Yesterday, on our way back to Sofia from Tarnovo, we stopped at an ethnic “museum” (I don’t recall its name) where they have several original 200-year-old houses on display as well as prehistoric skeletons and relics and a couple of good restaurants. Oh, and lots of feral cats.
The museum consists of several dwellings interspersed with regular houses, though all are about 200 years old. Here’s a non-museum house. What a lovely place to live! (It’s in the mountains.)
Making honey and wax was a major industry in the town. This old honey-extraction and wax press is still used occasionally for demonstrations. After the honey was spooned from the combs, the wax was boiled in water and then the concoction poured through several meshes of rice straw (to extract dirt) and then pressed, with the hot wax solidifying in the cold water below. The refined wax was sold for candles and other purposes; in its final form it took the form of gray-brown sheets, about half a centimeter thick.
Here’s the interior of a “rich man’s house”: a merchant who traveled through Europe trading leather and wool for other goods (olive oil and so on). There were three floors, with the animals below. This is the original room and loom on which rugs were woven. The loom was connected to a cradle on the left so that the baby could be gently rocked during weaving:
The museum building had a bunch of skulls. This guy got badly whacked on the head, but, as you see, the bone healed after the whack. He survived the injury! I’m not sure how old this skull is, but it demonstrates the violence of our ancestors that Steve Pinker mentions in The Better Angels of our Nature.
This dude didn’t make it–there’s no healing of the horrific wounds in the skull. That must represent a few blows with a blunt axe.
Stray cats abound in the region: most are wary, though they’re in pretty good shape as people do feed them. This kitten was tame and let me hold it. I have a bazillion pictures of The Street Cats of Bulgaria which I’ll inflict on you later.
After observing our head-bashed ancestors, we were all hungry, and repaired to a restaurant in the village which happened to house a mother cat and her two gorgeous kittens (below). I wonder if the tabby kitten has the Munchkin short-leg gene.
They were hungry (I fed them, of course), and I wanted to take the tabby home with me.
Before lunch we had a Bulgarian drink: a spearmint liqueur that we mixed with Sprite and ice. Very refreshing. Mother Cat was friendly, too, and I had her purring in my lap. Noms, cats, and drinks: what could be better?
One of the lunch dishes we shared was a luscious pork stew with vegetables:
We also had three other dishes: a casserole with eggs, peppers, and sausage (top right), a yogurt-and-zucchini dish (below it), and a stewed rabbit with mushrooms in a delicious sauce (bottom). It was all served with freshly made flatbread. And, of course, I couldn’t resist feeding the three cats (who were ravenous) copious amounts of rabbit.
The quality (and quantity!) of Bulgarian food is superb. I have not had a single bad meal or dish in the five days I’ve been here.
Here is Vassy taking photos of the village; I wanted to show you her famous “Zombie Rabbit” purse, emblazoned with an evil rabbit and the words “So dark. . . so cute.” (She has a matching wallet.) When I read those words, Lubo, remembering our lunch, added, “And so delicious.”
Lubo, the main organizer of the Ratio conference, enjoying a rakia (the local hard liquor) before dinner two nights ago. (I haven’t shown that one yet.) This is plum rakia, the equivalent of slivovitz. I had one too, as it’s the national drink—and, when well made, it’s very good. It comes in various flavors, with grape most common, but also apple, apriciot, plum, and other fruit distillations.
Slivovitz – brain damage in a glass.
I was speaking fluent Czech after one or three.
I thought you were speaking fluent Czech backwards after #4 !
I’m fascinated by open-air ethnological museums, like the one you show.
The Shaker one in Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, strikes me as the best I’ve seen in the US; and there’s a nice but smaller one at the Ephrata Colony in Pennsylvania [religious communes seem to survive well]; and I’d be happy to hear readers’ advice on others.
There are terrific ones in Scandinavia, in both Stockholm (Djurgarden) and Oslo, both with buildings up to 1000 years old – nothing like having a long history.
Does your shirt say, “Faith and Woo: Together We Can Find a Cure”?
Did anyone ask you to explain the meaning of the word, “Woo” or were the people that you met familiar w/ it?
The English-speaking rationalists understood it (at least some of them), but not many Bulgarians understand English (as I found while trying to find my way around Plovdiv today!), and so they wouldn’t even think to ask.
Do Bulgarians have an equivalent word that they use to describe the “woo” phenomenon?
