My only previous contact with Bulgaria was a translator who told me he had to change the name of the eponymous hero in one of my books, Cal, because in Bulgarian it means 'mud'. My name is mud in Bulgaria.

I am with photographer, Knut Bry - more a spelling mistake than a name - coming in to land at Sofia. After customs we meet Maria Stefanova, our translator, and the bearded Slavcho, our driver and guide. In real life, Maria is a broadcaster - Slavcho a film maker.

Saint Alexander Nevsky Cathedral is surrounded by people selling souvenirs - mostly textiles, hanging on ropes looped between trees. To get a more interesting angle Knut lies his six foot four frame down on the pavement and shoots up at the golden domes through a lace tablecloth. An old woman sees him and thinks he's had a heart attack but he signals he's okay and she triple blesses herself with relief. A man, comes over and lifts the lace tablecloth so that it won't interrupt Knut's view of the domes.

Inside, the cathedral is richly dark. High above a verger changes bulbs, shaped like flames, in one of the many huge brassy chandeliers. The power is on so he can see which of the bulbs needs replaced. He uses a ladder like a tennis umpire's seat. The pockets of his grey overall chink with dead bulbs. He screws in new ones with a dry, chirping noise. When all the bulbs have been replaced he turns off the chandelier and moves on to the next one pushing his cumbersome ladder in front of him - like some sort of electric Sisyphus.

Tarnovo

We eat in the Mehana folk restaurant. I have a typical Bulgarian salad - a heap of fresh crunchy vegetables coated in dressing and grated feta cheese. I am introduced to the habit here of strong drink at the beginning of the meal - a brandy, Raika, gives a kick start to the evening. I complain there is no folk music. I'm not often right, but I'm wrong this time. Out of the woodwork step two oldish men with accordions and a younger woman. The locals join in the typically Bulgarian songs. About love and eagles. The music hots up to traditional dance rhythms. Somebody produces a two-faced drum shaped like an egg timer and a customer plays it. Then he gets up to dance the ratchenitza -but for all I know it could be the choro. The main focus of interest is the man's shoes - tennis shoes with red lights on the heels. As he dances frantically Knut tries to get a picture of red streaks - like those disappearing traffic shots - from the dancing man's heels.

There seems to be a great habit of sweeping, using a broomstick without a handle. It is cruelly short so that the women have to bend over in a back breaking stance. Sweeping with this kind of brush involves a necessary kowtowing.

The next day we visit the painter Nicolas Manev in his artist's retreat. It is a house donated by a famous Bulgarian painter, Boris Denev, for the use of artists. We sit in an area surrounded by windows looking out onto the leafy garden. In the middle of the room is a mangal, a metal table the colour of dull bronze . In winter the mangal is filled with burning charcoal and heats the room like a giant thurible. Now Nicolas uses it as a table and serves us with plates of halva and pink turkish delight and a bottle of lemonade. 'Bulgaria is magical,' he says in English.'I work far better here than in Paris. Let me show you my atelier.'
Across the street his studio is filthy and untidy - the right kind of a place for work - full of broken heads and jars full of paint brushes and still life set-ups which have never been dismantled. On the way out above a light plug on the landing a swallow has built its mud nest. I try out one of the few words I remember from my schoolboy French.
'Hirondelle ?'
'Ah oui.'
I go downstairs like a smug bastard.

Arbanassi

We head for the village of Arbanassi, a village established in medieval times. Every house is like a small castle built of stone and wood, none moreso than the house of Constanzaliev. They have beautifully proportioned and decorated rooms - it all looks very modern, with kitchens full of hanging pewter pots. Ovens, stoves and fireplaces for the winter, even inside toilets. These are small rooms with a triangular hole sawn out of the thick floorboards - two of them, in case of an emergency. That kind of thing can happen in any century.

