Blog 2024 | Gary J. Kirkpatrick Art and Travel Blog

Holiday Foods of Rome, and ditching Panettones

31/12/2024 by Gary Kirkpatrick

Christmas eve dinner here in Rome: I prepared a multiple course meal. Well it was mostly me, as the spousal unit managed to sneak in some very non-Italian smoked herring and salmon. You can get both of these in the stores here these days, but that is no excuse, IMHO.

In Italy the meal is divided into courses: antipasto (before the pasta), Primo piato (first plate, meaning pasta) and Secondo, meaning seafood and meats, Contorni (vegetables) and the Dolci (desserts) and then at the end an espresso (and NOT a cappuccino, let alone one WITH the meal). For primo I made stuffed mushrooms and ricotta fritters (both family recipes), smoked salmon with grilled veg as well as polpette marino (disliked by all but one), these last two begrudgingly admitted to this course in order to humor the unit, and artichokes.

rome wine on shelf — Wine bottles in a bar in Rome

Primos: I made pasta with meatballs and gnochhi in a pistachio pesto sauce. Spaghetti and meatballs served together is an Italian-American thing, as “polpetti” is a meat item and therefore comes as a secondo. This was another compromise, in an effort to serve at least something that the younger non-Italians with us would identify as Italian and in which they might find comfort. “Enough with the surprises, already!” they seemed to be saying, though maybe I was jumping the gun, as to my great delight these are not picky eaters.

Shrimp grilled in butter and lots of garlic, and steamed mussels came next. By this time everyone was full so there were left over shrimp and mussels, and we never even got to the contorni, the vegetable side dish, in one restaurant laughingly translated as “contours.” I’d made cicoria sauteed with garlic, olives and olive oil. We skipped to the dolci, Panettone as well as Vin Santo. Vin Santo, a sweet wine, is a Rome tradition. You dip the crunchy Tozzeti alle Mandorle and chomp away. Tozzeti are called ‘biscotti’ in the US, but ‘biscotti’ is simply the Italian word for ‘biscuit’ or, better yet, ‘cookie.’ There are numerous variations of tozzeti as well as biscotti in general, but mostly just one in the US if you can find them there at all.

White and red wine accompanied the meal. The white in this photo is from the nearby Colli Albani. It is not good enough for a special meal so we opened a better one. The one in the photo and its variations are popular in Rome, sold in bottles or delivered by truck and then pumped via hose into the basement casks of the “enotecas” (wine shops). The shops in turn deliver via spigot to customers who bring their own bottles. They charge about $2.50 a liter. It is often served as the ‘vino della casa’ at restaurants for 6-10 euros a liter (a bottle is .75 liters)

local white wine — White wine from nearby Frascati

Christmas Day: Lunch with friends, people we have known since our sojourn of 1999-2000. There was prosciutto crudo and Russian salad for antipasto. Prosciutto is the Italian word for ham. It can either be cotto (cooked, that is, regular ham) or crudo, literally ‘raw,’ but actually it is salt cured for long term conservation without refrigeration. In the US people think that ‘prosciutto’ just refers to the crudo version. Russian salad, just their family tradition and not at all common, is diced potatoes, carrots, peas, and hard boiled eggs. The eggs in this case were, thankfully, sliced and laid on top, as I dislike them. A lasagna and then an Italian version of meatloaf came next. It was a fine meal, with long periods of conversation beforehand and between each course as well.

pannetone — Pannetones are a fruit cake, though nowadays there are many variations.

A few days later we went to another friend’s house for coffee. She served up some really good and not too sweet cookies she made using family recipes, as well as turron, marzipan and the ubiquitous panettone. I’d brought a panettone with me, as we had too many even after taking one to the Christmas eve dinner. I was hoping to get rid of it. We’d already had one and ‘basta!’ one was enough. I thought I was out of luck but then our friend announced she would like to take us to see her daughter. I was hoping for another opportunity. Nope. She had the rest of the panettone in tow. Mine remained hidden in my backpack.

Everyone seems to try to pan off their panettones here. I am sure that when we lived here in December of 1999 we brought panettones to friends’ houses that were the very ones they brought to ours.

