“The Balkans are a complex civilisational weave into which diverse and sometimes conflicting versions of reality are read by the natives and projected by the outsiders.” (Kapka Kassabova, To the Lake)
Smaranda Șchiopu
Kapka Kassabova has spent the past decade deeply involved in exploring the Balkans, particularly her native country, Bulgaria, and the less visible lives of plants, animals and humans. The result is an unrivalled body of literature that brings to the surface the disappearing landscapes and the cultural mosaic of the region, often reduced to clichés of violence or nostalgia. As a longstanding fan of Kapka Kassabova and her one-of-a-kind poetic writing, I was thrilled at the prospect of seeing her in person for the first time, at the event organised by the Bulgarian Cultural Institute in Central London. A returning participant in the London Book Fair in 2025, Bulgaria organized a series of events to connect contemporary writers with the diverse international audience anticipated in London. Kapka Kassabova met her enthusiastic public at the Hatchards bookshop in central London, and during the talk with Rosie Goldsmith, they spoke about what the author has called ‘the Balkan Quartet’, her series of books about the edges of the Balkan peninsula. Much of the conversation revolved around the book that closes the quartet, Anima, published in 2024, in which the author depicts her experience of living among shepherds and breeders of the endangered species of Karakachan sheep and dogs. Subtitled, A Wild Pastoral, the book journeys along the transhumance line in the Western Pirin mountains in Bulgaria, painting a vivid picture of pastoralism, an endangered traditional way of life: “Transhumance has UNESCO status as intangible cultural heritage of humanity. Yet, most of humanity has forgotten about it. We have forgotten that this too is something we can do, if we fancy it: walk with animals, live with animals, care for animals and be cared for by them.”
Each book in Kassabova’s quartet focuses on a different facet of the Balkan peninsula, creating a layered narrative of a place shaped by historical upheavals, ever-changing ideologies and above all, industrialisation. The book that opens the quartet, Border (2017) introduces the reader to the natural and historical landscape that would be revisited in two of the three subsequent books. Visiting villages and towns on all sides of the former Cold War frontier that separated Bulgaria from Turkey and Greece, Kassabova uncovers memories, myths and contemporary stories of migration and border enforcement. To the Lake (2020) takes the author and the reader to the ancient lakes of Ohrid and Prespa, shared by Albania, North Macedonia, and Greece. Along another tripartite border, Kapka Kassabova examines the landscapes full of historical marks, together with her maternal lineage originating from North Macedonia. With Elixir (2022), the author returns to Bulgaria, in the Mesta River valley in the eastern Pirin mountains, a place abundant in medicinal plants and ancestral knowledge. Here, Kassabova meets traditional herbalists whose lives are entwined with the ecology of the land. And finally, Anima (2024), follows the last breeders of Karakachan sheep and dogs, through Bulgaria’s western Pirin mountains, chronicling a vanishing world of interspecies intimacy and ancient pastoral rhythms. By living closely with plants and animals, much like her main characters, Kapka Kassabova gradually unveils the complex and multi-layered physical and emotional landscape of the Balkans and its peoples.
If a writer ever needed a mantra to initiate the journey towards a new book, Kapka Kassabova would choose one that describes her attachment to the ‘beginner’s mind’ approach: “You arrive as nobody”. The author explained how, before a book even starts to take shape in her mind, it will exist in the space around itself, in places consisting of nature, animals, and humans. In those places she arrives as nobody, emptied out of dispositions and preconceptions, to allow the empty vessel to be filled with other peoples’ stories. It took her a decade of ‘arriving as nobody’ to survey the Balkans, each time arriving with ever-sharper lenses to cast on a much mystified region. Like a modern day Herodotus, Kapka Kassabova travels and collects stories which she weaves into her books.
