Stories from Trun. A Balkan Suite

Stories from Trun is second supplemented edition.

The book A Balkan Suite is a collection of three novellas, based on legends set in chronological order, in the centuries when Bulgaria was under the rule of the Ottoman Turks. On the whole, the three novellas are an attempt to penetrate into the mindset of the peoples that inhabit the Balkan peninsular — a crossroads of religions and nations, a seething ethnic cauldron that has kindled the fire of two world wars.

The first novella puts a distinction not between “good” and “bad” people not along the line of “kindred” and “alien,” “Christians” against “Moslems,” but between common people, facing a pack of cut-throats without a trace of humanity in them. Which will prove stauncher: steel or traditions, fire or innocence?

The second novella is based on a legend, told in numerous places in the Balkans, howbeit differing in versions: a (young) man grabs on his back a lassie and tries to carry this burden on top of a steep mountain. If he is capable to reach the top, he will marry the girl; if he fails, he would lose her forever. In the novella The Infidel’s Hill the man and the young woman are of different ethnos, religion, fortune, age, life experience and social status. The only thing they have in common is love. However, their love is impossible in their time and place.

The third novella features Angelina Voevoda (chieftain) — a collective image of all Bulgarian women that took arms and became haidout chieftains to fight for their people’s freedom. This voevoda, however, is not entirely of their kind, because she has found out that serfdom and freedom are states of the spirit. That is why she battles on three different fronts — against the Turkish enslavers of the Bulgarian lands and people, against the ecclesiastical elite who submissively ignore the Greek rapacity despoiling our Bulgarian creed and spirituality, and against those Bulgarian males, who lived like animals and turned their wives into livestock.

The messages of A Balkan Suite are both timely and encompassing, because our Past is what we step upon in order to uplift ourselves and see our Future more clearly.