Monday, November 09, 2009

Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria

Halloween in Bulgaria

Swollen Ankles and Soggy Red Carpet

We just returned home after what may have been our finest day thus far here in Bulgaria. We were invited to the family home of our new friend, Svetlin, a young man who is Bella and Cyrus’s piano teacher. I should first mention how significant the home invite is for a global vagabond. The home invite could very well be the pinnacle, the ultimate and rarely-attainable goal toward truly experiencing the culture and customs of another country. We’ve hosted gatherings in our own homes in each of the countries we’ve visited thus far, of course, but that has more to do with sharing our American customs with new friends, rather than vice versa. After thirteen months of travel in seven countries, we have only received five home invites. So today was momentous.

We met Svetlin one recent afternoon when Bella, Cyrus and I were exploring our new neighborhood here in Veliko Tarnovo. When we overheard lovely piano music coming from the old theater at the end of our cobblestone street, we ducked in out of curiosity and found Svetlin behind the piano. When he saw the children, he grinned and bid us welcome, добре дошъл! I responded clumsily with the only Bulgarian word that was coming to me at the time уроци (urotsi), which I hoped might mean lessons. Svetlin smiled, understandingly, and every day since has been giving Bella and Cyrus lessons on the piano in the old opera house.

Svetlin speaks only a few words of English, which you would think might pose a problem during lessons. Although we’ve been in Bulgaria for over two months now—diligently taking daily language lessons with our new teacher, Ventzi—between the five of us we can still barely string enough words together to form a complete sentence. Even so, every conversation we’ve had thus far with Svetlin has been an absolute delight. As far as I can tell, this is for two reasons. First, he is teaching the children in the language of music. As we’ve learned from our lessons in other countries, when you’re studying music, sometimes words can be superfluous. Second, Svetlin is a tender teddy bear. His affection for the children is so apparent that it sparkles in his eyes, no matter how harsh the Bulgarian words flowing out of his mouth may sound to our untrained ears, which have for the past year been tuned to the frequency of romance languages. Svetlin is a delight to be with even if we can’t understand a thing he says, so we jumped at the invitation when he asked us to spend a day with him and to meet his parents.

We arrived at noon in his hometown of Dryanovo and stood in front of the tall, dreary, communist-era cement apartment building that is the home of Svetlin’s elderly parents. As we approached the building, a gust of cold wind blew across the parking lot. In that moment, I felt summer turn into fall, and the unexpected chill left me uncomfortable and nervous. Bella rang the doorbell. As we waited to be buzzed in, I attempted in vain to pat down little Cruz’s stubborn cowlick, suddenly wondering why on earth we had accepted this invitation. It could only be uncomfortable for us all. How were we going to communicate with his parents? Having been raised during the decades of communism, they were sure to speak even less English than their son, and the art of gesticulation would only get us so far.

Svetlin swung open the door and welcomed the children in with a huge grin. He introduced us, in Bulgarian, to the squat elderly couple smiling from behind him. When I saw their beaming faces, which were wrinkled variants of Svetlin’s own, my apprehension immediately melted away. For the next four hours, this trio would make us feel like royalty.

Svetlin’s frail father gestured for us to take off our shoes, offering us each a cozy pair of house slippers, which is a Bulgarian tradition that I’m learning to love. Svetlin motioned for us to follow his mother as she waddled down the hallway and into the living room. A dreary grey paint job had been counterbalanced by a cheery ginger-colored shag carpet that would make any good hippy jealous. The room was sparsely furnished, other than a wooden board that had been balanced between two hairy orange sofas and would serve as our dining table. Svetlin’s mother gestured for us to sit on the less tattered of the two sofas, and then proceeded to shuffle back and forth to the kitchen until the board was spread with a colorful potpourri of pickled fall vegetables, sausages, and cheeses. Svetlin and his father took seats on the sofa across from us. They were each sporting ear-to-ear grins and wearing button-down sweaters, which I imagined had been knitted by Svetlin’s mother decades ago. As the two men gazed at us in contented silence, Svetlin’s mother served course after course of delicious traditional Bulgarian dishes—from squash soup, to roasted chicken and potatoes, fluffy white cloud bread, meatballs, and stuffed mushrooms. Jason enthusiastically jotted down notes about each dish in the hopes of recreating the feast at a later date. Each course was washed down with the homemade rakia brandy that Svetlin’s father had distilled last fall. For dessert, she had prepared roasted pumpkin smothered in homemade honey and toasted walnuts. много вкусни! Delicious!

