TRAVEL

Тhe Black Sea is a geographical curiosity. Until recently (in geological terms), it was a big lake locked between Europe and Asia, gorging on the waters of scores of rivers. About 6,500 to 7,500 years ago, it filled to the brim, broke through what would become the Dardanelles Straights and connected to the Mediterranean. As its water levels fluctuated up and down, wind blew and rain poured, the cliffs on the new shoreline were relentlessly eaten, beaten and broken. In some places, this neverending process exposed to the elements ancient rocks that had lain buried for aeons.

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.

The path down to the grotto drops steeply through oak and hornbeam. By the time you reach the ravine floor the sky has almost disappeared. The light here is greenish and perpetual, unchanged whether it is morning or afternoon, July or October. Water drips somewhere ahead. The air smells of wet stone and something older – soil, perhaps, or time itself.

When the names of the churches were forgotten, the villagers gave them new ones. The Letters. God's Gully. The Buried Church. One they called simply The Church, a name so stripped of detail it somehow contains everything that had been lost. Centuries of monastic life, a scriptorium full of manuscripts, royal burials, eight hundred monks – all of it reduced, in the end, to a name that was really just a gesture toward something irreplaceable and gone.

Мanufacturing building bricks and art hardly ever meet. But as you pass under the red clay arches leading to an assemblage of strange red and black creatures, deformed men and children, and labyrinths of bricks and broken moulds, you will find your disbelief suspended.

The premises are inconspicuous. You are in Cherven Bryag, a quiet industrial town of about 10,000 still reeling from the closure of its old industries, including a tank parts factory and the railway to Oryahovo on the Danube.

Picture this: barefoot men and women in traditional dress, dancing over glowing embers, their faces blank and inward-looking, while a drum and a bagpipe repeat a simple, hypnotic melody that seems to have no beginning and no end. The crowd around them is silent. The night sky above is thick with stars. The embers are very much alive.

There is a particular quality to the light in the Eastern Rhodope mountains. Low and lateral in the early morning, it makes the cliff faces reveal themselves slowly. The pale rocks catch it first, then the shadows deepen, and then – if you know where to look, or sometimes even if you do not – you begin to see the niches. Small, dark, precisely cut, they gape from the rock like absences, singly or in their hundreds, as purposeful as punctuation in a language nobody can read.

Londoners, especially, will be bemused to discover that decades before Norman Foster designed the world famous Gherkin in the City the workers in the oil refinery of Burgas got their own avant-garde housing project that in more than one way not only predated but also outshines one of Sir Norman's major achievements.

To appreciate the social, cultural and architectural significance of the Cucumber in Burgas, which now fervently aspires to become the European Capital of Culture in 2032, one needs to consider the historical background.

Few figures in European history have left a cultural footprint as deep and enduring as 9th century saints Cyril and Methodius. Revered as the Apostles of the Slavs, the two brothers from Salonica, the modern  Greek city of Thessaloniki, are remembered as missionaries, scholars, translators and creators of the first Slavic alphabet. Their legacy bridges cultures, languages and centuries.

The Black Sea has been a part of human history since the first Middle Eastern farmers crossed into Europe, about ten millennia ago. Its shores have been inhabited ever since. Empires fought major naval battles in its waters, ships sank, peoples came and went. Today, hundreds of thousands spend their summer holidays in its bustling resorts, enjoying its beaches. Still, the Black Sea remains an enigma.