by Prisca Middlemiss
Prisca Middlemiss together with her husband Neil Middlemiss were English language teachers in Rousse in the early 1970s.
Was it New Year 1974 or 1975? The date escapes me now, but what remains imprinted on my memory is the pig killing. It happened in Vodolei, a village north of Veliko Turnovo, in the middle of a hard winter.
Bulgarians are rightly famed for their hospitality, but the Vodolei ceremony was utterly different from the never-drain-your-glass or empty-your-plate evenings that we enjoyed two or three times a week in Rousse with our fellow teachers at the English Language School. The village community’s Коледа pig killing allowed us to witness an ancient Bulgaria.
Many – perhaps most – of my pupils and colleagues in Rousse were first generation town dwellers. Their parents and grandparents were born in villages – в село – and many still lived there. Nikolai Stefanov and his wife, parents of one of our colleagues, lived in Vodolei, and that year it was their turn to host the village pig killing.
We were invited and on the day we approached the farmhouse down a broad, rutted road, mud hard as iron in the deep winter frost. The farm, a smallholding in the middle of the village, was set back from the road. Behind the rusted metal gate stretched the yard: to the right, a stable empty for over 20 years since the horses were collectivised, outbuildings, and sties. To the left, the house, typically Bulgarian in style, with a shallow inclined roof, outdoor wooden stairs, ears of maize hanging from the eaves and at ground level under the leaves a лятна кухня. Downstairs were two rooms, one large with chairs and cloth-covered benches around the walls, for the older men to drink, talk, eat туршия and smoke; the other, the indoor kitchen, where the women were getting ready to work.
Everyone assembled at 7 am, and five or six muscular Naskos, Ivans, Bai-Goshos and Stefchos met the village butcher in the yard. Outside a table was laid with more туршия, glasses and a jug of греяна ракия (hot, sugared rakia with black pepper). The men downed a slug and got to work. After men finished their work, the women cut away in long swathes from the pigskin. Tiny pork chops were cleaved and speed-roasted on the fire, salted, peppered, onioned – and the feasting could move on from the opening туршия to the свинско.
By now it was mid afternoon, dusk was close, the fire was dying down, and the men were gathered indoors to feast after a tough day chasing, slaughtering, butchering, and flaying the pig. The women were still hard at work, boiling some cuts, baking and roasting others, filling and sealing kilner jar like буркани with chunks of pork. They didn’t know what to do with me, an unskilled foreign woman, so I was granted honorary man status and got to feast and carouse. Наздраве. And Наздраве. And Наздраве.
By the end of the day every part of the pig had been prepared for its next use.
Today I am saddened to know that Bulgarians buy their New Year’s pork at the supermarket, or cheat and feed up a pig for a couple of weeks ready for Koleda. But most of all I am saddened by the empty villages and the end of a way of life that I was privileged to catch a glimpse of one New Year in 1974. Or was it 1975?
Complement with Phil Dexter’s story about teaching English in Bulgaria in the 1980s.