Book summary “Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe”: summary

Introduction

You often view borders as mere lines on a map that separate nations and languages. Yet when you travel to the southeastern edge of Europe, you discover that borders are living wounds etched into landscapes and human memory. You might wonder how the remnants of totalitarian regimes still shape the natural world and the minds of ordinary people. Kapka Kassabova explores the physical and psychological margins where Bulgaria meets Turkey and Greece.

A journey along Europe's southeastern fringes reveals how brutal totalitarian borders left deep psychological scars and ecological sanctuaries that continue to shape human lives.

The book guides you through the mountainous Strandja and Rhodope ranges, the Black Sea coast, and the rivers that divide nations. You will examine the legacy of the Iron Curtain, violent population exchanges, and modern migration crises.

• How do ancient landscapes preserve the dark architecture of Cold War surveillance?
• What happens to human communities trapped between shifting state borders and imperial ruins?
• How do modern refugees navigate the ancient trading routes now patrolled by militarized states?

1. History and Geography of the Border

The Strandja mountain range and the Black Sea coast preserve ancient relic ecosystems, historical trauma, and the dark architecture of Cold War surveillance.

A guarded frontier transforms a natural landscape into a zone of human memory and secret escapes.

During the Cold War, the Black Sea resorts of Bulgaria functioned as a controlled shop window for the Eastern bloc where a human market for freedom operated. International tourists and gilded youth partied in state-run resorts like Golden Sands and Sunny Beach under the surveillance of security agents and Stasi operatives. Desperate individuals sought ways to escape across the border through the forested mountains or the sea. The red_riviera saw the 1960s decade when the Sunny Beach and Golden Sands resorts sprang up along the tideless Black Sea, which holds 90 per cent anoxic water below the oxygenated top layer.

The author remembers her ten-year-old self on the southern beaches in 1984, yearning for adventure while watching East Germans sneak away at night toward the forbidden Strandja border forest.

The Red Riviera and Strandja

Formed by colliding and parting Eurasian plates, strandja missed the last ice age, allowing Tertiary-age plants like rhododendron_ponticum to survive across a 10,000 square kilometres surface area. The 300 million years age of the mountain range matches its megalithic rock sanctuaries, Thracian gold mines, and ancient subterranean tunnels. The 1,031 metres highest peak of Strandja overlooks the Pontic shores, where the Varna Necropolis contained a body wearing humanity's first gold jewellery dating back to 4600 BC.

Twentieth-century geopolitical upheavals and border redrawings systematically depopulated and destroyed the traditional communities of the strandja borderlands. Following the Balkan Wars and the establishment of communist rule, villages experienced population exchanges, forced collectivization, dispossession of land, and strict military controls within the border zone, leading to mass emigration and abandonment after the fall of communism. The village in the valley once held 2,000 souls who lived in the Village in the Valley until the 1990s, reduced to 200 today out of 8,000 total people living in Strandja across both sides of the border, while 70 per cent of people worked with the land in Bulgaria before communist collectivization.

Greek-speaking residents fled to Greece after the Balkan Wars, leaving their houses and untouched church icons to incoming Bulgarian refugees, who were later trapped by communist collectivization and border isolation behind an otkrit list and a cherna chernilka.

Rituals and Beliefs

Curative holy springs serve as traditional liminal spaces where communities cleanse personal and collective sorrows through seasonal rituals. Agiasmas act as mediators between the material and magical realms. Villagers gather at these forest springs at the start of summer to wash church icons, leave strips of clothing to shed illnesses, and participate in sacrificial feasting. You can experience these traditions directly:

• Come to an agiasma to wash your face and conscience
• Hang a strip of your clothing on a nearby tree to leave sickness and sorrow behind

Village women in a Soviet-era minivan transport ancient, lace-dressed icons to the Big Agiasma clearing to wash them in the river and place them on wooden platforms.

Fire-walking rituals in strandja combine ancient pagan solar and chthonic cults with Christian saints as a form of collective psychological therapy. Selected individuals known as nestinari enter a state of ecstatic trance, carrying icons and trampling hot embers to ash. This practice acts as a mechanism to channel collective suffering, historical trauma, and grief from lost homelands and wars. You can participate in the ancient ceremony through strict movements:

• Circle the embers three times anticlockwise during the Departure stage
• Step onto the embers pressing an icon's face to your chest during the Possession stage

During the festival of Saints Constantine and Elena, modern nestinari and Greek visitors step onto the red-hot embers while a bagpipe and drum play traditional ritual tunes accompanied by kyor kaz and the sound of vuh vuh vuh.

