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March 1998: The road to Rila

Our little expedition left Sofia on a cloudless April morning on the road to Rila. First stop was Dragalevski Monastery which is, in fact, in the suburbs of Sofia. Winding up the slopes of Mount Vitosha, the road to the monastery passes through thick woods of silver birches and beech trees until it comes to an end in a small clearing overlooking the city.

Built in between 1371 and 1393, Dragalevski led a fairly charmed existence as Bulgarian monasteries go. It was spared by the Ottomans when they arrived in Sofia in 1385 and survived in one incarnation or another through to the twentieth century. In the mid nineteenth century, it was a centre of revolutionary activity; the Abbot, Father Genadiy, was the head messenger of the Sofia Secret Revolutionary Committee. Its isolated position deep in the woods must have leant itself well to all the covert comings and goings under the eyes of the Turks only a few miles away in the city centre. After the death of Vassil Levski (see Portrait), Genadiy had to flee to Serbia in great haste to avoid arrest.

The monastery today consists of a small church, the Church of the Holy Virgin of Vitosha, flanked by a right-angled cloister. This was built in 1932 and looks all too modern despite its sympathetic design. When we arrived, two nuns were chanting the morning service, warmed by a small iron stove. A monastery can either be a convent or a monastery– nuns or monks. There is no noun in Bulgarian to differentiate the occupants of a "manistir" by giving it a masculine or feminine ending.

The interior of the Church was very dark and it was almost impossible to see the frescoes. There is a splendid trumpeting angel from the scene of the Last Judgement who looks like he has been taking a number of "illegal substances", judging by his dilated pupils. A large carp appears to be coming out of the end of the trumpet!

Skirting round the North of Vitosha Mountain, we headed South on the road to Thessalonika. Snow still lay on the rooftops of the villages, with smoke from the cottages making a patchwork mist over the valleys. The countryside soon became fertile and rolling until Pernik, a heavy industrial town with acres of abandoned factories. Efrem's theory was that if something didn't belong to the people, then they didn't bother to look after it. We passed another sprawling urban clutter at Radomir before leaving the main road at Izvor for Zemen.

Driving through villages of red tiled houses, each surrounded by its own collection of fruit trees – almonds, cherries, plums and apples – we reached Zemen, a sleepy town where young men lounged about in black leather jackets and eyed us furtively as we clattered down the cobbled streets. The monastery of Saint John the Theologian, about a mile out of the town, is a gem. Overlooking the poplar lined banks of the River Struma, the exquisite tiny church had been built in 1354. With one cloister under repair, a low stone wall topped with tiles encloses the whole area.

The guidebook states that " the Zemen church is an absolute exception to the whole of Bulgaria's medieval architecture: a cubic building, with three semi-cylindrical apsides with equal height, reaching up to the roof cornice which unites them in a single group. The roof – a four-walled squashed pyramid with a cupola atop a cylindrical drum, decorated by two rows of blind arches – is unique in the entire Balkan Peninsula".

Now unoccupied, it must have been a place of great spiritual tranquillity in its heyday. One of the frescoes in the church, some of which stem from the twelfth century, – " The agony in the garden of Gethsemane" – shows the apostles all asleep and is described in one book as the best picture ever painted of Bulgarians sleeping! They all look like they have desperately tried to stay awake but it's all been too much – they have zizzed off in their seats.

Another fresco of interest is of the donors of the original monastery – Despot Deya and Doya. Dressed in the traditional garb of rich boyars, they look serenely at you from the North wall. Doya wears the most enormous pair of pearl earrings, so Deya was certainly in the money. I wondered if their names ever led to any social confusion: "Hello, my name's Deya and this is my wife, Doya"! Her left hand is in the traditional pose of the Virgin Eleusa, pointing at her husband as the "right way". Her right hand, in contrast, is giving a cheery little wave – "I'm all right, Jill". Deya is looking in entirely the opposite direction with an expression of intense concentration on his face. There is a similarity with the fresco of the Boyana donors but the interaction between Deya and Doya is more revealing.