I don’t think we have a specific word for that, even though that’s a bigger thing than religion in Bulgaria.
Those two gorgeous kittens are obviously female.
Wow, you just had to put up the one pic where I look like a drunken eastern european – low blow 🙂
I think you look happy! 🙂
Captain America is never happy while there are injustices to be righted.
I am always impressed that my ancestors managed to produce progeny and possibly avoid, for the most part, having to endure the gruesome things we once did to each other.
Of course, the first skull gives me confidence that we are all physically capable of enduring a lot more than we think we can.
We have no evidence as to how well that person recovered from their injury. If they lived in a fairly prosperous time and family, they might have been cared for in a badly brain-damaged state for long enough for their skull to heal. And how do we know it was human violence? Could they have been kicked by a horse?
The other one, though: “a few blows with a blunt axe” (nice non-US spelling of ‘axe’ there, Prof CC!)
Not so blunt, by the look of the smooth cut on the left temporal area. The holes in the crown and occiput, though, must have been made with a non-edged spike (back of a battle-axe?) and there was no getting up from that.
Fall is slow in coming? Looks like fine weather.
Great T-shirt, food, and kittehs!
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Cats look good on you, Jerry. Just sayin’.
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https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10152561612704185&fref=nf
laundry-basket kitteh…
Luscious pork stew is luscious. Professor CC must have entered umami heaven during consumption of that comestible. The serving dish resembles a cauldron morphing into a wall planter.
And the tabby wants to be taken home with PCC.
Spearmint might have finally found it’s vocation.
The skulls remind me of a medical procedure called trapaning, where a hole is sawed or bored into the skull to let out evil spirits. When the subject does not survive, the opening would show cut marks. Here are pictures of examples. I cannot tell if the ones you show have cut marks.
Trepanning (wikipedia link).
That was my thought too, on seeing the first skull. The procedure has been performed – and survived – since the Neolithic, and possibly further back into the Mesolithic.
That’s what it looks like to me. The hole in the back of the skull in Jerry’s photo looks like it was made by scraping with a sharp blade — a surgical procedure from which the guy recovered. I own this very nice reproduction of a similar example.
You can see the skull has been badly broken and glued together, with some pieces still missing and small gaps filled with plaster. The breaks are so long and straight that I suspect it was broken long after death, during a careless exhumation or something.
You can also see faint traces of red coloration on the top of this skull. It might have been wrapped in a red cloth at some point, but it might be decoration — there is a tradition in central Europe of burying people for only a few years, then digging up the bones and storing them in a big room. The skulls are often elaborately decorated with the decedent’s name and attractive designs.
… bone getting considerably more brittle in the first few months after death. One man’s taphonomy is another CSI plot line (not that I’ve ever watched an episode of CSI-anywhere).
Ochre? Certainly been done before. Is the colour out on the ~5YR hue, or more towards the R hue?
It all looks wonderful – Bulgaria has become a must visit for me.
I tried to figure out, from the first picture with the t-shirt:
Faith & _____
Together we can ______
what it could have said, and it was hard to fill in the blanks with something that Jerry would wear.
Faith & Reason
Together we can ‘t
was as close as I got.
But what it really says is quite wonderful.
Comment #2 above gives the accurate reading of the shirt.
Oh, and any country with a flatbread culture is a good eating country.
If you like travelogue/cookbook/photography books, I can highly recommend “Flatbreads and Flavors” by Alford and Duguid.
(They have several books all on excellent foodie topics.)
One of my best friends is from Bulgaria, he was thrilled to hear about your trip. BTW, his name is Lyubo and he looks similar to your friend Lubo, guess it’s the hairdo. So glad you’re having a good time, it sounds like a fascinating place to visit 🙂 Nazdrave!
What a lovely setting that first pic is. I guess the roofing is giant slates?
And I would hate to have to carve the screw and the threads in the lever of that giant press. Hard enough to carve the screw, even tho you just lay it out with a string to start, but doing it on the interior, and matching the threads, to boot, seems really daunting.
That food looks delish. Bulgaria seems like a wonderful country from the photos you’ve shown.
I collect comics, so I love Lubo’s shirt- I have one just like it!
Half-way through “The Better Angels of our Nature” and love it. Actually off to bed to read it right now.
It is always nice to see food pictures that remind us of how we are all different in some ways, alike in others.