"Remarkable: a book about borders that makes the reader feel
sumptuously free." --Peter Pomerantsev
In this extraordinary work of narrative reportage, Kapka Kassabova
returns to Bulgaria, from where she emigrated as a girl twenty-five
years previously, to explore the border it shares with Turkey and
Greece. When she was a child, the border zone was rumored to be an
easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall, and it swarmed
with soldiers and spies. On holidays in the "Red Riviera" on the Black
Sea, she remembers playing on the beach only miles from a bristling
electrified fence whose barbs pointed inward toward the enemy: the
citizens of the totalitarian regime.
Kassabova discovers a place that has been shaped by successive forces of
history: the Soviet and Ottoman empires, and, older still, myth and
legend. Her exquisite portraits of fire walkers, smugglers, treasure
hunters, botanists, and border guards populate the book. There are also
the ragged men and women who have walked across Turkey from Syria and
Iraq. But there seem to be nonhuman forces at work here too: This
densely forested landscape is rich with curative springs and Thracian
tombs, and the tug of the ancient world, of circular time and animism,
is never far off.
Border is a scintillating, immersive travel narrative that is also a
shadow history of the Cold War, a sideways look at the migration crisis
troubling Europe, and a deep, witchy descent into interior and exterior
geographies.