2. The Totalitarian Machine and Its Secrets

Militarized border zones brutalized young conscripts, silenced foreign escapees, and fueled occult expeditions driven by state paranoia.

Former communist secret service agents often transitioned into wealthy retirees living in opulent post-communist mansions while remaining unapologetic about their past. A former State Security courier living in a palatial gangster-baroque house draws a map of the border to explain how East Germans were tricked and caught.

Guards, Spies, and Missing Tourists

Compulsory military service on the border brutalized young men, turning them into enforcers of a totalitarian machine who internalized lifelong psychological damage. Border guards and conscripts endured extreme isolation and manipulated commanders known as daemons in human disguise.

A former border guard corporal with a sewn-up eye mourns his son Nasko, who was killed by a dynamited quarry blast meant to supply stones for a general's villa in the year 1986. Archival records cited in the Bulgarian Interior Ministry note 415 missing foreign tourists between 1961 and 1989. East German attempts numbered around 4,000, with 95 per cent of East German escapees arrested by Bulgarian border guards.

A 19-year-old East German named Michael was executed with a point-blank shot to the cheek in July 1989, four months before the world turned upside down, while carrying 790 marks and a gold coin.

Occult Expeditions and Resistance

High-ranking communist officials pursued occult archaeological projects to unearth ancient treasures and cosmic power, exploiting slave labor and suppressing dissent. Lyudmila Zhivkova, Minister of Culture and daughter of the General Secretary, initiated top-secret excavations in Strandja based on prophecies from the blind seer Vanga. Professor Mutafchiev led the secret expedition into the Big Site in 1981, later suffering imprisonment and writing esoteric theories connecting the site to intergalactic portals.

The blind clairvoyant Vanga became an institution of the socialist state, serving as both a persecuted mystic and a state-managed oracle consulted by ordinary citizens and political elites alike. Treasure hunter Mustafa brought a yellowed map to Vanga in 1911, the year of her birth, before he was interrogated by State Security.

The Goryani movement formed one of the largest armed resistance movements against Soviet state terror in the Eastern Europe borderlands, driven by peasants defending their confiscated ancestral lands. A Goryanin served two labor camp sentences for breaking stones during the 1950s because he refused to publicly denounce the resistance movement.

Border springs acquire mythic and gravitational significance, binding travelers and locals to a landscape caught between nations. A Belgian botanist and gardener stays for days collecting endemic plants and drinking repeatedly from Kreynero, unable to leave the valley. Border guards devised brutal methods to pass the time and extract symbolic value from the dangerous wildlife inhabiting the border zone.

You can execute the extraction procedure on vipers using these precise steps:

• Drop the viper in a plastic bag.
• Make a cigarette burn in your army-issue jacket.
• Let the viper's head out of the bag and hold it firmly.
• Allow the viper to be drawn to the smoke.
• Yank the viper back the moment it sinks its teeth into the burnt fabric to leave the fangs behind.

3. The Mechanics of Escape and Repression

East European totalitarian regimes weaponized false cartography, Stasi terror, and brutal liquidations to trap citizens desiring freedom.

The prescribed socialist personality required individuals to conform entirely, stripping them of personal identity, face, and destiny unless aligned with the state.

Felix S. grew up in East Germany in a politically bipolar family where his bourgeois father rebelled against the mandatory voting and regime. In the Soviet bloc, citizens were conditioned to display a specific set of politically correct attitudes and behaviors that embodied Homo sovieticus.

The Stasi Apparatus and False Maps

The GDR manufactured special maps for citizens interested in borders that featured deliberately false cartography to trap would-we escapees. Eighteen-year-olds Felix and Dominik used a GDR-bought map when they crossed into Bulgaria on 21.9.1971, believing they had reached freedom when they were actually ambushed.

The Stasi maintained an enormous network of full-time agents and unofficial collaborators who utilized psychological destruction and solitary confinement.

The regime specialized in death by bureaucracy and systemic psychological annihilation, operating secret prisons and interrogation methods designed to strip prisoners of their existence. Felix was interrogated in the middle of the night, subjected to months of solitary confinement in Andreasstrasse jail, and later imprisoned in Cottbus Prison. By 1989, the apparatus operated with:

• 91000 full-time Stasi agents;
• 189000 unofficial collaborators;
• 3000 West German Stasi agents;
• 30000 to 40000 East Germans bought out for hard currency by 1989.