Some other tidbits about eating in Italy

Bread is a big deal in Italy. You can get it in grocery stores and panificio, a bread shop. Pastries are sold in a pasticceria. Bread and pastries are not normally sold in the same shop. Whether you get bread in a grocery store (supermercato) or a panificio, you chose the bread you want from the clerk, who weighs it and applies a price sticker to the bag.

You will need a good bread knife as few places have a slicer and the breads have mighty fine crusty crusts. In addition these breads are not made with chemicals so they dry out and harden quickly, so it is best not to slice them in advance, although these days you can freeze them and they will be just fine for weeks.

Want some pizza on the run? Get slices at any of the many small shops. You order by size, they weigh and heat it up for you- they seem to love to weigh food here. You can also get veggies in some places. A tavola calda (“hot table”) has pizza (by the weight of course!) and much more, such as roasted chicken, porchetta (pork stuffed with garlic and herbs) and contorni (also by the weight). Beer, wine and soft drinks are served from a refrigerated case (not weighed, thanks goodness). These places have plenty of seating, unlike most by the slice places, and are much less expensive than a restaurant. You order at the counter and pay then and there.

pizza and cicorria — Pizza a taglio (by the weight), cicoria (bitter green loved by the Italians), polpette (meatballs). Not fancy but good!

Religiosity in Italy

27/12/202427/12/2024 by Gary Kirkpatrick

Rome is the seat of the approximately 1.2 billion Roman Catholics. Strictly speaking it’s the Vatican City State that occupies this position, but as it is surrounded by the city of Rome, it is understandable why so many meld the two.

The Pope was the head of the Papal States, comprising roughly the center third of Italy, from 756 to 1870. By 1860 most of the Papal States had been conquered by what had become known as the Kingdom of Italy in an effort termed Il Risorgimiento. At that point the Pope only controlled Lazio, the province in which Rome is located, but he lost that in 1870. He then governed only the Vatican City. This arrangement was formalized by the 1929 accord negotiated with Fascist Italy under the pugnacious and blustering Mussolini.

What remains of the Papal power is largely religious. How strong is the Pope’s religious holds over the Italian people? This is not an easy question to answer as there are multiple polls providing varying results. I estimate that roughly 75 percent of Italians are nominally Roman Catholic (RCC), with about half of them observant (attending church on a regular basis), about 10% are atheist or agnostic, 4% are non-Catholic Christians including more than 100,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses and about 50,000 Mormons, 3.5 percent Muslim, with 2 percent who are followers of other religions, including Buddhists, Jews (there are about 40,000), Hindus, Sikhs, etc.

The Pope’s celebrity gives the appearance of importance greater than his actual influence justifies, given half of the country’s Roman Catholics do not regularly participate in Church activities, such as service attendance, despite the threat of eternal damnation for failing to do so. This same group, however, when asked, largely express a belief in the Christian deity. For more information check out Religion in Italy and Pew.

Dec 24, 2024 Pope does service at St Peter's — Il Papa is about the conduct a church service at St Peter’s, December 24, 2024.

Even in Rome churches are closed for lack of attendance, allowing the Church to better manage its resources. This is in spite of the fact that aside from the four large churches in Rome, the rest of the churches in Italy are maintained by the Italian government. In some places elsewhere in Europe, the buildings are converted to secular use such as art museums or turned into paid visits.

Church maintenance is not the only form of governmental assistance. Without his other assistance the Church would probably collapse. In Italy by law 0.8% of every taxpayer’s annual payment is devoted either to an organized religions which performs social services, or to a state-funded social assistance program. The system is called the otto per mille, meaning eight for every thousand. Over €1 billion a year flows into church coffers from this source. The RCC is not alone: recipients include “…the Waldensian Church, the Assemblies of God, the Seventh Day Adventists, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, the Lutherans, the Baptists, the Greek Orthodox, along with the Italian Buddhist Union and the Italian Hindu Union.” Tax payers choose the recipients. The Catholic Church remains the most popular choice in 2024, selected by about 70 percent of those who express a preference. The government generally finishes a distant second, followed by other religious groups. See Crux Without this system, the Church would be reliant on Sunday donations, sales of paraphernalia and its businesses.

