PaintingEaster eggs, an ancient custom preserved across Bulgaria, traditionally takes place on either the Thursday (Велики четвъртък) or the Saturday (Велика събота) before Easter(Великден).
The eggs, called писани яйца in Bulgarian (from пиша, meaning to write or draw) are decorated with various geometric and floral motifs, drawn with wax, then, depending on the technique used, the shapes are either filled in by hand via paintbrush, or the entire egg is dipped into a container of dye. With the second method, the wax is later melted off to reveal a negative design. This process may be repeated several times with different dyes for a multicolored effect.
Many cultures regard the egg as a symbol of new life and associate it with springtime. Among Orthodox Bulgarians these roots have syncretized with Christian belief and practice — the very first egg is always painted a solid red (symbolizing Christ’s blood) and, while still wet, used to draw crosses on children’s foreheads. It is then placed in front of an icon or buried in the yard and retrieved a year later. Based on the state of its contents, predictions can be made regarding the household’s fortunes.
On Easter Sunday the eggs are cracked against one another and the person whose egg “defeats” the rest (borak) is said to be healthy and lucky throughout the year.
My eighth grader’s mom is in my folk dancing class. Tonight she wore a velour tracksuit with the words “#1 Public Enemy” on the chest and upper right thigh. The rest of us typically wear ill-fitting high-necked sweater and jean combinations except for the eleventh grade girl Tsveti who wears athletic tights on her perfectly formed legs and t-shirts with slogans. We’re both the quiet ones. The same lady always falls to the right of me in line. I always forget how to hold her hand; every time she fixes our hand arrangement after the first few minutes. Five times a class I ask her, what’s the name of this dance? I repeat after her. Some names I remember are Staro Bansko Horo, Shopsko Horo, Sitno Shopsko, Chichovo, Elenino; but when I hear the name afterwards I can’t think of the dance at all or remember anything about the music. Every class is one more time to hear these songs and watch my instructor’s feet and bounce or shuffle or hop along in some approximation of what he is doing, in ways I won’t remember an hour later. I watch the steam rising off his bald sweaty head. I forget to ask why he always sprinkles water on the wood floor before class. I already miss it, I haven’t even left yet.
For the past year and a half I’ve fixated on this feeling that no one can truly know anything about this time. My family and friends have never visited. If they did, their visit would be a vacation, revealing very little about my grind every day and my solitude. My experience is solitude, more than anything else. I’m alone all the time. I’ve developed many habits to accommodate myself always being with myself. The same country, town, apartment, every place would change completely if I brought people from elsewhere into them. My students can’t know much, for the inverse reason. They don’t know anything about the place where I came from. I can only convey so much. The thinking behind the choices I make in lesson plans, methods, references, jokes, clothing must be so shadowy to them. Something something Georgia peaches Martin Luther King Trump? When they ask why I’m here desperate feelings of immobility, lack of options in a rural hometown, student loan debt, nagging desire and instinct get watered down into “I always knew I wanted to live outside of the U.S. after college.”
Now I feel sad every day for everything no one else will ever know and I will never know either, because I forget everything and so little in the future will bear any relation to the present. Even now it feels like I am nowhere. I’ve always felt this way on trains here but the feeling is overflowing into other places now. On trains, you miss all the proper cities and see only unmarked places, just fields, empty construction sites, horizons. The stations at each stop are nowhere, too. They have broken windows and analog clocks. One of my clearest memories is of the time when it snowed two feet over a weekend in October, when Julia and I waited for a train to Veliko Tarnovo that never came. It was stuck in snow on the tracks, we guessed. No one could tell us anything about it even at the information desk. In the nowhere inside the station we bought hot chocolates from the coffee machines. There were no lights on. The light from outside was cool and white, reflected by the white snow and white lace curtains on the windows. We waited for about forty-five minutes.
As I am sad I also feel that it’s potentially annoying to write about the sadness of being the exclusive bearer of some knowledge and/or being funded by a grant to live abroad for two years
Picture taken by Risto Sukovic after the September 1916 Battle for Kajmakcalan, a mountain range between modern day Greece and Macedonia. The battle took place between Serbian and Bulgarian troops and ended with a victory for Serbia. The headstones commemorate Serbian soldiers who went missing (from the Serbian World War I Archives)
The Preslavian Treasure was found in autumn of 1978 at a vineyard in Castana, just a few kilometers of the second Bulgarian capital – Veliki Preslav.
The golden treasure is a brilliant illustration of life in Preslavian castles. More than 170 golden, silver and bronze objects, decorated with cellular enamel, precious stones and pearls were found in the rescue researches that followed. A thorough analysis of the finding showed its collective nature. It consists of 10th - century ladies’ jewels made in Konstantinopolus and Preslav, but it also includes artifacts dating far back to the period between 3rd and 7th centuries. The latter suggests their owners’ taste to old and luxurious articles.
The excavations helped explain some curious and important facts. First, there was an old-Bulgarian settlement in Castana, which was a suburb of the capital, Preslav. Second, there are signs of the town being destroyed by fire for which we find proof in the records of Byzantine authors who were contemporaries of the town’ s conquering in 972. Third, the valuable articles from the treasure were hidden in a mason furnace of a humble poor man’s hut in the village. Judging from the rich nature of the finding and the 15 Byzantine coins belonging to Constantine VII and Roman II (945 and 959) which were found in the treasure, we have the right to assume that the luxurious jewelry somehow got there in the turbulent events between 969 and 972.
This was the time when Preslav was besieged and conquered first by Kiev royal prince, Svetoslav and two years later by the Byzantine Emperor, John Tzimisshi. We could only make conjectures on whether the treasure was hidden by a faithful servant of the ruler or was plundered during the attack of the Palace.
The owner of the necklace was probably under the protection of the Virgin Mary, who is portrayed on both central medallions. It is possible that tzar Peter I of Bulgaria gave this beautiful jewelry as a wedding gift to his bride, Irene Lekapene, a Byzantine princess, in 927 in Constantinople. It is assumed that the necklace was a wedding present because the images of water-birds symbolize family happiness and fidelity.