Border killings of fleeing citizens were officially termed liquidations and were routinely covered up as accidental deaths abroad. When East Germans were shot trying to cross the border in Bulgaria, their bodies were returned in sealed zinc coffins and documented as dying in the sozialistischen Ausland. Klaus and Brigitte were shot by a corporal who emptied one hundred and forty Kalashnikov bullets into them in the summer of 1975. An older retiring border guard remembers arresting East Germans like Klaus Hoffmann in 1986 and watching 300000 people emigrating to Turkey in summer 1989. Border guards recorded all arrests in thick green logbooks that have since disappeared, taking their memories of fugitives and dark secrets with them.

Folklore and Ancient Thrace

In Strandja folklore, the shape-shifting dragon known as the zmey manifests as a ball of fire over rivers and mines, representing collective fate. Locals frequently sight nocturnal fireballs and fire discs near liminal spaces like rivers and closed mines, serving as a mythological outlet for unexpressed trauma and fate. Villagers like Despina and Mr N. recount multigenerational sightings of flying fireballs, and the author herself witnesses a turning ball of light shooting toward the river on her last night.

Ancient Thracians were hedonistic tribes who left behind rich material treasures and stone-hewn cult sites but no written records or centralized empire. Sprawling across parts of modern-day Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Romania, the Thracians were renowned warriors and winemakers who avoided empire-building in favor of sensual and mystical pleasures. Villagers discovered the 30 metres length of the Mezek tomb corridor in the 1930s, which contained a life-size bronze boar and the remains of an Odrysian king from around the fifth century BC.

4. Displacement, Memory, and Coexistence

Forced assimilation campaigns and minority expulsions shattered traditional communities, yet multiconfessional neighbourly bonds frequently survived shifting state borders.

The 1989 Exodus and Forced Assimilation

Totalitarian regimes facing economic failure often resort to forced assimilation campaigns against ethnic minorities to distract the populace. In 1989, the Bulgarian communist regime instituted the Revival Process, forcibly renaming ethnic Turks, banning mosques and the Turkish language, and eventually expelling hundreds of thousands of citizens across the border into Turkey just before the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Ahmed recalls being forced to leave his home with his family within three days in the summer of 1989, leaving their state bank savings behind and having to abandon or shoot their pets because animals were confiscated. This exodus involved 300,000 ethnic Turks who became exiles in 1989, contributing to 340,000 total people displaced during the exodus.

Traumatic forced displacement and police intimidation can cause individuals, particularly children, to completely suppress their native language to survive. Refugee children displaced by ethnic purges often face intense hostility and demands to prove their national identity in their new home countries, leading them to drop their mother tongue entirely under duress.

After a Turkish police officer violently grabbed young Ayshe in a refugee tent camp and demanded to know what kind of Turk she was if she did not speak Turkish, she never spoke another word of Bulgarian.

Border Coexistence and Homing Instincts

Twin border towns often develop a symbiotic relationship where each side supplies what the other legally or economically lacks. Svilengrad and Edirne function as economic twins separated by a political border. While Svilengrad offers casinos, alcohol, and sex to visiting Turks and Greeks, Edirne provides wholesale shopping, infrastructure, and family values to Bulgarians.

Ventsi runs a hotel in Svilengrad catering to gamblers and gas engineers, and regularly drives across the border to Edirne to purchase wholesale supplies and gourmet food items for his restaurant because they are cheaper.

In border regions with mixed histories, traditional neighbourly bonds and shared cultural practices often transcend formal religious and national divisions. Decades of multi-ethnic living create deep-seated local codes of mutual respect and coexistence, known as komshulak, where people of different faiths regularly participate in each other's religious ceremonies and community events.

At the midnight Easter service in St George's Orthodox Church in Edirne, which was established in 1869 alongside the Edirne synagogue built in 1906, half of the congregation consists of local Muslims standing alongside Christians, participating in community bonds that survive shifting state borders.

Extreme isolation and trauma in military service at heavily guarded borders can drive young recruits to find psychological outlets in artistic creation. Conscripted soldiers stationed in remote observation towers for prolonged periods face severe psychological strain from witnessing violence and strict confinement, prompting them to write daily poetry or tattoo their comrades as a defense against madness.

Ventsi spent twelve hours spent isolated in a small room on watch during his twelve months locked in a border observation tower where he witnessed horrific violence, including a recruit who went crazy and killed five comrades, prompting Ventsi to write a poem every day and tattoo eighteen soldiers with identical bird motifs.