The Church owns businesses? Indeed, it does. There are Church properties such as private clinics, hotels, bed and breakfast accommodation and guest houses. The income was not taxed provided part of it was occupied by priests or nuns, or had a chapel or prayer room. This created an easy tax loophole. Then the EU took Italy to court. In March of 2023 the Court ordered the Italian government to collect taxes on Church revenue. The tax obligation mounts into the millions. The matter is ongoing but could result in a significant hit on Church coffers. See Reuters

Rome: What’s up with the 2025 Jubilee.

27/12/2024 by Gary Kirkpatrick

Rome is just a 2 hour flight from Valencia so even Ryan Air’s uncomfortable seats can be manageable. We plunked our two carry-ons in the overheads and sat with a sizable and friendly Bulgarian fellow living in Valencia somehow wedged between us. There went the manageability. He’s with his wife and children, with them to the rear of the plane although at first I thought they were hiding in the jacket he was wearing. They were heading for a short visit to the Eternal City.

We chose this holiday period to visit Rome as it’s a Jubilee year. Jubilees are always preceded by projects that hope to improve Rome’s infrastructure as well maintaining churches, statues and other works of art. It starts with the opening of “holy doors.”

A Jubilee is celebrated by the Roman Catholic Church every 25 years. For the faithful it has spiritual significance, being “A Holy Year of the forgiveness of sin, conversion and joyful celebration.” Catholic Life. In days gone by this pilgrimage came with a promised reduction in the time spent in purgatory but nowadays it is wrapped in aspirational themes.

Wondering, as I was, where the “jubilee” came from? In the Hebrew Bible, aka the Old Testament, it is a year of “emancipation and restoration.” Every 50 years you were to emancipate enslaved Hebrews, restore lands to their former owners, and not cultivate the land. Sounds like a pretty rough year unless you were an an enslaved Hebrew or had lost your land somehow, aside from the travails of the then current owner.

The first of the Roman Catholic Church jubilees occurred in 1300. At first it was celebrated every 100 years, later dropped to 50 and then 25 years, where it remains. But wait! There were ‘special jubilee years in 1983, the 1,950th anniversary of the death of Jesus, and 2015, the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second Vatican Council. There will be another in 2033, 2000 years after the death of Jesus. Nothing like a jubilee to cheer you up, I guess.

This Jubilee has various themes including 1) the world of communication (24 January) , 2) Armed Forces (8 February), 3) artists (16 February), Jubilee of Deacons (21 February), 4) Volunteering (8 March), 5) those who are ill (5 April), 6) adolescents (25 April), 7) People with disabilities (28 April), 8) workers (1 May), 9) Children (24 May), 10) Families, grandparents and elderly people (30 May), 11) sports (14 June), 12) young people (28 July), 9) migrants (5 October), 13) the poor (16 November). The jubilee is a way of highlighting causes deemed worthy of attention.

Planners anticipate that some 35 million plan to make the pilgrimage in 2026, with a million or so choosing this Christmas period. The Jubilee officially started on December 24, 2024 with the opening of the so called “Holy Doors” at St. Peter’s Basilica, and ending on January 6, 2026. There are ‘holy doors’ at all the Vatican churches in Rome and elsewhere. My favorite is the huge door at San Giovane in Laterano, being that taken from the Roman senate at the forum, which is just a short distance away.

Above: Pope Francis at St. Peter’s “Holy Door” on 12/24. He’s nearly 90 and not in the best of health.

There a number of events of note during the Jubilee. See Program Expect Concerts and exhibitions galore (the Vatican’s ‘concerts’ link is not working as of this writing).

There are numerous infrastructure projects in Rome, with a total of 115 planned. The total cost of the projects is estimated at €1.2 trillion, about $1.5 trillion USD. The city expects to recoup a significant portion of the expenditures from the additional anticipated tourist taxes. Among the projects:

Piazza_Pia_underpass_Rome_Vatican_Jubilee@2x-1553856656 — New tunnel at St Peter’s (in the background)

An €85 million infrastructure project created a new tunnel along with the pedestrianization of Piazza Pia. It now links Castel S. Angelo to Via della Conciliazione and St Peter’s Square. Trevi Fountain was just reopened to view, sparkling clean and with crowd controls limiting visitors to 400 at a time, according to a local in the know. The main Tram stop for the Vatican, Line 19, now has been cleaned up and beautified with stone pavements. San Giovanni in Laterano is currently enclosed by fencing on the front side. It is due to open on December 28, along with a host of others before year’s end, Mayor Gualtieri running about with sharpened scissors as a host of other projects come to conclusion.