I am fascinated by the floor tiles recycled from a nearby Roman settlement. Each tile is marked with a crude design indented by trailed fingers, always different - sometimes four fingers in an X, sometimes three, sometimes squiggled, sometimes straight. There is a closeness to history here when I bend to match exactly my fingers to the fingers of the man or woman drawn through the ceramic mud all those centuries ago. Then I see the delicate paw print of a dog in another tile - and by the door, what looks to me, like the print of a badger.

Gabrovo

We drive through Gabrovo and Maria tells me that the people here are renowned for their humour - on April 1st they have a festival. Comedians come from all over the world. 'They do fun,' she says. And they do it in the purpose built House of Humour - from the outside as bleak a concrete building as I've seen.

We visit Maria's Aunt and Uncle who live here and they serve us with banaitza - a traditional welcoming dish. It's like a savoury flaky pastry made of flour, butter, feta cheese and salt. It's hard to resist finishing the whole plateful. Maria's uncle, with his white hair and black moustache, looks the image of Einstein. The body language between Maria and her Aunt is lovely to watch as they talk. Hand touching, the young one buttoning the top button of the older one's cardigan as they talk in a language I cannot understand.

Back on the main road again a man in his twenties, utterly drunk staggers about the middle of the road trying to retrieve his polythene bag. He falls and his back leg goes up. His cheek goes down on the white line. He cannot right himself - he crawls about on hands and knees in the middle of the road as Trabants whine and swerve around him. Welcome to the House of Fun.

The Museum of Crafts at Etar

The place has been closed for two hours but we venture in through a gap in the fence hoping the security men are not armed.There is a street of reconstructed shops devoted to crafts of the last century - shoemakers, weavers, bell-makers, a place for making butter out of nuts, carpenters, herbalists, potters, leather workers, coppersmiths. A kitten moves about this cobbled street its tiny tail up like an aerial, all of a quiver.

There is a natural washing machine (valiavitza) where a stream is sluiced into a huge wooden bowl and washing rotates in the current. Very clever. A spin drier has yet to be devised.
KAZANLAK

Hotels in former Soviet states have completely dispensed with the terrible air of snobbery they have further west. Here in Hotel Kazanlak the lobby is a place for kids to hang out. It is like a railway station without trains. There is a strong smell of kerosene and stale smoke.

In the lobby some men in white overalls on A-shaped ladders are painting the ceiling. One of them shows off in front of Knut's camera and walks on his ladder across the floor - without coming down off it. Like some awkward giraffe. We applaud - they laugh. I imagine them as acrobats in a circus and that their friends, the fire-eaters, are to blame for the kerosene and stale smoke.

The Institute of the Rose

The rose is the symbol of Bulgaria and the Institute devotes itself to growing them for their oil. The metal flask for containing the distilled oil is called a kumkum - this is the noise it makes when it pours. It takes fifty kilos of petals to give a gram of oil. The Institute produces other extracts - thyme, marigold,lavender. In the laboratory we smell some of these and they don't smell like they taste - if you know what I mean. They are like tunes written for cello but played on the trumpet. You can recognize them but you're not quite sure where you first encountered them.
Like the lucky man who fell in the sewer, I come out smelling of roses. But not everyone around here is lucky - we learn that the workers in this state run institution have had no salary since December.

The House of Hadji Eniovata

Spring is a bad time to see real roses but we experience last year's in all their variety at this museum, rose jam (good for the bowels, I'm told) rose brandy (raika), rose liqueur. We sit in a walled courtyard in the warm spring sunshine at tables so white I feel snow-blind.

On the Road to Plovdiv

Smoke drifts across the road and we stop to watch. A couple of men and three women are chucking buckets of water onto heaps of burning wood. Charcoal burners, their skin blackened by the smoke. There is a wigwam of oak logs waiting to be covered with a mixture of soil and black ash, then burned slowly. These people are gipsys and they travel around doing this. The oldest man says he learned it from his father but worked as a driver for 20 years. Then he became unemployed and fell back on this trade for a living.'Not many people know how to do it,' he says.' The fire burns for up to ten days and the temperature is critical. It must even be watched through the night.' It looks like hard and dirty work. He shows us his layers of socks and footwear to keep his feet from burning. What do they do with the charcoal ?
Export it to Germany for barbecues.