When the plates were finally cleared away, we all melted blissfully into the hairy orange sofas. Svetlin pulled out his red-marbled accordion and began to play traditional waltzes as we reclined and digested. His beaming mother clapped and sang along, eventually prying herself from the sofa to dance. She raised her fleshy arms to the heavens, swayed her hunched back, and shuffled swollen ankles in time across the shag carpet. Svetlin’s father, who was slightly less mobile, smiled blissfully as he clapped along, tapping his fluffy house slippers to the beat.

I am still unsure why this sweet, gentle couple who didn’t know us from Adam and Eve would go to the trouble of inviting us into their home and lavishing us with such generosity. Whatever their motivation, the hospitality Svetlin’s family showed to us was an incredible blessing. To be honest, it was even a bit embarrassing. It made us realize what poor hosts we have been—throwing food and drinks on the table and, in true American buffet fashion, leaving our guests to fend for themselves. Now we find ourselves in a place where the buffet is a foreign concept, and guests would never dream of serving themselves without first being offered. Bulgarians are teaching us a thing or two about hospitality.

On October 26^th, Bulgaria quietly celebrated the feast day of St. Demetrius, who is said to bring on winter when the first snows fall from his beard. We celebrated the day by hiring a guide from our neighborhood, Georgi, to take us on an excursion over Shipka Mountain Pass into the Valley of Roses. Bulgaria is renowned for its roses and takes full advantage of its flower surplus by making rose oil, rose soap, rose jam, rose lotion, rose liquor, rose Turkish delight (which they call локум (lokum) in Bulgarian, so as not to give any undue credit to the Turks). In fact, the whole country smells like my grandmother after a bath.

Georgi drove us to the quaint river villages of Bozhentsi and Etera. We wandered down misty paths where toasty-warm fires blew smoke rings over slate rooftops, and fuzzy-haired old men in stained sweaters and suspenders chopped wood in the cool, drizzling rain. As we marveled at the haunted yellow forests where trees cast their leaves into the thick fog, we realized that Halloween was only a few days away. Georgi assured us that Count Dracula, who once lived in the nearby hills of Romania, was not the vampire that Americans make him out to be. Just a nasty old landowner. He did take the opportunity, however, to scare the bejesus out of the kids by sharing some real Bulgarian legends—like the one about the nasty Дядо Turbalan (Grandfather Big‑Sack) who wanders the forests at night in search of naughty children to stuff into his rucksack and steal away from their parents. The tale reminded Jason of another legend, that of La Llorona, which he shared with Georgi. Back in New Mexico, La Llorona, The Weeping Woman, is a ghostly spirit with flowing black hair who roams the rivers and creeks, wailing into the night and searching for children to drag into a watery grave. As the kids sat wide-eyed in the backseat, quiet for the first time in recent history, Georgi, Jason and I giggled to ourselves and reflected on the cross-cultural creativity of generations of parents in creating their own boogeymen out of necessity to keep children away from dangerous places like forests and streams.

The rain let up just as we reached the mountain village of Shipka. Georgi parked in front of a beautiful little Orthodox church which, beneath its golden onion dome, was painted a cheery shade of pink in defiance of the dreary weather. Georgi explained that the church had been built centuries ago to honor the fallen Russian soldiers who helped free Bulgaria from the Turks. We were lucky enough to arrive just in time for evening prayers, as announced by the holy dude in fancy vestments who was parading around the perimeter of the church banging loudly on a wooden plank.

