Prespa
We took our seats in the scented shadows of a huge, old sycamore. Our table wobbled until the restaurant's owner - "just a moment" - inserted a chock between one of its feet and the flagstones.
"Where you from?"
"Sofia," we said. "Bulgaria."
"Ah, Voulgaria." He smiled grandly and pronounced, "Kak si?"
"Mnogo dobre." I ordered the lamb shish.
Dogs looked mournfully up at the diners. The waitress typed into her phone. Screaming children ran around and around. It was the summer of 2023, evening in the village of Agios Germanos. If you hiked, as we would, up the tawny hillside to the service road, you could look over the village and its neighbors to Lake Prespa and Albania and Macedonia beyond.
Pavlina was rattled. She'd struggled to make payroll and we'd just come from her dad's house, where she'd had to avoid mentioning the disastrous business venture she'd tried with him. We'd left Maggie and Ellie with him and his second wife and I'd spent the two-hour drive from Thessaloniki to Prespa telling Pavlina that nothing bad would happen. Memories of the emergency room still fresh in her memory,* Pavlina was not reassured. Our room turned out to be in a beautiful old stone building, a treasure of architectural heritage in which it was illegal to install air conditioners.
It's always like this in the summer. I'll get to this year's crises in a minute, but let me tell you how good that lamb shish was. Nearly black from the fire, it crackled in the mouth, with pockets of melted fat and chunks of sawn-off bone to present the carnivore with challenge and opportunity. Pavlina had a veal steak - dry-aged and made from a regional breed of cow.
We were dealing with all that when an elderly man and woman walked up to us. I put down my gnawed rib and wiped a napkin across my mouth.
"Ot Balgaria li ste?" The man asked. Our conversation must have included some reference to Bulgaria, or maybe it was the maitre d's speech that had alerted them.
"Nie sme stari Balgari," he said slowly and carefully. We are old Bulgarians.
I grinned up at them. "I az sam nov Balgarin." And I'm a new Bulgarian.
English Wikipedia has this to say: "For many years, the Greek part of the Prespa Lakes region was an underpopulated, military sensitive area which required special permission for outsiders to visit. It saw fierce fighting during the Greek Civil War and much of the local population subsequently emigrated to escape endemic poverty and political strife. The region remained little developed until the 1970s, when it began to be promoted as a tourist destination."
The Old Bulgarians were two of these refugees. They told us this was their first time speaking their language in forty years.
During the Greek Civil War, they had fled the village of Orovnik to Canada, then moved again to Australia. This was their first return to the village, now renamed Karies. They seemed happy enough with their lives, looking back.
We didn't happen to have any conversations like that this year, when we went back to Prespa. We did talk again to the hotel's house-keeper, who spoke florid, high-volume Macedonian with us, the neighbors, and her son on the phone until the hotel's owner told her to cool it. Not all the Old Bulgarians have left. And as I quipped, some new ones have arrived.
We are lucky to live in a time when such things as language and ethnicity don't get in the way. The Iron Curtain once separated Bulgaria from Greece, and a civil war killed people here and drove them from their homes. Now, Pavlina and I can drive from Sofia to Prespa with only a cursory passport check. A housekeeper from Prespa can visit her grandchildren in Skopje with only a little more trouble.
Pavlina was doing better this year when we came back to Prespa. The new crop of crises, financial and domestic, were even larger, but she had learned how to handle them. Part of that technique was posting an out-of-office notification and escaping to northwestern Greece, were we could get some perspective.
I spent most of July head-down in Thracian, reading Vladimir Orel,  having coffee with Thracologists, changing, reverting, and changing again the aspiration rules in my Sound Shifts spreadsheet. But now (in August) I realized that I was using the sound shifts to keep Thracian a safe secret, a cowardice I couldn't afford since I have to start serializing this book in October. So, I started sharing my translations of Thracian, which I plan to continue here on Patreon and on Substack at a rate of one post a week. I hope you enjoy.
I also dipped my toe into the dreaded Discourse for the first time in July. I read a Substack essay with which I disagreed, realized I had a personal story to back up my opinion, talked about it with friends, and posted the result. I was apprehensive about what might happen next, but the responses my story generated, both for and against, were courteous and well-meant. The experiment was a success. Here it is: Heart Drain.
***
And I read some books this month
The Story of the Stone - by Barry Hughart
This second book in the series was missing most of the charm of the first. It tried to replace its predecessor's childish adventure with a more adult kind of fun, but the result was more than a little sleazy.
The Starship & the Canoe - by Kenneth Brower
I'm sure the author didn't intend to write an indictment of his generation. On the one hand, Bower gives us excerpts from the writing of Freeman Dyson, who spent his post-war life trying to put people in the Kuiper Belt. On the other, we get interviews with Dyson's son George, who lives in a tree and builds canoes. George Dyson had his reasons to repudiate his father, but I can't help but see his life as a waste of potential. Every time the book switched from father to son I got sad, so I put it down at around the halfway point. Perhaps Bower found some great synthesis to wrap up his book, but looking at the world around me, I don't find myself in want to a synthesis. I just want the Starship.
Let Them Look West - by Marty Phillips
This is an interesting sort of speculative fiction - an exploration of the consequences of a political movement. In it, a fictional politician makes Wyoming the center of a sort of Christian social democracy, calling members of the faith from around the country and the world to receive food and shelter in return for their labor building infrastructure and religious monuments. I don't believe such a program would actually work, but what I did believe are the characters. They're all real people, with real self-contradictions, petty grievances, vulnerabilities, and wisdom. The book is mostly conversations with these people, and that's enough. They're good conversations.
Maggie hit Ellie in the eye with a pear.