There is also an odd-man-out , "The forging of the nails". This story is not recorded in either the gospel texts or indeed in any painting – Bulgarian, Russian or Western European. It is a scene of four 'lads' in their medieval work tunics, two with hammers at the anvil, one working hard at the bellows whilst the fourth has a set of tongs to extract the nails from the fire. They are all preoccupied with their tasks except the one on the anvil who is definitely posing for the artist. One worries about his mate's thumb as the hammer is raised high in the air over it!

In the 1875 uprising, Zemen's patriotic Abbot, Michael, formed a revolutionary detachment but was to pay for it with his life. Since the beginning of this century no monks have resided at Zemen, so it sadly has the air of a museum about it.

I had in fact missed out a monastery before reaching Zemen. Peshteva, built in 1347, had been abandoned till 1840 when the good monk Simon and his son restored it. The Turks burnt it down in 1878 and today there remains a small three-conch church. It was impossible to find it without a major navigational effort, not unlike the next one on my list, Boboshevo.

Leaving Zemen, we drove through valleys cluttered with small hamlets, through pine clad steep canyons, all the time never seeing another car on the road. On the more precipitous wooded slopes, there was the occasional landslide or treefall on the road, which Efrem gingerly negotiated, one eye on the sheer drop below us. These were the Verbina Mountains, still with snow piled high on the side of the road. We emerged onto a lofty plateau, which then fell away towards Justendil, a busy town on the border of Macedonia. Long ago, it was famed for its colourful gypsy quarter. The sight of the snow capped Carev Mountain in the far distance was like a transplant of Kilamanjaro from Africa to the Balkans.

Efrem made a small navigational error at this point which he duly corrected with terrifying panache by reversing down a motorway at 50 mph. 'No point going on to the next turn-off when there's nothing behind you' was his theory. Thank God, it worked. We stopped to admire two storks who had built their nest on the top of a lamp post in a small village. "Late again", said a villager, "23 March this year, same as last. Late again". At the arrival of the storks, the Bulgarians take off the little red and white ribbons which they place in trees – or under stones – on the First of March or Martinitza as they call it. These are symbols for fertility and good luck; for farmers, a plea for an early spring and lots of sunshine to make their crops grow.

Heading for Boboshevo, we picked up the Struma River again, big and confident now as its clean, clear waters lazily snaked through the mountain passes. But where was the monastery? One lady directed us to Rila; another lady didn't know; a third, this time an old man, pointed to the top of the nearby mountain called Rouen. Efrem found a dusty track and the Lada chugged its way up the next two thousand feet without a murmur of fuss. The monastery was in an appalling state, its saddle roof covered by a tarpaulin with its buttresses propped up by rickety wooden scaffolding. Tiny like Zemen, it had been built in the second half of the 9th century, but very much as a place of retreat from the world. It had a single knave, which led into a semi- circular vault, together no more that 15 metres in overall length. The view to the East towards the summit of the snow-topped Rila Mountain was breathtaking.

Inside, the frescoes were in poor condition but the one I had come to see had somehow miraculously survived. It depicted the Second Coming but instead of the customary River of Sin, in which various sinners are subjected to all sorts of gory tortures, the artist shows the sea with grotesque fishes and fantastic reptiles swimming about in it. In the middle of the picture sits the goddess Aphrodite on a huge animal with a scaly body and the tail of a fish. She holds a large shell in her hand and seems oblivious to the fate of the sinners, one who is being gobbled up by her mount. Other creatures have bit of human limbs in their mouths in the process of ingestion, so the effect is unusually macabre and chilling.