At last! Our narrated video “From Amsterdam to France 2024”

05/01/202520/12/2024 by Gary Kirkpatrick

Plovdiv

22/12/202420/12/2024 by Gary Kirkpatrick

About 350,000 people live in Plovdiv making it the second largest city in Bulgaria. It was founded on the Marista River. People support themselves here on tobacco production, food processing, textiles and brewing, as well as high tech, festivals and tourism. There are six universities in this small city. It is known for its Roman era theater, still in use, and centrally located. There are old Orthodox-style churches, mosques, and a large Jewish temple. It was the European Capital of Culture in 1999 and 2019, no small honor.

We came in a van capable of seating 20, but there were fewer on this typical cold but sunny day. They waited for us on a side street near the Cathedral. We were accompanied by a guide. I’ll call him Boris. A big friendly guy, he speaks excellent, American accented English, the country’s second language, so this capability is pretty common.

Along the way Boris talked about life in the Soviet era. He told the story of his father wanting a car. He was able to accumulate the required 50% down payment. Then he waited. And waited. And waited for eleven years for the notification! When it finally arrived off he went to the official, and one and only, car dealership in the country. He’d ordered a red car. We have no red cars, they said, but here’s a green one. He could not refuse delivery without having to start the waiting period from zero. This was not unusual, our guide said. Generally consumer goods were hard to come by and the only imports allowed were from bloc countries. East German products were prized, though not by anyone in the West.

On the plus side, you could count on a job and if none were available, an income nonetheless. There are still people who prefer the communist era for its safety net. Also, while there were no real elections, government was stable. Maybe a few heads would roll now and again, but the government never fell. Nowadays the government is unstable. There are plenty of real elections, in fact, but there have been seven of them since 2021.

Once in town we walked up one of the city’s seven hills to take a look at some of the interesting architecture from the Ottoman period, something you do not find in the young (1887) city of Sofia. A mansion we passed was built by a well to do merchant. He was forced to change his name to a Turkish one and convert to Islam in order to do business.

plovdiv rich house — Plovdiv merchant’s house, closed to visitors on Mondays, so this was as close as we got

plovdiv street — Cobbled streets in the old town

Plovdiv-Sveta-Marina-Church-3001093675 — Sveta Marina Church, barely recognizable as a church

Under the Ottomans, Christian churches were allowed, but they were not permitted to look like a church but rather but to blend in with the Ottoman architecture. Mosques were subject to no such restriction. Non-Muslims paid higher taxes. These sorts of policies made the Ottomans very unpopular.

We walked to the well preserved Roman era theater in the old center. As was normal for the Romans, the theater was carved out of the hillside, so seating followed the hill’s climb. No need to erect grandstands.

roman theater — Roman theater with views of the Balkan Mountains

Nearby is the Circo Massimo, an oval race track, located beneath the area’s main drag. They have excavated only a small portion of the track, a main entrance. It was built at ground level and buried over time.

There are numerous eateries in the area, so this is where Boris dropped us off at lunch time. We saw lots of kabob shops, a contribution of the Turks, and places selling a variety of freshly baked doughy goodies like the one below. You can eat cheaply and well but you have to sit outside. Crossing back over the Circo Massimo you can find plenty or restaurants with indoor as well as outdoor seating, with plenty of people preferring the outdoors even at daytime temperatures around 5c/40f. The one we chose had a dozen salad offerings, which Bulgarians love, along with a variety of meat dishes. Lunch for two cost us around $20, payable with credit cards, almost universally accepted in the country.

hot dog in bun — Plenty to keep you going, with the usual hot dog taste

sculpture — Lots of public art, including this fine piece

Flood stories from Picanya

22/12/202417/12/2024 by Gary Kirkpatrick

It was getting dark when we boarded the Picanya metro replacement bus, but there was enough light to see the fields of cars piled 4 and 5 high in fields near Paiporta. You can still see white bits of clothing and paper scattered about, sticking onto small trees and broken branches, left there by the raging waters. Unfortunately the bus was going too fast for shooting photos. On the walk into the center of Picanya from the bus stop, this being further away from the Rambla than the center of town, there was little sign of damage other than undamaged cars had obviously been driven on muddy streets, their windshields splattered, their tires terracotta colored, the paint badly in need of a wash.

