Journey to Europe's most unknown and dangerous border

BarcelonaWhen she was just a child, Kapka Kassabova (Sofia, 1973) spent her summers with her family in a seemingly idyllic village in southern Bulgaria called Michurin during the Soviet era (now Tsarevo). "I could consider myself privileged, because with my parents, who were scientists, we went on vacation, while many of the children I knew spent their summers working in the tobacco fields," she recalls now, coinciding with the publication of the first Catalan translation of one of her books. Border (Comanegra, 2025; translation by Ariadna Pous), which presented at the CCCB Kosmopolis festival“At that time, I couldn’t have known that in the villages of the so-called Red Riviera, one out of every two waiters worked for the Bulgarian State Security, and that there were also many KGB and Stasi agents secretly watching the East German vacationers: some of them were making their way through the forest, hoping for a new life far from communism,” she explains.

The girl who was once Kassabova didn’t know that the border guards could kill some of these fugitives, but she sensed “the pervasive fear” of living in a regime that deprived its inhabitants of some of their fundamental rights. “There was a lot of silence, and children are very sensitive to what isn’t said,” she continues. “One of the topics that no one ever referred to was…” border, which in Bulgarian is called granitaThe border was a taboo, a kind of void that was practically nonexistent even for families who spent their summers nearby. And yet it was extensive, and people lived there who had to endure constant surveillance, just as has been the case for decades in the Gaza Strip. Many years after the fall of communism, Kassabova decided to write a book about this no-man's-land, traveling the hundreds of kilometers of border that stretch from the Black Sea to Mac, where legends coexist with the traumatic historical legacy, and which passes through countries like Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece.

Living in an open-air prison

"For a long time, my country was a huge open-air prison," he explains. BorderPublished in English in 2017, Kapka Kassabova inaugurated a quartet of books set in the Balkans, which the author has recently concluded with Anima: a wild pastoral (Jonathan Cape, 2024). Decades had to pass before Kassabova felt the need to reconnect with this "unknown and dangerous frontier." "In the early nineties, Bulgaria was falling apart: after the regime collapsed, everything ground to a halt, and the state controlled everything," she recalls. "My parents were desperate and felt that the only option for the family was to leave." They ended up on the other side of the world, in New Zealand, to work at the university. "Before we settled there, I already had an idea in my head of what that island must be like, because one of the books that has most influenced and amazed me since childhood has been the world atlas," she continues. "I was disappointed to find so many descendants of white Europeans in New Zealand. But I expected many more Maori."

While still a student, Kassabova debuted as a poet with All roads lead to the sea (Auckland University Press, 1997). Since then, she has published a dozen more titles, always written in English, even though it is the fourth language she learned: "My mother tongue is Bulgarian, I studied at the French school in Sofia, and before English, I learned Russian," she says.

Although her parents still live in New Zealand, Kapka Kassabova returned to Europe in 2005. She has lived for two decades in the Scottish Highlands, the setting for her next book, Borrowed landwhich will be available in English next year. "My life's mission was to write the Balkan Quartet, which begins with Border “I had to return to the place where my ancestors came from and live with all the shadows of the border,” he admits. “The border is an underground world. It’s a descent into Hades.”

Mountains full of gold

Through conversations with some of the inhabitants of the border region between Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, and Macedonia, the author unearths little-remembered historical episodes that unfold with growing surprise, as in the chapter dedicated to the site where, in the 1980s, the daughter of the country's head of state and a government minister discovered the gold-covered tomb of the Egyptian goddess Bastet. The story involves clairvoyants, treasure hunters, accidents, and mysterious deaths. "It's not the only treasure in the Strandja or Rhodope mountains, and the people who live there are aware of it," says Kassabova. "The gold underground dates back to the time of the Thracian civilization and empires like the Byzantine, Roman, and Ottoman. There are many people still searching for it."

In the book, the pursuit of gold is both literal and symbolic, because Kassabova knows how to give value to the stories of the border inhabitants she encounters. They serve, for example, to explain the persecution of thousands of dissidents during the decades of socialism, but also to recall "the ghosts that can still be perceived," he says, within the abandoned fortifications of the Metaxas Line—which was meant to protect the Greeks from a possible Bulgarian invasion between 1919 and 1919—and the exodus of 300,000 Bulgarian Muslims to Turkey in the early 1990s. "This exodus was the prelude to the genocide perpetrated during the Balkan wars," he recalls.

"I like traveling to the periphery and the margins and finding stories," the author continues. "What's left out of the main narratives seems the most interesting to me. Spending time in the mountains and forests of the Strandja and the Rhodopes, I realized that these are places still haunted by those fleeing, by the screams of soldiers going mad inside the fortifications, and by the young men who had to guard the border."

On one of her trips, Kapka Kassabova ran into one of the former guards hired by the State Security Department. "In the good old days, we had our methods for people like you," he threatened her. And he advised her, shortly afterward: "Don't go loitering and digging up old graves, my dear." “Nobody cares about that.” However, it wasn’t that man who endangered the writer’s life, but a Greek man, Ziko, who drove her to a ghost town on a mountaintop. Up there, it was just the two of them and a group of “unknown henchmen” who had arrived in BMWs and whom Kassabova feared might attack her or even wipe her off the map. “I thought I’d been set up, and I ran through the woods,” she recounts years later. “It was while I was escaping that invisible threat that I came across three people by a river filling a boat with loaves of bread. The woman’s name was Marta. The men, as impossible as it may seem…” Anyone who wants to find out how this story ends will have to read it. Border.

In another chapter of the book, Ziko himself, who has "smuggled all sorts of goods, from berries to machine guns," reveals to Kapka Kassabova how to live a long life: "The secret is to have three hearts. One to love people. Another to love yourself. And a third to love the mountains." The only problem is that in the border mountains, madness is more prevalent than love.