The Bulgarian Mountains

by Ian Stewart

Ian Stewart was Director of British Council Bulgaria from 2002 to 2007. Before taking the position, together with his wife Ann they spent four intensive weeks in the heat of Varna learning Bulgarian, rocked to “sleep” by all-night wedding celebrations and Techno festivals.

They left Bulgaria in one cold grey morning in December 2007 convinced that this has been the best of their ten postings with British Council. Since then they have been back to Bularia several times and still maintain friendships in English and an increasingly broken Bulgarian by Skype.

“We explored the foothills and the deep valleys leading into them which hid monasteries and ancient sites, peppered with small villages.” –  Ian Stewart

We arrived in Bulgaria by car from Serbia at the start of five and a half years working there for the British Council. After hours of tediously flat motorway driving, turning left at Nis took us through a dark, twisty, potholed system of tunnels to release us into a different landscape. There were still many kilometres before the Bulgarian border, but already there were signs of what was to come, as hills grew into mountains.

For me, the answer to a question often posed in Bulgaria – which did I prefer, the beach or the mountains – was always the mountains. But I also thought that it was a false question. The real attraction of Bulgaria is the beach and the mountains in such close proximity, with plenty of cultural and archaeological interest throughout, more than enough to keep me happy for five years.

Our house in Boyana was as high up the mountain as was practical and allowed us easy weekend access to Vitosha. We could look down smugly on smog swathed Sofia with an ice cold beer (summer) or hot chocolate (winter) to look forward to. As an alternative, we could trust our lives for a few stotinki to the Dragalevtsi chair lift and spend 30 minutes in zen-like silence, skimming the treetops in the absolute assurance that the guy behind wasn’t pressing to overtake as he undoubtedly would be doing on the road. And nothing beat the heart-stopping lurches on the way down with the added frisson of being left hanging stationary from time to time for no apparent reason. Best value ride in the world!

We explored the foothills and the deep valleys leading into them which hid monasteries and ancient sites, peppered with small villages each with a guaranteed shopska, banitsa or stew along with a robust shot of rakia should that be needed.

And we were rarely alone, which was sometimes a relief as the trail that we were following which started so confidently marked in white and red ringlets often petered out at a crucial parting of the ways with no clue which to take.

The people we met were usually well equipped and took the hills seriously, but there was a sprinkling of women in stilettos and tight skirts who nevertheless inexplicably made it to the top and octogenarian men stripped to the waist powering up the slopes, although the most surreal moment must be meeting a man at the top of Vitosha one February at -15C in deep snow who was naked save for boots and haversack.

Conversations rarely got beyond the dobar den (“Good morning” in English) level, but when they did benefitted from the informality of the hills and were excellent for improving my Bulgarian.

There were always surprises such as the hike from Melnik across the low but steep and very crumbly lunar landscape of sandstone mounds towards Rozhen monastery. This was one of many walks in which we got seriously lost, since accurate large scale maps appeared to be one of Bulgaria’s weaknesses, but that too added to the charm – at least when safely back at the hotel. And the icing on the cake was the view of Vitosha from my office window to inspire and distract in equal measure.

Oh, and this infatuation with Bulgarian mountains had nothing whatsoever to do with my previous job with the British Council in the Baltic States, highest point 300 metres…