We followed the holy dude into the church where we were surprised to find that we were the only people attending evening prayers. Bulgarians are traditionally Eastern Orthodox Christians, Georgi explained, and although the religion survived 500 years of Muslim rule under the Ottoman Empire—sheltered in monasteries tucked away in the mountains—just two decades of Communism did more toward stamping out religious practice. The emergence of capitalism has resurrected the rich custom of icon painting, however, and new generations of artists are beginning to study this ancient tradition. Their works fill galleries and churches, like the little chapel in Shipka, with lavish, gold-leafed portraits of saints. As we stood awkwardly in front of the altar, grey-bearded priests in black gowns chanted, rang bells, filled the sanctuary with incense and candle light, and murmured prayers under their breath, seemingly unaware of their new congregation of six.

The highlight of our Shipka tour was undoubtedly sneaking into the formerly-grand, and now dilapidated (though no less awe-inspiring), former headquarters of the Bulgarian Communist Party. As we neared the top of Shipka Mountain Pass, an immense, round, space-age-looking monument began to cut through the mist like a gigantic, ghostly spaceship. In the back seat, three child-sized jaws dropped to the floorboard.

In decades past, Georgi explained, this structure hosted Communist Party assemblies and banquets. Then unexpectedly, twenty years ago this week, the Berlin Wall fell. He went on to explain that all over the country, Bulgarians who were watching news reports from Germany that historic week, suddenly realized that the Iron Curtain had been lifted. Georgi shared memories of the day when his parents were among the droves of Bulgarians who rose up and tore down their own wall. They started by attacking the Shipka headquarters, which now stood before us shrouded in a spine-chilling fog. Multitudes of Bulgarians stormed the building, shredding velvet chairs, tearing down mosaic murals, shooting through the roof, covering Party slogans with graffiti, bashing grand staircases, and ripping up marble floors. Since that day the headquarters, where we now tiptoed through rubble and broken glass, has stood as a tattered monument to the Red Years, each day giving a little more over to the elements.

We crept through the haunted great hall, which was thick with a haze that scarcely allowed sun rays to penetrate through the gaping holes in the roof. A heavy silence hung thick over piles of soggy, shredded red carpet. Only ghosts were there with us now, paying silent homage to the brilliant red hammer and sickle that still hung ominously from the center dome. Back in Georgi’s van an hour later, when we had each regained the ability to speak, the kids agreed that the Shipka Communist Headquarters was absolutely the most amazing—and creepy—place we have ever snuck into. Even better than a haunted house.

On Halloween night, we decided to host a costume party in the little home we’re renting here in Veliko Tarnovo. It wasn’t hard to make the place look creepy. With the coming of fall, the gigantic hop vines creeping up the sides of the stone house have all turned blood-red. We decorated the cellar with fake spiders and webs and a barrel of bobbing apples. Cyrus turned the lights down low as our guests, began to arrive dressed in their best costumes. We invited Svetlin, Georgi, Ventzi (our Bulgarian language and cooking teacher), and all of our new Bulgarian friends. Also in attendance were Dracula, Zoro, Grandfather Big‑Sack, and a few Harry Potters.

Cyrus made a haunted bingo game in advance and, as he saw our guests to their seats and taught them the rules, I queued up the creepiest music I could find. Jason served his homemade macaroni and cheese, along with some pumpkin banitsa, which is a traditional Bulgarian pastry that Ventzi recently taught him how to make.

The party went off without a hitch. Cruz took first place in the bobbing for apples competition, Dracula won the costume contest, and Svetlin rocked the bingo table. Trick-or-treating was, of course, out of the question again this year since that would have required Halloween buy-in from the entire town, rather than just from the little group of friends in our cellar. Still, missing trick-or-treating for a second year in a row was somehow okay with the kids this time.

At the end of the evening, when our new Bulgarian friends bid us goodbye, they thanked us for having given them a chance to celebrate the strange American holiday they’ve heard so much about. We, on the other hand, were just proud to have shown that Americans, too, can graciously host a party.