Wanderings: Mezek, Bulgaria

May 25, 2019

The once-daily train up the Evros River (1) valley ends ar a small Greek village called Ormenion. I stopped in a local café for a drink. The locals (all men) seemed pleased to see someone new and we chatted amiably in broken English about what I was doing in their village.

At the Bulgarian passport control station, the official asked me with a grave face for my vehicle registration papers. I pointed at my bike and said "вело" (2) (bike). He broke out in a wide grin, laughed, and stamped my passport.

The turn-off for Mezek is just past the border. The well-paved, tree-lined road had little traffic and a nice bike lane. I soon arrived in Mezek, which is the most pleasant Bulgarian village I have seen.

A climb up a modest bluff behind the village brought me to the Mezek Fortress, dating from at least the early 1200s during the Byzantine era (3). The fortress affords sweeping views of the Maritsa River valley, and served to guard Adrianople/Edirne and Constantinople/Istanbul from the northwest. There was a school group and a number of families wandering about, climbing on the walls, and taking pictures in period costumes.

I walked back down the hill, grabbed my bike and headed to the nearby Thracian tomb dating from the 4th century B.C.E. The tomb was discovered in 1931, and has a very long, stone-lined corridor leading to the burial chamber. The corridor is lined with holograms of the various objects (wine containers, candle holders, &c.) found at the site, the originals of which are in various museums. The burial chamber is a tall, beehive shaped structure, which has managed to survive intact and unscathed for almost 2.5 millenia.

At the winery named after the village, I bought a bottle of Thraki wine, a red blend including Mavrud, a local grape. The bottle fit the bike rack perfectly, as if the rack were designed for the purpose.

There was no restaurant in town, so I stopped at a small grocery planning to buy some bread, cheese and maybe hard sausage. I greeted the young lady with my best здравейте (4) (zdraveite). She told me they had a small electric grill and that she could cook up any meat I wanted from the meat case. I was pleasantly surprised and went back to the guesthouse to grab my wine. The chicken on skewers was quite tasty; I ate two-thirds, while the neighborhood cats got the rest.

As I sat at the small table outside, everyone in the village (5) seemed to come by, including other diners whose meat was cooked on the electric grill. The shop owner sat down with the diners, brought out a pack of small chocolate muffins and shared one with me as we all chatted as well as we could (6). I offered to share my wine, but I had no takers.

Back at the guesthouse, I offered wine to the other guests. Still no takers, so I drank most of the bottle myself (7). Colin and his father were fellow guests and we chatted about music tastes. His father, who grew up in the 1970s under communism, says the music from the late 1970s is best. He was forbidden to listen to the decadent western music, which made him want to hear it all the more. Colin showed me a video of a concert he attended by Slavi Trifonov, a Bulgarian folk-rock singer. Colin's wife was a former dancer for the band.

(1) Known as the Maritsa in Bulgaria and the Meçis in Turkey. The river rises in the Rila Mountains in southwestern Bulgaria and eventually forms most of the border between Greece and Turkey (a).

(a) The one place where the river does not define the border is near Edirne, where the river runs quite close to the city. There is a small zone on the west bank of the river that was ceded to Turkey by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, presumably to keep the city out of range of Greek artillery.

(2) Pronounced "velo," which is the same as the French word for bike.

(3) Although there is some belief that the site was use for military purposes as early as the Thracian period in the 4th century B.C.E.

(4) I was pleased when she subsequently told me she thought I was a foreigner until I spoke, then thought I was Bulgarian. Apparently, my Bulgarian "hello" is not bad.

(5) Plus the border police stocking up on snacks and coffee for their night patrols.

(6) This consisted of me naming a place, then saying the Bulgarian word for either bike or railway, depending on how I got there.

(7) I can't let good wine go to waste and I had no way to carry it with my bag also on the rack.