Homing pigeons possess an innate spatial memory allowing them to navigate thousands of miles back to their home loft by following geographic features and roadways. Unlike common assumptions that birds fly in straight lines, homing pigeons follow established ground infrastructure such as main roads and roundabouts to orient themselves over vast distances without passports or paperwork.

Ventsi kept a flock of pigeons in his hotel attic, noting that his favorite dove, Columbina, which could reach a top speed of 90 miles per hour on a potential 1000 miles potential stretch of a homing pigeon flight, always found her way back home even after being stolen, representing an instinctual drive to return to familiar ground.

5. Refugee Limbo and Transiting Corridors

Ancient trading routes and imperial bridges now function as modern transit corridors where refugees and smugglers negotiate dangerous passages.

The plains of upper Thrace in Bulgaria and Isparta in Turkey hold a near-monopoly on the world's production of genuine attar of roses due to unique soil and climatic conditions. Workers from the rose industry traveled south across the border into Anatolia with cuttings from the Valley of Roses when Bulgaria broke away from the Ottomans in the 1870s. Rosa damascena was originally imported from Damascus by Ottoman envoys in the sixteenth century. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, rose workers planted cuttings in Anatolia. Despite communism causing a relative decline in Bulgaria, the region still accounts for half of the world's supply. There are 10000 species of rose in total, with 50 percent of the world's rose attar produced in the Valley of Roses near Kazanlak, and 4000 kilos of flower heads needed to obtain one kilogram of rose oil.

While geopolitical regimes, borders, and human populations constantly change, the geographical corridors used for trafficking goods and people remain remarkably permanent. Routes utilized historically by rebels, smugglers, and refugees during the Cold War continue to be traversed today, with only the direction of travel reversing toward Europe. The corridors once used by Palestinians and Kurdish rebels are now used by refugees and fugitives traveling from Asia through Turkey into Europe.

Attar of Roses and Historic Bridges

Built by the vizier Damad Mustafa Pasha in the sixteenth century to facilitate trade between Vienna and Istanbul, the 300-metre stone bridge became the core of a bustling market town called Silk Town, which later suffered destruction and depopulation following the Balkan Wars. Historic infrastructure projects along major imperial routes often gathered rich trade, multicultural communities, and dramatic folklore before being fractured by modern nation-state borders. Suleiman the Magnificent grew envious of the spectacular bridge built by his vizier, leading the vizier to take poison out of loyalty, after which the sultan cursed the bridge until his own pages drowned during a crossing. There are 18 stone arches of the historic bridge, a 300 metres length of the bridge, 400 bags of gold coins as the cost of construction, and 300 fireplaces inside the courtyard of the caravanserai.

During the Cold War, border regions functioned as militarized buffer zones where local populations lived under strict surveillance and total isolation from foreign travelers. Border towns like Svilengrad turned into highly controlled hothouses of vigilance where civilians were strictly prohibited from interacting with international tourists or drivers passing through on their way to Istanbul. A retired teacher in Svilengrad stopped offering water and tomatoes to a thirsty Czech couple in the 1970s after local militia subjected her to a long interrogation after 50 years of Cold War buffer zone existence.

Kurdish Refuges and Transit Cafes

Borderland cafés in transit zones function as informal hubs where smugglers and desperate migrants negotiate dangerous passages across heavily guarded frontiers. Ali's Café serves as an invisible anchor for refugees and fugitives who have nowhere else to go, mirroring a modern-day Casablanca where illegal deals are struck in cash currencies while people wait indefinitely. A Syrian man who had paid eight thousand euros to a trafficker in Istanbul was dumped on a Strandja hill, walked all the way back to Ali's Café after losing all his money, and found himself back at square one, alongside a standard bus ticket costing 50 euros from Istanbul to the border.

Families fleeing persecution in conflict zones often become trapped in legal and geographical limbo in transit countries, unable to move forward or return home. Soran and Alal, a Kurdish couple from northern Iraq who previously fought as Peshmerga against Saddam Hussein, sold their family house to escape the advance of Islamic State, only to be detained at the Bulgarian border after attempting to travel with fake passports. Erdem, Soran and Alal's son, had to pay thousands of euros step-by-step to smugglers to cross through Serbia, Hungary, and Austria before finally finding work as a mechanic in Germany, surviving 30 years of marriage for Soran and Alal, 8 children in their family, 8 months of waiting for an official decision on their asylum application, 1500 euros paid to smuggle from Serbia into Hungary, 1000 euros paid from Hungary into Austria, and 800 euros paid from Austria onwards.

