Small villages and clusters of old, abandoned houses define the Stara Planina mountains around Troyan. Gumoshtnik, whose name is hard to pronounce even for Bulgarians, is one of them. A quiet place, its streets are largely empty and its population is only a fraction of what it was a century ago. The churchyard looks like churchyards across Bulgaria: two monuments to fallen soldiers, an old school and a locked church.

Yet the visitors who come to Gumoshtnik on long weekends and during the summer are more than the usual trickle of people who have bought village properties as an easy escape from urban life. Gumoshtnik also attracts tourists.

When they arrive, they head to the churchyard and make their way past the restored schoolroom, which also serves as a local museum. They stop by a small obelisk, then reverently read the antiquated inscription.

"In memory of those who sank in the Atlantic Ocean with the Titanic in 1912," it says. On another side are the casualties' names: Marin Markov, Lazar Markov, Stoycho Minkov, Nedyalko Mihov, Penko Petrov, Iliya Stoychev and I. Naydenov.

The seven men's death certificates are kept in the village museum. The Lloyd's insurance list of the 1,570 people who drowned is there too. The Bulgarian names were added in pencil.

The last minutes of the Titanic, according to a local artist 

When a small and relatively isolated community is struck by an unfathomable tragedy of such proportions, it often struggles to comprehend it. Gumoshtnik is no exception. As soon as news of the maritime disaster reached this remote mountain village, rumours, hopes and stories began to circulate, gradually blending together and giving birth to legends and songs – the immaterial signs of psychological processing.

According to one of these stories, the local victims of the Titanic tragedy should have numbered eight. But the unnamed eighth man never boarded the ship. He met a French woman in Southampton, fell in love with her and decided to stay behind, forfeiting his ticket and abandoning his travelling companions.

Another story circulating in the Troyan region tells of two men who reached France, bought their Titanic tickets and then sat down in a port tavern, nervous about the sea crossing ahead. They drank so heavily that they missed the sailing entirely. They survived through sheer inebriation.

Then there is the story of the two widows, both pregnant when the ship went down. One gave birth to a boy, the other to a girl. In time, the children married.

The Titanic tragedy reverberated across the entire Troyan region. The men from Gumoshtnik were part of a group of 34 Bulgarians, most of them from the area. They were all travelling third class from Southampton, bound mostly for Chicago. None survived.

When Lloyd's paid out compensation, part of the money was used to erect the obelisk in Gumoshtnik. It stands today as one of the most remarkable small monuments in Bulgaria – a village's attempt to hold on to men the ocean took before they ever reached the country they had set out for.

If the Titanic had not sunk, the fate of those men would most likely have been unremarkable. They would have been processed at Ellis Island and joined the long stream of Bulgarian labour migrants already working in the mines and on the railway lines of the American interior. They would have sent money home, returned after a few years, bought land, built houses. That was the plan.

From left: The death certificate for a Gumoshtnik man on the Titanic issued posthumously; Gumoshtnik men at the beginning of the 20th century 

Bulgarians are no exception to the Roman principle Ubi bene ibi patria – the homeland is wherever life is good. Decades of Communist isolation, during which Bulgarians could not even move to Sofia without a permit, fed a notion that Bulgarians were by nature a static people, attached to their village and their plot of ground. This was a distortion of a much longer and more restless history. During the Revival Period Bulgarians were already trading and travelling across the Ottoman Empire, leaving their hometowns in search of better lives in Central Europe. It was no great leap, then, to join the massive waves of European emigration to the United States at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

At the turn of the century, poor Bulgarians from the mountain regions had little chance of advancing at home. Cheap mass-produced goods had dealt a crushing blow to artisans working in methods that were rapidly becoming redundant. The rocky fields of the Balkan foothills could barely feed large families. Into this situation came fast-talking agents with a well-rehearsed pitch: America was a land of unlimited opportunity, unskilled workers were in constant demand in the mines and on the railways, a man could work for two or three years, save his money and come home to buy land and build a fine house.

For many villagers, this was an offer they could not afford to decline. They sold what they could and took out loans to cover the cost of the passage. Their families remained behind to wait.

The people of the Troyan region have not forgotten any of this. They keep it in a song, still sung across the area, in which only the names of the victims change.

Cursed be this America,
America, Northern and Southern,
America, the big profit,
Which deceived these young boys,
Young boys, a group of heroes,
And forced them to cross nine countries,
Until they reached the tenth one.

The song goes on. A steamship is waiting in the tenth country. A hundred thousand people board it. They travel for three days and three nights until high mountains rush at them out of the dark – not mountains, but thick blocks of ice. And the young boys cry out: play the music, for memory and glory, as we are all going to die, young and green, white and red.

The Holy Spirit descending over the entrance of Gumoshtnik's church

There is something telling in the way Gumoshtnik remembers its dead. No one pays much attention to the two other monuments in the churchyard, dedicated to the local men who died in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 and the First World War, although they outnumber the Titanic victims.

The three monuments in Gumoshtnik are the stone embodiment of the saying about the one man's death being a tragedy, but the death of millions being a statistic. Wars produce mass casualties, and mass casualties are hard to hold in the mind as individual losses. The men who went down with the Titanic had names, destinations, tickets, plans. They were not called up and sent to a front. They chose to go. They were travelling toward a dream. The gap between that dream and what happened to them is still legible in the obelisk and the pencilled names and the song.