Rila is only a few miles on from Boboshevo, so we stopped for lunch on the road up to the monastery. The waiter at a little restaurant, called the Croaking Frog, seated us by a roaring fire of birch logs and produced delicious freshly caught trout. I was aware of a large stuffed boar - a Gligan – observing me eat and hoped that we didn't meet one later. Apparently they are fearless of cars! The waiter announced that "fish, chicken and women are best eaten with the hands" which I found puzzling. He seemed to think I'd get it straight off.

The final approach to Rila through hillsides of oak, hornbeam, beech and mountain ash is spectacular as the dramatic 10,000-foot ridge of Musala Mountain looms up through the V-neck of the valley and starts to tower over one. The Rila monastery is the daddy of them all, the biggest and the most treasured in the Bulgarian national psyche. Straddling the valley with its great buttressed walls, it could be mistaken for a fortress from the outside. And that is what it is in the minds of Bulgarians: if Rila was to vanish, then so to would the state.

Founded in the 10th century by a wandering hermit, St john of Rila, the monastery went through various fortunes, abandoned at one stage due to the constant attacks by the local brigands. A fortified tower – the Tower of Hrelyo- was erected in 1335 to counter this threat and it stands rather awkwardly in the centre of the complex although subsequently put to good use as a bell and clock tower. Rila is a working monastery today with a complement of seven monks.

As one enters the gates, the courtyard is like the keep of a castle with a large brightly painted church squatting in the middle. On all sides are four-storied wooden balconied black and white cloisters, where the monks live and keep their various offices. At one stage it was fashionable for Bulgarian provinces to decorate their own special rooms and these are on the top floor of the eastern wing.

Life was not that uncomfortable in days gone by as can be seen in a well-preserved monk's cell or in this case a suite. A small kitchen and utility room leads into a spacious bedroom with a large hearth and an early version of double-glazing to keep the winter out. For cold it is at Rila in the winter months at 3,500 feet. Two monks were sitting outside the church reading the newspaper; one got very cross with me for recording this leisure activity on my camera. Was he looking at the racing or the football results? Then it was time for Vespers, which is signalled by a monk knocking a suspended wooden plank with a mallet. Three big taps followed by a number of small knocks echoed round the courtyard.

The museum at Rila has an unrivalled collection of ancient documents, icons, clerical vestments and metalwork from all over the country. The most astonishing exhibit is the wooden cross carved by the monk Rafael. Taking a piece of wooden board, he spent twelve years picking out a cross about 18 inches high which has 140 biblical scenes and over 1,500 tiny three-dimensional human figures. He finished it in 1802, having gone totally blind in the process. It is an astonishing object, the result of one man's patience and manual dexterity allied to his love of God.

The Church of the Holy Virgin is a monument to the National revivalist movement with murals mainly by Zahari Zograph (see Portrait). There is something a bit garish and brash about those that have been restored: they are too new to sit comfortably with the brooding history of the Monastery. However, their subject matter is wonderfully diverse and my favourite has to be 'the Visit to the Fortune Teller' on the South wall. Three groups of people are heading towards a small hut. The first has already arrived - a sickly looking man on his knees, held up from behind by a pretty woman in national dress. The fortune teller, also a woman in national dress, is bent down on one knee pouring some potion down his throat. Behind them comes a mother with her sickly daughter in an oxen cart pulled by two white oxen and behind them, a young man leading a ill-looking wife on a white horse. Six horrid looking devils with red wings bounce about in the background whilst one pushes the cart. There must be a point to it but it looked to me like it was a sin to go to the doctor!

A short walk from the monastery down to the river Rilska takes one to the Ossuary, a morbid dank place where the monks of yesteryear are buried. The track down is depressing, clumps of garbage dotted around. The Ossuary consists of two small graveyards with a chapel between them, flanked by a broken down outhouse of indeterminate description. It is utterly derelict and a place of death despite the gurgling music of the river and canopy of shimmering beech trees.

Leaving Rila early the next morning, we passed a roadside sign: " Guaranteed satisfaction at the Ecstasy Bar". It was far too early to take up this wayside promise!

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