Impoverished mountain communities often engage in illegal treasure hunting fueled by historical maps and legends of hidden partisan provisions. During the Greek Civil War, leftist guerrillas and British pilots dropped money and supplies into the border forests. Provisions buried under marked stones that were never retrieved became the target of generations of local treasure hunters searching for gold, separated by a seven metres distance between the crown stone and the owl stone. Ioanna and her friend followed a precise map instructing them to find a stone with a carved crown and walk seven meters to an owl-marked stone near Muslim graves, though the cache had already been looted by another local hunter known as Crocodile Dundee.

• Find the stone with the carved crown on it.
• Walk seven metres east of the stone until you see a stone with an owl scratched on it.
• Locate the old Muslim graves where buried treasure is supposedly hidden.

Traditional folk healers use lead-melting rituals to diagnose and heal psychological trauma, guilt, and psychosomatic distress. The healer melts lead that has touched a hunting bullet used on a wild animal, pours it into water, and interprets the resulting shapes to locate the source of the patient's emotional distress while mumbling protective formulas. A border army colonel suffering from severe insomnia was healed when his fragmented lead shape finally reformed into a solid piece after multiple attempts, requiring forty days for wearing garment purification in a clean stream.

• Rub head, chest, and legs with a bullet used to kill a wild animal.
• Sleep with the bullet under your pillow.
• Bring the bullet or a worn T-shirt touched by the bullet to the healer.
• Healer melts the bullet and pours it into water while mumbling a special formula three times.
• Healer interprets the molten lead shapes and pours the strained water over the afflicted person's head, heart, and legs, or has them drink it.

Border healers perform footprint-reversing rituals on untrodden soil to purge an individual of accumulated negative energies and psychological burdens acquired during travel. The healer outlines a person's footprint facing east with a knife, cuts out the soil, and turns it over to trap all unwanted energy before sending the traveler to a sacred water spring. The healer performs the Reverse the Footprint ritual on the author to clear the heavy psychic residue picked up during her long journey through the borderlands.

• Place foot on untrodden soil with toes pointing east.
• Healer outlines the foot three times anticlockwise with a knife while muttering an incantation.
• Remove foot from the spot.
• Healer cuts out and overturns the soil in the footprint.
• Go wash in the waters of Saint Marina.

Conclusion

The psychological magnetism of borderlands binds you to landscapes marked by historical violence and human resilience because physical walls eventually crumble while psychological scars endure across generations.

You can navigate the persistent echoes of historical trauma in modern societies by applying practical rules drawn from borderland experiences.

1. Recognize that political boundaries often mask deeper ecological sanctuaries and human tragedies that require careful listening rather than indifference.
2. Acknowledge how past state surveillance and totalitarian policies continue to shape current geopolitical anxieties and migration crises.
3. Observe traditional healing rituals and local folklore to understand how communities process collective grief and memory.
4. Respect the complex identities of border residents who maintain multiconfessional bonds despite centuries of forced assimilation and displacement.
5. Examine your own relationship with freedom and movement by witnessing how vulnerable human beings navigate dangerous transit corridors today.

10 Key Ideas

1. During the Cold War, the Black Sea resorts of Bulgaria functioned as a controlled shop window for the Eastern bloc where a human market for freedom operated.
2. Curative holy springs serve as traditional liminal spaces where communities cleanse personal and collective sorrows through seasonal rituals.
3. Archival records cited in the Bulgarian Interior Ministry note 415 missing foreign tourists between 1961 and 1989.
4. The Goryani movement formed one of the largest armed resistance movements against Soviet state terror in the Eastern Europe borderlands, driven by peasants defending their confiscated ancestral lands.
5. The Stasi maintained an enormous network of full-time agents and unofficial collaborators who utilized psychological destruction and solitary confinement.
6. The 1989 exodus involved 300,000 ethnic Turks who became exiles, contributing to 340,000 total people displaced during the forced assimilation campaign.
7. Decades of multi-ethnic living create deep-seated local codes of mutual respect and coexistence, known as komshulak, where people of different faiths regularly participate in each other's religious ceremonies and community events.
8. Families fleeing persecution in conflict zones often become trapped in legal and geographical limbo in transit countries, unable to move forward or return home.
9. Concrete fortifications along the Metaxas line left behind subterranean tunnels and military remnants that now merge with the rugged natural landscape of the borderlands.
10. Traditional folk healers use lead-melting rituals with hunting bullets to diagnose and heal psychological trauma, guilt, and psychosomatic distress.