Today the weather is in Morse code: raining in short bursts followed by dashes of sunlight. We take the road out of town, pass sodden rose fields and the red-toed monument then turn off to the Shipka Pass. At the junction there is another of these colossal figural monuments.
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The road leaves the valley climbing up into the Stara Planina (the Balkan Mountains), doubling back on itself at times to gain altitude, travelling through deciduous forest that becomes mixed.
We visit the monument to the battles that took place around the Shipka Pass during the Russo-Turkish War in 1878. The monument itself is stark, a stone tower silhouetted against the clouds and mist. It provokes associations with stereotypical medieval keeps or models for a computer game like Warcraft, and is complete with iron-bound doors and heraldic animal medallions, in this case the brass-beaked head of an eagle. Inside it is dark, and access to the rooms and exhibits at each level is by way of a staircase only wide enough for one person. Maps, diagrams of troop movements, drawings and paintings; uniforms and other military paraphernalia. Generations of graffiti are scratched on the parapet overlooking the pass. It is, however, traditional graffiti and not the modern spray-can variety, as befits a pantheon site which has a special place in the fabric of Bulgarian national identity. On the ground floor there is tomb with the bones of a number of the Russian soldiers and Bulgarian volunteers who took, and defended, the site. There is also a pair of Gatling guns, which in ten minutes took the lives of 800 Turkish soldiers in one of the assaults. The guns are not American-made, as were the first to be used by the Russian army. They were probably produced by the Russians themselves under licence from the inventor whose career trajectory took the opposite path to that in the biblical injunction requiring swords to be turned into ploughshares. If one has the urge (and a credit card) it is possible to buy a fully-working replica in the web for about four thousand euros, delivery within seven days. An additional two-thousand five hundred euros will secure a matching wooden gun carriage. |
