WHERE IN BULGARIA ARE YOU?

by Stamen Manolov; photography by Anthony Georgieff

You are at the bottom of an extinct volcano

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Men and women in bathing suits partake, come rain or shine, of some hot mineral springs that flow freely through the yellowish mud. A very un-orthodox church with bold, non-Christian-like murals stands nearby. So does a small one-storey village house, a cabin really. The place is well known to thousands of Bulgarians who used to frequent that house to converse with Vanga, this country's only officially-recognised and government-endorsed clairvoyant; a mystic, who died in 1996, but who continues to star in various tabloids internationally. US author Robert Littell used her as the prototype of the Witch of Melnik in his 1975 spy thriller, The October Circle.

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WHERE IN BULGARIA ARE YOU?
Come Yuletide, and the streets swarm with adult men dressed in what appears to be a combination between early 20th century gendarme uniforms and traditionally embroidered white shirts.
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A bridge spanning over a turbulent whitewater river, which was constructed in such an incredible location that it was quick to gain notoriety for being otherworldly, a structure no human hand was able to accomplish without assistance from supernatural force
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Logically, every odd rock has a story attached to it. Most of them, predictably, are macabre but all are worth listening to as they bespeak folk dreams and memories through the centuries.
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It was destroyed by the invading Ottomans, reviving itself in 1660. The compound you see today is a fine example of Revival Period architecture with a 1844 church with a fine woodcarved iconostasis.
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Many of its wooden houses are well preserved, some have been turned into museums, there are places to stay and places to eat, and the village is home to a couple of festivals one of which gathers an international crowd clad in traditional costu
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At least a dozen man-made lakes of various sizes attract many locals who come here for the serenity, the mountain air and for the angling and photography opportunities.
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First you see a pretty, almost fairy-tale, unmistakably Russian church. Soon you reach a larger-than-life equestrian statue representing a 19th century Russian monarch.
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In recent months the telltale Soviet soldier waving a submachine gun is gone and the whole compound has been fenced off. It is being protected round the clock by Bulgarian police.
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It tells of a boy who loved to dive, but a storm once trapped him to his death in a submarine cave just under the rocks.
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These are long extinct, but the lion has become so popular that Bulgaria has adopted it for its national coat-of-arms.
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At the same time it found itself facing with severe labour shortages. What they did was to convince young Bulgarians...
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WHERE IN BULGARIA ARE YOU?
It produced some of the brightest minds of the time. Since independence in 1878, however, it has been going downhill as its citizens sought their fortunes elsewhere and emigrated en masse.