We were on our way to see the youngest children of Picanya sing seasonal songs, starting in the center of town at the Centro Cultural. They wore traditional outfits, and were accompanied guitars, bells and a dulzaina, a traditional instrument in the oboe family. I called it a ‘squeaky’ for obvious reasons- they are not easy to listen to. Once we walked out of a concert where there were twenty of them. Insufferable. But here they fit in, part of the culture.

stage 1 — At the Centro Cultural. The church was damaged and is here temporarily.

20241214_194400 — The water came up to the top step in the photo.

traditional outfits — Children in traditional garb

We went to a second location with the the children (they sang at 9), an ancient convent’s garden, then made our way with our friend M through town, first for a coffee at one of the local bars. They serve coffee, beer, wine and the like, as well as various pastries and gelato with loudly colored ice creams under glass at the entrance. Then we walked through town to M’s house across the Rambla del Rozo, the artery for the flood waters. In town you can see the high water mark at around waist level. Many structures with ground level installations, apartments and businesses, were still closed, but the bars, hairdressers etc are up and running.

As you approach the Rambla the streets slope downwards to where the pedestrian bridge once was. It’s laying on its side, replaced by a temporary pedestrian bridge installed by the army engineers. A smell of rot is in the air. Photos of volunteers and soldiers are attached to the fence. The Rambla, once lushly vegetated, including a tree from which I once pulled a few ripe figs, is now stripped of everything green and gone is the waist high wall that kept people and their cars from going over the edge and down the 10 meters or so to the bottom of the normally dry gully.

house damage 1 — Nothing at ground level is inhabitable

remains of the ped bridge Picanya — Vegetation and wall stripped away by the ferocious current

Rambla del Pozo, Picanya — The same location as it was before the flood ripped things apart

There were 11 deaths in Picanya. One was a young woman who was found between cars. Apparently she was carried there from Chiva. A young man survived after being whisked downstream from here to Paiporta, a distance of about 2 kilometers, a bit over a mile. He beat the odds, didn’t he.

We went inside M’s house. A temporary plywood doorway was installed to replace the large heavy door that the flood had ripped from its hinges. Inside on the ground floor there was a half meter/18″ of mud that relatives shoveled out. They then cleaned and disinfected everything. The ceramic wall tiles are largely intact, with just a few broken ones. The hallway was flooded to some two meters in height. The garage door was ripped off. The car was pulled out, floated to the corner, where it took a left, went a block and parallel parked!

There had been six or seven floods during the fifty plus years she’s lived in this house, but never anything like this, including the disastrous flood of 1957 that led to the re-routing of the Turia River. Without that re-rerouting, the city of Valencia would have been a major disaster area, the streets around our apartment surrounded by waist deep water and a half meter of mud, with many times the number of ruined cars.

A flood survivor’s story

12/12/202408/12/2024 by Gary Kirkpatrick

We have friends in Picanya. We saw yesterday them for the first time since the flood. I sat with ‘M,’ whose house is located on the Rambla del Poyo, the normally empty gully that serves as drainage for the hills to the west. The Rambla is about 75 meters wide by about 15 meters deep and looks quite capable of holding a substantial amount of flood water as it almost always dry except for a little trickle in the center.

On the day of the flood, October 29, her daughter ‘D’ called to say she was coming by to get her son as it was starting to hail. She was in a nearby town where she had driven with her daughter, and did not want to be out in the weather. She got to her mother’s house, retrieved the son and went home, just in time. It was not raining in Picanya.

WhatsApp Image 2024-12-07 at 10.54.30 — Door yanked off its hinges

WhatsApp Image 2024-12-07 at 10.58.05 — Pushing the mud out

flood hitting bridge in Picanya — Flood waters hitting the bridge.

WhatsApp Image 2024-12-07 at 10.57.09 — Thick mud everywhere

M was reading when she heard a whooshing sound. She thought it had started to rain. Then whooshing again. She arose to look out the front window. Horror and fright gripped her. A vast and high speed wall of water was flashing by, rising to within a meter or a meter and a half of her balcony on the main floor, about 3 meters above the street. M looked down the stairs. The water rose to the seventh step as she watched. She knew that whatever was on the ground floor would be ruined or at least mud soaked if it was still there.