Plovdiv

We walk round the cobbled streets of the Old Town. Fig trees, acacia trees, a house with sideburns of ivy, shuttered windows that lean out over the street on curved wooden supports, red tiled roofs, nail studded doors. The French poet Lamartine bought a house here - it has since been turned into a retreat for writers. It is a warm evening and we pass the Roman Amphitheatre dating from the second century which is opposite a Music School. Scales on a piano conflict with a violin playing a Bach chaconne from a different window. Girls in short denim skirts sit around at a cafe opposite the Amphitheatre tapping the ash from their cigarettes to the pumping sounds of Bill Haley.

Me: There is something in red wine which doesn't
agree with me.

Maria: What's that ?

Me: A lot of it.

The Rhodope Mountains

We travel south to the mountains to meet Jordan Danchev who will show us the region he loves with a passion. We go to eat at the house of Jordanka, a lovely woman in her seventies dressed in traditional costume. There are friends and a welcoming fire of logs.

Three of us are invited into the small kitchen to watch two people prepare katchamak. Boiled salted cornflour is stirred with a broom handle - (hey ! maybe this is why all the street sweepers kowtow and get sore backs. All the broom handles are for making katchamak) and beaten down into pizza pans with a wooden spoon and covered with melted butter. Steam rises, butter boils, aromas waft. Knut adds to the confusion taking pictures. White cheese is cut and served with a slice of this delicious traditional dish.

In the morning I notice two flies prevented from leaving my bedroom by the fine mesh that was meant to keep them out.

We drive up to the mountain village of Zornitza perched on the hillside. It is a truly beautiful sight. From a distance the houses are pink and cream with their backs to a wall of fresh green. Plum and cherry trees in full white blossom insulate the houses from one another. Somebody chops wood and the 'chock' echoes around. If I turn around I see the road hairpinning its way up to here and in the distance blue hills leading up to the white of snow. At my feet, flowers. Lupins die and decay and, out of the centre of what looks like rotting brown rags, springs a fresh new plant. There are dandelions, cowslips, violets, hearts-ease and forget-me-nots. Maria says that the last name is the same in Bulgarian - 'do not forget me'. How does this come about ? How far back do our two languages have to go to share the name of a common flower ?

We go to Gela village to meet Dafo the musician and gaida maker (bagpipes). Danchov tells me that a recording of this man's was sent on the US Voyager into outer space. We clamber down a steep path to his house. Both Dafo and his wife, Tzonka, move about the house in their stocking feet. Dafo opens a bottle of raika with a cute penknife which has a fork attached and we swop toasts. I tell him my favourite one 'May we all be happy - and our enemies know it.'

Later he plays the gaida. The bag is as big as a small goat - in fact it IS a small goat. There is a hanging drone and a chanter made of horn. He stands as he tunes the instrument. It is difficult to guess his age - a big man with an upright military bearing. He begins to play. And oh... the sound he makes it make.

The small room fills with pain and love, joy and loss. Thousands of years are telescoped into this vinegar sound. A slight flexing of his knees - occasionally tapping of his right stockinged foot on the floor. His fingers are square, like chisels, as they move on the chanter, producing vibrato. This is music of the highest order, of Bach like proportions - architectural, controlled - but it also cuts at the heart. I think of this tune moving through the cosmos and as a human being I am proud of it.

I hear the song again later in the evening, this time sung by Valia Balkanska (who is accompanied by Dafo's piping on the Voyager disc) and if anything it is more moving. Immediately you hear the voice you feel you are in the presence of something great. It hollers and swoops. A gaida (Petar Yanev) and another voice (Gergana Ruseva) accompany her and the pipes mesh with the open throat singing and the soul soars. Valia sits very straight, kerchiefed, wearing traditional dress (the jacket is 140 years old). Her hands are joined loosely in her lap, her voice is shaking the rafters.