There is a variety of literature on the Balkans, ranging from academic to journalistic, travel writing and fiction. A large part of it has been written by foreigners who travelled to or worked with the Balkans in some capacity. In her seminal book, Imagining the Balkans, Maria Todorova argues that writings such as these led to the mutated connotations of the word “Balkan”, balkanised, balkanism. With them, we are introduced to a world of fragmentations, instability and violence, supposedly defining for the history of the Balkan peninsula in South-Eastern Europe. The propagation that these terms saw from the 19th century onwards until still very recently, has had the perverse effect of freezing a geographical region into “one of the most powerful pejorative designations in history, international relations, political science, and, nowadays, general intellectual discourse.”
And then there is Kapka Kassabova, self-describing as a writer of place(s) rather than a travel writer, who elevates the places she visits from mere backdrops to integral participants in the journey. While in a place, Kassabova would spend weeks and months with her hosts, much like an anthropologist would, immersed in a host community; she would eat and work with them, go to rituals with them, go picking herbs with them or walking herds with them. Becoming engrossed in the daily lives of host characters, she mediates for us encounters with a variety of human experiences. The larger picture that emerges is one of a place where memories are still fresh, of old and new historical wounds, where people have shown resilience in their trade (medicinal herbs) or in their life mission (to safeguard Karakachan dogs and sheep), where others have been less fortunate, yet real.
A theme that starts to take shape in Border and becomes an overarching leitmotif of her entire world view is that homogenisation, as imposed by states and political systems on nature as well as people, erodes landscapes and human experience alike. Historically, the Balkans had been under Ottoman control or suzerainty, and it was not uncommon for Armenians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Jews, Serbs, and Romanians to coexist, particularly in large cities like Constantinople or Salonika. But in the 19th century, burgeoning nationalist movements started spreading throughout the Balkans, leading to wars of independence for the Bulgarians, Greeks, Romanians, and Serbs, resulting in the creation of several young nation states by the end of the First World War, and the disintegration of two empires (Ottoman and Russian). During the 19th and 20th centuries, the nationalist movements in some of these new states explicitly aimed to purify national and ethnic identities, by erasing the complex past histories and people that had come before modernity.
The violence of the advent nation states is prevalent in the second book of the quartet, To the Lake, where Kassabova portrays the lakes Ohrid and Prespa as dramatic examples of how the new nation states ended up chopping and dividing mountains, forests, and lakes. The millennial geography of the lakes was brusquely altered when they were thus split among three countries, Albania, Greece and North Macedonia, none of which were very friendly to each other. Within each state, nationalistic or communist policies tended to further complicate matters for people living in the borderlands, who were often tempted to escape across the lakes, and die as a result.
Similar nationalistic policies had taken place in Bulgaria, and they are described in Border. We learn about the communist state enforced 20th century population exchanges between Bulgaria on the one hand, and Greece and Turkey on the other, specifically in the newly established border regions. The Bulgarian communist state attempted three times to erase the Pomaks, the ethnic Bulgarian Muslims, (descendants of early converts to Islam during the Ottoman empire), either by forcing them to leave the country and go to Turkey, either by forcefully changing their names into Slavic sounding ones and making them renounce their religion. The ideological monoculture after the Second World War hunted the Pomaks in their rural, mountainous communities, across the Balkans, not only in Bulgaria, but also in Macedonia, as “for a while, you had to be a Christian, or dead and gone.” Some Pomak villages managed to survive the purges, and we’ll meet some of these survivors again in the third book of the series, Elixir, in which Kassabova documents the workers with medicinal plants, an important and undervalued industry in Bulgaria. Returning to Bulgaria to document the medicinal plant healers, the author settles in the Mesta river valley, discovering how the people survived here:
“People in the Mesta basin knew suffering, but they had something precious – the forest. Everything was still connected – peaks, people, plants. This place still had something of the old, wild kind – medicine, meaning, magic. Bulgaria, I discovered, is a leading exporter of medicinal and culinary plants. Many of them are still gathered in the wild and the Mesta basin is a hub because of its ecological wealth: three mountains, layered climate zones, virtually untouched by industry and, until the 1950s, unspoiled by mechanisation or modernity altogether.”