Her house has three levels, ground, main and second. She climbed the stairs to the top. Relatives started to call to find out how she was: alone, still safe and dry, but trembling. In the meantime her son S was about a kilometer away at the metro station, waist deep in water. He made it out safely.

The roar of the waters subsided. When able, she descended the stairs to street level. Her large and beautiful curved top wooden door was on the floor, battered and swollen. She would not be able to use it, and a replacement would cost up to €6000, as it is hand made from high quality lumber. There are many such doors in this town. Her car had been ripped out of the garage along with the door that had been closed when the raging waters slammed it. It was down the street. The back of her house was littered with tall cane stalks, a tire and assorted stuff. Clothing and other items she and relatives stored on the ground floor were ruined, although D could not bear to part with a few things filled with memories.

A little more than a month later, after two weeks in her son’s girlfriend’s house, M is back home. The water and electricity are back. She is still boiling the water although she says the authorities say it is safe to drink. The car, a nice BMW perhaps five years old with low mileage, is a total loss. The metal gate entrance gate is still intact and working so she is safe from intruders, although when she was gone L, D’s husband, stayed there some nights while her son stayed others.

D lives close by in a 5 story apartment building, occupying a top floor flat, safe from the flood waters’ immediate effects. The apartments on the first level were flooded. One of the occupants with a child stayed with D until they were able to get to an apartment in Valencia city. There was no water as the main pump was damaged. Soldiers and fireman came to pump the water out of the basement garage. They lost whatever was stored there- typically there are storage units, called trasteros, in these garages. The elevator’s door was broken and its electrics ruined.

D is a psychologist. She owns and directs a residence for people with mental health challenges in a nearby town. She was not able to get to work. While her husband tried to save their car by removing it from the underground garage before the flood waters rose too high, at street level it was still damaged beyond repair. She rented a rental car from the train station in Valencia – how she got there I do not know – so she can now get to work. There were enough employees who lived close to the facility or who stayed in it to allow it to keep functioning. That town was also flooded but the facility remained safe enough to avoid evacuating residents. Her brother also works in the same field but in a different facility. His car is a total loss. He was able to borrow a car for a while but now is trying to find another so he can get to work.

The metro to Picanya still is out of service. Cars still sit on the tracks there.

Soldiers stayed in the day care center while working in the town. The center has now reopened. The elementary school reopened as well.

We met them yesterday at a shopping center near us. They have lost all their holiday decorations as well as clothing and other items so they drove here. While there is an over-abundance of donated items in the town from caring and generous contributors from all over, and World Central Kitchen has been fabulous, coming every day for weeks, there are still many things they need that they can not get locally.

M seems much exhausted by the ordeal. She can not summon the will to do her normal holiday meal where for years she hosted relatives. They are doing the holiday meals, and she will not have to lift a finger.

Photos and videos by M, reproduced with permission

Volunteers providing meals

05/12/2024 by Gary Kirkpatrick

We joined a hundred or so volunteers are helping at Valencia’s World Central Kitchen to provide hot meals for people in locations effected by the floods of a month ago.

They are very well organized. When we arrived, we first had to check in. I was not registered so they took my name and phone number. You can register on Telegram if you have the group link. Then we visited the assignment board. Two volunteers had a long list of activities. The cooking was already started so there were three sections for packaging the food. Then there was the delivery process, broken down by location. Each activity had the number of people needed notated with phone numbers.

At the packaging stations, there was a table set up to receive the huge paella pans. Two or three people placed portions in the sturdy containers. These were passed down to several people who installed the lids. Then people placed the containers in large gray insulated boxes. These were then placed in vans either provided by volunteers or rented by WCK.

There were no shortages of materials or labor. There was coffee for the volunteers and a bathroom that looked totally normal that had been dropped in by WCT when they arrived.

WCT was founded 2010 by Spanish American chef José Andrés to help in Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake. It has served millions of meals since then. They are sometimes located in war zones, and there have been several fatalities.

Bulgaria’s Complexities

02/12/2024 by Gary Kirkpatrick

I have long seen Bulgaria as just a small, insignificant, and now former communist country in Eastern Europe. We went there primarily because it is one of the two EU countries we had not visited. Now that I have been there, my curiosity has been aroused, and I have learned more about this country and the forces that complicate its functioning. The following complicating factors are in no particular order.

