Kapka Kassabova on the untold stories of Bulgaria's haunted borderland
This episode originally aired on Feb. 11, 2018.
In her prize-winning 2017 book, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, Kapka Kassabova returns to the Bulgaria of her communist childhood to fulfill a desire to cross a forbidden border — between Bulgaria and Turkey and Greece. Along the way, she retraces the history of the region and engages with the mythology of the land and its people. Border won numerous prizes, including the British Academy's Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding and the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year, and it was also a finalist for the U.S.National Book Critics Circle Award.
Born in 1973, Kassabova left Bulgaria as a teenager after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Her family settled in New Zealand, where she published books of poetry and made a career as a travel writer — twice winning New Zealand's Travel Writer of the Year award. Kassabova has since followed Border with two more titles in a planned quartet about different regions of the southern Balkans: To The Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace was published in 2020, and Elixir: In the Valley at the End of Time comes out this spring.
In 2018, Kassabova spoke to Eleanor Wachtel from her home in the Scottish Highlands.
Growing up in the shadow of a border
"It's fair to say that anyone who grew up behind a hard border, such as the Iron Curtain, would have felt its shadow even from a distance. Of course, the border was a no-go zone — it was completely out of reach for ordinary people like my family. So you can never actually set eyes on it. But you knew it was there.
It's fair to say that anyone who grew up behind a hard border, such as the Iron Curtain, would have felt its shadow even from a distance.- Kapka Kassabova
"This hyper-awareness of borders, especially hard borders, has haunted and attracted me. The desire to know why a border is typically soft for one side, completely benign for one side, but potentially lethal for the other side. That drove the journey for my book Border."
A history etched into the land
"What remains unspoken has to be retained in some other way, and I think the landscape retains it for us. Story hunting in the border zone certainly had its terrifying moments because of the living as much as the dead. There was this kind of hauntedness, this sense of being stalked, this sense of silent screams and mouths full of earth that haunt the landscape. And also the sense that memory may not have a voice, but it's there. It's there in the land, it's there in the ruined houses and in the initials scratched in the trees.
You can feel the ghosts of these dispossessed columns of people and animals that passed along the drove roads of the Eastern Balkans.- Kapka Kassabova
"It's almost as if the landscape has a memory. You can feel the ghosts of these dispossessed columns of people and animals that passed along the drove roads of the Eastern Balkans. I wanted to capture some of these stories in Border, some of this living memory. If major traumas, like what happened along the Iron Curtain, go undiscussed and unnamed, then we are doomed to repeat these things."
Unbound stories
"People still want to connect — it's in our nature. Just over 100 years ago, under the Ottoman Empire, there were no boundaries in the Balkan Peninsula. It was a hugely intermingled, cosmopolitan society. It was with the rise of Balkan nationalisms and the decay of the Ottoman Empire that these new boundaries started being erected and disputed.
I had a sense of tremendous connectedness against all the odds and across severed roads —that was given to me by the people of the border and it really gives me hope.- Kapka Kassabova
"That was the challenge of writing this book — how to capture this complexity of overlapping waves of civilizations coming and going. I set out looking for border stories expecting stories of great division and dissent. But at the end of this journey and at the end of the book, I felt unexpectedly uplifted. I had a sense of tremendous connectedness against all the odds and across severed roads — that was given to me by the people of the border and it really gives me hope."
Kapka Kassabova's comments have been edited and condensed.
