Last care
I had a special trip that overturned many of my ideas about life. It happened in the summer of 2003, but has a history of a few months earlier. Phones weren’t that smart and popular back then, but ways to connect more publicly. There was a series of phonecards and one of them / which was “Monasteries”, but then I learned it / caught my attention. So much so that I seemed to have a deja vu. I remembered a dream from two months ago where I was at this place and even led a group of people. But I had no idea where it was … On the back of the map it said: “The 7 thrones” and so on! But where is it – in Bulgaria or Greece it was not clear. I asked for info and it sounded more and more fabulous: “The Seven Thrones Monastery is located in the Champs-Elysees, near the Eliseyna River …”



I was no longer anxious to be there, but it was still not clear where to go. Finally I realized – in the Iskar Gorge. And without reservation, because Mtel’s cell was collapsing at the time and there was no real mobile connection, so I quickly tidied up a team of two other loyal friends and left because I was no longer patient. We got off the passenger train that the locals use as public transport and our journey with a series of challenges began. We found the monastery – on a bend to the village of Osenovlak. We were greeted by a joke and as much as we tried to look it in the eyes that were throwing coals, we looked at it .. in the eyebrows. At that time, the fashion with their tattooing had not come yet, and its really ripped eyebrows and even blackish thick features, like a magnet, caught our attention. It quickly became clear to us that we had fallen into a place forgotten by God. In front of the monastery there was a closed establishment where, if there is a mood, the papadia cooks. But only for us it would not do it, let alone several times a day… We were surprised to find that there were no shops. We also learned that the main consumers are young people, as far as they are concerned, and they buy mostly bread. Old men and him do their best not to buy unnecessary things. There is no job, no people – except adults and someone else unemployed who watch for fires in the mountains. It was as if time had stopped in the 19th century. The noises were from the river, the wind and the herds of the herds. We were incredibly pleased to hear it in the distance, because we knew there would be one person to guide us. Everything was like a scenery of an old Bulgarian film, except that we were in the lead roles and there was no one to submit the script to… In the monastery we met the only other guests – a couple from Sofia, whom we immediately became friends with and even on their idea we made a sequel on the route in the region to x. Coffin.
The monastery really turned out to be special – it had 7 rooms and 7 iconostasis, there served 7 priests, under one dome and could simultaneously confess believers. There was a beautiful wood-carved chandelier in the middle, and the courtyard and setting really gave us the relaxation and privacy we had come to. Ivan Vazov even had a room here, she is still kept only to this day, there he wrote “The Rattling Beats”, and probably many other things, and the poet with the nickname Zmei Goryanin was laid in the yard of the church. I don’t know why people need to go all the way to Bali to find themselves. In places like this, you can really get great insights – about yourself, about life, about where you are and where you want to be and a number of other things. I realized that I was a big slip. Because I have so much in the background of everyone I met here, and I don’t appreciate it and suffer from what I don’t have. We passed bar after bar – for hours on end, the sun was raging and the views were just spacious. Once we met some foresters with a dirty jeep, they offered to take us out to some extent, provided that we shared some time with them – to the river, where they provided us with whatever they had. It was the most delicious cheese and coffee and the most friendly people in the world. But since noon they were warming with brandy and driving fast and sharp on the forest roads. Will we get alive, I wondered, and they laugh that no one drives here, unless it’s a can and a half …


After two hours of walking, we reached Trstenaya hut, there were three lakes, but one expired after treacherous raids. The carnival greeted us naked to the waist with his neck down from the teeth of animals – said they were his ex-wife. Well, we are warned… then he introduced us to his life philosophy in a short Chinese version of the five circles, of which the past is in this line, his ex-wife. But she was probably not there because she mentioned her anger too often. Then he showed us how to catch a ram in the lake – with a powder of vanilla, in a ball of wet bread, which he threw for a bait. For half an hour, he filled the pot … I didn’t eat more delicious fish in my life, though I hadn’t tried it before and after.

Then he rubbed some people at an impossibly steep place and told them that this was the way … and there was a less steep one, just longer. I was allowed to use the tiled bathroom, which was under construction, but the others were gone. Maybe it’s time to bounce back there. There were already new farmers. I was outraged at everything – that they were drinking that they had let cows without a shepherd on the road and that some car could hit them (and Dido apostrophe me, “Which car ?!”), and that with the money we had we were hungry. The closest one was 14 km from us, opening for two hours from 5 to 7, when people traveling on the passenger train to the Elysein train arrived, and once we went there and literally robbed it – we were buying like hungry. Not that there was much in the store, de. I really came back different from this trip and I remember all who – as if I was there yesterday, I was so impressed and so different from everyone I knew about a Varna woman like me.
So for me, something like this is more like the Camino, not the alien.
I have seen how the people we live with at the same time are actually almost two centuries ago. And I felt ashamed. Because of our politicians. That I did not know it was not as fatal as their ignorance, because the wages they receive and the gas they absorb should be because they have more responsibility and are close to their constituents, they know their problems. I’m sure things haven’t changed much. I remember that there, on the high in the defile, stood the hero of the story “Father Jozo watches”, and on the road I shot with a camera a bus station, obscure with obituaries, which was called “Last care” and was written in old Bulgarian font. movies. It was like irony. But it was not funny. And along the way there were lots of wild yellow junks that made up for the lack of a store and fruit. How much pain is there in this world…