Kapka Kassabova casts a particularly critical lens on the specific genre of late industrialisation that she encounters in the Balkans. While mass industrialisation did indeed arrive “late”, it did not happen to fill an empty space. Agrarian societies, pluri-cultures, pastoralism, guardians of the earth, of forests, plants and animals, these still existed in early to mid-20th century. While some such people still exist, in the shape of shepherds or healers, they have been largely disbanded, erased by industrialisation; some of those who remain are oddities and aware of it.
Kamen, the last breeder of Karakachan dogs and sheep in Bulgaria is one of them and we learn about his story in Anima, the last book of the quartet. Karakachan is an umbrella term for the sheep, dogs, and the shepherds who used to live and move with them along ancient transhumance lines, from the Aegean plains up to the Pirin mountains. The shepherds were descendants of a mysterious Greek speaking ethnic group wed to nomadism, at least until their ancient lifestyle started being tampered with. First, there were the lines on the map impacting their migratory routes: the drawing of borders in the Balkans in the 20th century, followed by the closing of the Iron Curtain borders. Then, the collectivisation in the 1950s compelled them to settle down with their animals, while the privatisation of the 1990s had them lose everything. Forcefully settled, deprived of their livelihood, they started to disappear, people, dogs and sheep. Today, in the Balkans, the only known breeders of Karakachan sheep and dogs are in Albania and in Bulgaria. The Karakachan dogs and sheep that Kapka Kassabova accompanied on their summer pasture act as a living link with our historical past and are a living example of the interdependence of humans, animals and movement. If, at the beginning of the 20th century the new nation state disbanded hundreds of years of pastoralism in the Balkans, in the 21st it is not actively helping with their preservation. Sheep and tourists occasionally share the same trekking grounds in a national park, and since the sheep are always guarded by dogs, the law requires that shepherds maintain distance from certain paths. A fine is given if the bounds are crossed. Herding a flock of sheep requires the shepherd to have both skill and patience as sheep can get easily distracted, so keeping them from getting fined also adds to their workload.
Spending a lot of her time in rural, mountainous settings, Kapka Kassabova does not fall into the trap of portraying any of them as either the idyllic escapes from the tumultuous urban life, or the backwater in need of civilisation. Her depictions, while poetically rendered, are true to the lives she encounters; we meet the people she interacts with as complex characters, conflictual, contradictory, generous, and naïve, or taciturn and stubborn in carrying out their duties. The hermits, the fishermen, the aging locals, the shepherds, many of them marginalised, embody the memory of the place and safeguard not only the memories, but the realities of living closer to the rhythms of nature. Kassabova stands firmly against any homogenising views of the lives of the Balkan people and instead chooses to offer us a kaleidoscopic picture of the histories of the places she inhabits. Often enough, these fragments are the lives of those dedicated to a disappearing occupation. From the keepers of churches along the Ohrid lake to the healers in the Mesta Valley, from the last guard of the closed border of the communist regime to the keepers of pastoralism in Pirin, all these characters are the living link between a world of archaic traditions and way of life and one that precipitates their extinction: “We are the last ones, Kamen said. Pastoralism will die out in Europe. It will continue in Central Asia where it began, but European laws go against it and Europeans have forgotten where they come from.”
Kapka Kassabova’s keen eye for ‘the last ones’, for the disappearing and the marginalised has not only enabled her to document vanishing worlds, but also to reconstruct, from the margins, a picture of the Balkans, and of Bulgaria specifically. As Bulgaria transitioned from being a piece in the Ottoman mosaic to an independent nation, the different political systems that held power had often interfered violently into the lives of people, significantly impacting their livelihood and immediate surroundings. In the process of fashioning a new national identity, the state altered lives and landscapes, disappeared people and customs, and further managed to create pockets of exclusion. By ‘arriving as nobody’ to meet the outcasts, Kapka Kassabova reminds us that to truly know and understand one another, and consequently to truly live together, we must start with humility and the ability to listen to one another without prejudice.
Photo: Ohrid and its lake (source: Pixabay, CC0)
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