Issue 86

Here it's the third week of the garbage strike and Athens has begun to smell. Bright-colored trash bags fill the curbs and alleyways, and we have learned to step over the rubbish and avoid the blocks that have become unnavigable. We know which stretches are particularly foul – a stretch along Mavili Square, or the entire top end of Monastiraki. Odos Athinas is a sea of trash, and Omonia is ghastly but we don't go there anyway. May has gone from unseasonably cool to raging hot, and the garbage is melting. In front of the museum it's like yet another installation project.

People still believe in the Devil and hope to see him in the whites of the convulsing epileptic's eyes. This time, though, something is not right. I don't know what, I just feel it. I get up. A plump man wearing glasses and a plaid jacket is helping me.

"Thanks," I say, "I'll be fine… It's just a regular seizure."

"No comprende," the man smiles.

A punk kid stands up and silently points at the plastic seat. His baby face is unusually kind.

Mere coincidence (or was it Fate?) acquainted Frenchwoman Marie Vrinat-Nikolov with Bulgaria, and she fell in love with it at the age of 13. The love affair has been going on since then in spite of a number of personal and "ideological" challenges. French by birth, she also has Bulgarian citizenship which she acquired on her own volition and not without a fair amount of trouble. Marie Vrinat-Nikolov now lives between France and Bulgaria, between French and Bulgarian, but in the world of Bulgarian literature.

Apart from the "proverbial" labori­ousness of its citizens and their cleanliness, one of the cliches most often used to describe this Balkan "Land of Roses" is its tolerance. Bulgaria saved its Jews from planned deportation during the Second World War is the historical fact often quoted to support the tolerance cliche.

Like all cliches, however, the "Bulgarian tolerance" may have stemmed from some distant past no one can remember. Anyone chancing to venture into the streets of Sofia in 2013 will see a very different picture.

The source used by myself in the Encyclopaedia of Islam to which I am a contributor is a short remark by Rupert Furneaux in his The Siege of Plevna, Anthony Blond publishers, London,1958. On p 198 you can read that Pleven cost the Russians 30,000 deaths to take it, the Turks 10,000 deaths to defend it... On p216: "In all, some 50,000 Turks died in Russian captivity. Out of 43,000 men who set out (as prisoners on the way to Russia), only 15,000 reached Russia, and only 12,000 returned to their homes after the war."