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Shiroka Luka

On waking in this village I hear, not the sound of cars or lorries, but birdsong, a cuckoo, children's voices, sheep beh-ing, goat bells, downstairs a smoker's cough. The absence of traffic reminds me of another absence. I have not seen an advertisment since leaving Sofia.

A rooster cok-o-reek-o's in Bulgarian. At home they cock-a-doodle-doo in English.

At least two flocks of sheep go past outside the door, bells clonking. I walk into the street and its flat cobble stones are littered with slightly greenish droppings. So this is why people take their shoes off at the door.

We are in the house of Maria and Nicola Grudevi ready to eat breakfast. As elsewhere in Bulgaria, everything is fresh - in-house yellow and white cheese, cucumbers in wedges, tomatoes, bread, honey, home-made butter. There might be one shop in a village 'for nails and bread' otherwise everything is prepared. As if to prove a point I praise the tea and our hostess rushes off to show me what it is. I expect her to come back with a tea-bag which I can read. Instead she comes back with bunches of dried herbs and flowers and rose-hips. She insists in giving me enough 'makings' to last well into the next century. Bags of tea.

She also gives us a piece of home woven cloth each - enough for a cushion - and drapes it across the right shoulder, a sign for special guests.

The Caves

The road from Shiroka Luca to Trigrad is amazing with its mountainous scenery. We stop at the Devil's Throat cave with its sign warning of bats.

Inside, the cave is big - a couple of cathedrals big. Legend has it that this is where Orpheus came to fetch Eurydice. The underground falls roar and turn to mist as the daylight filters down from above. On the way out, climbing the metal staircase 20 stories high, the legs go to jelly. Our guide tells us that there are caves three times bigger than this one, but they are accessible only to climbers.

A Russian built lorry (Zil) loaded with trees crawls up the steep hairpins at speeds too low to register and noise levels too high to contemplate.

Maria: They have dogs here because it is much more
secure for the potatoes.

Me: ?

Maria: The wild pigs eat them.

Me: ??

Maria: The potatoes, not the dogs.

Kovatchevitza

Slavcho takes us to stay in his restored holiday house in the last village. Once the road has run out, the lanes are little more than rocks and clay, like dry riverbeds between the houses. Slavcho's place is over 100 years old and has a medieval feel to it. Outer wooden gates lead into a courtyard for animals. Stairs go up to the living quarters and a further staircase leads to the chardak or verandah. This is a wonderful concept - an open room almost the size of the house directly beneath the roof with magnificent views - cool in the heat of the summer, so I'm told. Right now, it's log fires downstairs.

The village of Kovatchevitza has the problems of any remote settlement - the young people drift away, and many of the houses are only used as holiday homes by people from Sofia.

I meet a man Ivan Zhechev, scything his garden - no lawn mowers here - who tells me he is a sports journalist. A day later I discover he has translated Anna Karenin into Bulgarian. His son, Jeorgi speaks Bulgarian, Russian, French, Italian and English. Where's my hirondelle now ?

We meet an old school teacher, Angel Jigrev (86) who has been teaching since the 30's. Even now he has one pupil and, he says with a grin, the boy is first in the class.

Bansko

This is a ski resort and on our way home from a restaurant after midnight we come across a crowded church - Easter Saturday and the ceremonies are in progress. There are thousands of young people carrying lit tapers so that it is like a light show, some kind of decorous pop concert. Old women carry herbs and chant prayers. If they are in their eighties they must feel relieved that things have returned to normal again. A thurifer comes past,in full golden robes, and leaves a wake of blue incense unfurling behind him. It smells rich and aromatic. Even though I know the Catholic rite I am lost. This bears as much resemblance to it as American football does to football. Worshippers drift in and out at will.

And so do I. In a dark alley I stand looking up at the stars in the clear sky. Overhead a flickering image moves - a plane, high enough to be silent, on its way somewhere. Passengers to New York, Milan or Vienna unwrapping cutlery unaware of this country of stunning beauty and hospitable people thousands of feet below them - and a billion miles above them the piping of Dafo and the incomparable voice of Valia Balkanska.