1: The United States has has just two neighbors to deal with, Canada and Mexico, and Spain has just France and Portugal, to give two examples. Many countries have similar situations. But Bulgaria is bordered by Romania to the north, Greece and Turkey to the south, North Macedonia, Serbia and Kosovo to the west. Some of these are Islamic, some Orthodox Christian, with ethnic Turk, Slav and Roma and other populations. War and natural disasters could bring waves of immigrants into Bulgaria.

2: Bulgaria is in the Balkans. Many wars have been fought in this area, most recently in the 1991 and 2001 involving the countries of the former Yugoslavia. In the First Balkan War (1912-13), Greece, Serbia, Montenegro and Bulgaria declared war on the Ottoman Empire. In the Second Balkan War (1913), Bulgaria attacked the countries it was aligned with in fighting the Ottomans! Then Romania attacked from from the north, and the Ottomans regained some of the territory they lost to Bulgaria. Going back in time we see the area conquered by the Ottomans. In the 6th to 3rd century BC, the region was a battleground for ancient Macedonians, Thracians, Persons and Celts before the arrival of the Pax Romana. The latter is recorded on Trajan’s column in Rome.

3: I have long been confused by the term ‘The Balkans,” and it’s not just me. In fact there is good reason for the confusion: the term is ambiguous. The word itself comes from the Balkan mountain range that extends through the entirety Bulgaria and into Serbia. The term “The Balkans” usually includes Albania, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Greece, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, European Turkey, oddly just the coast of Romania, and strangely most but not all of Serbia and, weirdly, large parts of Croatia but not all of it. Sometimes it includes all of Romania, Serbia and Croatia, and just the southern parts of Slovenia. Then there are references to something called the Balkan peninsula, a quasi geographical term. It adds Albania and Greece to the list. To add even further to the confusion, the Balkan Peninsula is not a peninsula, say the geographers, and even if it were, most of these countries are not on it. And in lieu of the term Balkans, some just say “Southeastern Europe.” But who knows exactly where that is?

4: Bulgaria sits precisely in the path between Turkey and the rest of Europe. The Ottomans marched to the gates of Vienna before being turned away for the final time in the 18th century. To get to Vienna the Ottomans had to have control first of all of the country we now call Bulgaria. While the Turks are now confined to its borders, Bulgaria is still are motivated to keep an eye open to its south. And the north. And the west. And the Russians. They are looking intently at what is happening in Ukraine and what the EU and the US are doing, and not doing. None of these countries can fend off Russian on its own.

5: The Bulgarians have been under foreign control since the Roman era at least, except for 68 years in the early 20th century (1878-1946) and between 1989 and the present. That just 101 years out of around 6000. Bulgaria became a principality in 1878, with full independence coming in 1908.. Ottoman control meant the suppression of Bulgarian culture. For example, churches had to look like ordinary buildings. To achieve a higher status you had to convert to Islam, which helped your tax situation as well. Many “Islamified” their names to fit in better with the predominant power. The country fell under the Russian yoke in 1946, a domination that lasted until 1989. Bloc

Given all this foreign domination and the cultural cross currents implied by its history and geography, it is no wonder that the Bulgarians find self government to be difficult. Since 2021 they just keep holding election after election when the latest coalition falls apart. The Italians have done the same since the end of WWII, the Belgians were without a government for years, France has a delicate arrangement keeping out Le Pen, so these unstable coalitions need not ruin everything, nor bring the end of democracy let alone self-rule. The bureaucrats keep things going. And no one said democracy was easy, nor perfect, just better than dictatorship and foreign domination or outright rule.

Bulgarian Traditional Folk Dance

28/11/202428/11/2024 by Gary Kirkpatrick

In days gone by we did international folk dancing with groups in Florida and Pennsylvania. I led the group in Pennsylvania for several years. Among our favorite dances were those that came from Bulgaria. While in Sofia we found a performance at a restaurant and walked the 1.8 kilometers for the performance starting at 8 pm. It was dark and pretty cold but the trip was worthwhile.

I shot the first video from our table, so there are interruptions and imperfections, but you can get a good feel for the event. Pretty good food and wine too, by the way, all for about $50. More about the Bulgarian cuisine to come. The second video is a performance of a professional group with professional filming.