelled at short notice. After breakfast we walk into town. The Rose Festival is in full swing. Children and young people are wearing T-shirts with the Rose Festival logo on the front. This has remained the same since the communist era and the shirts are distributed by a trust set up by Lyudmila Shivkova (Todor Shivkov’s daughter and Minister of Culture).

What has changed is that the logos on the back of the T-shirts are now those of a telecommunications company and an insurance group. This apparent paradox proves to be the leitmotif of the festival which seems to be in the process of riding the waves caused by the transition from a communist folk festival into a global tourist event. A little later we drive out of town to the surrounding rose fields. The original intention was to talk to some of the rose pickers, but when we arrive there is a folk dance group (young people in everyday clothes) rehearsing their dances for later, in town. The practice session is taking place in a lay-by but that doesn’t seem to deter the dancers from enjoying themselves in spite of the cars speeding by. The leader of the group is a woman who barks out her commands and corrections with the same diction as a sergeant-major on a parade ground. She is small, burly and righteously intense. Soon after L sets up the camera she makes her muscular presence felt, right in front of the lens, leaving us in no doubt that filming is not to be tolerated under any circumstances. From her facial expression and general demeanour it might easily be assumed that it was still an arrestable offence to point a camera in any but an authorised direction…

After our brief encounter with the military authority of the dance trainer—which is appropriate in a town famous for both guns and roses—we drive further out the road to investigate a statue, right next to a petrol station. It turns out to be another memorial to events of 1923. Socialist realism has been given a more recent gloss though: the toe nails are painted a bright red.