Христос воскресе!

As a mostly Orthodox country Bulgaria celebrated Easter last weekend and even though I'm not religious, I just couldn't say no when a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to celebrate Easter with her and her friends. Generally, there aren't any special events when it comes to celebrating Easter in Bulgaria. Usually, eggs are coloured on Holy Thursday or Saturday. People go to church on Saturday night and they walk around the church three times with lit candles. There's a saying that if your faith is strong enough, the candle won't be put out no matter how strong the wind is. After midnight and then on Easter Sunday people greet each other saying Christ has risen! Indeed he is risen! (Христос воскресе! Воистину воскресе!). After the service on Saturday night and on Easter Sunday people exchange Easter eggs and have an egg fight. Egg fight or egg tapping is a traditional Easter game. People tap Easter eggs against another egg and the unbroken egg wins. The tapping is then repeated with other eggs. The person that manages to break all other eggs without breaking his own egg, will be lucky and healthy until the next Easter. On Easter Sunday people mostly just have a special Easter lunch, but in some parts of Bulgaria celebrating Easter includes also some special festive customs. One of these parts is also Blagoevgrad Province, where I have been invited to and took part in some lovely local traditions.

Elešnica is a just little village close to Bansko (Blagoevgrad Province) with ca. 1,500 inhabitants, but every Easter locals from near-by villages are meeting here either to see or to take part in a special Easter tradition. More or less everyone in the village dresses up in national costumes and people dance traditional Bulgarian dances from one side of the village all the way up to the main square. Some people also dress up in goat-fur costumes with bells, similar to Slovenian kurent, and their job is to jump around, make a lot of noise and scare away the evil spirits. These costumes smell so bad that I'm sure the evil spirits were scared away just because of the smell. Anyway, as I was actively participating in the dancing tradition I was also dressed in a national costume and saying that I felt special is a bit of an understatement. Not only my friends, but also their relatives really made an effort to make me feel welcome and I have to say they are one of the warmest people I have ever met. Anyway, back to the dancing.

Bulgarian dances may seem easy to perform, but they sure aren't a piece of cake to learn. It can be quite tricky to catch the rhythm of the music and without the rhythm you are pretty much lost. However, for a non-Bulgarian I think I did actually quite well and hearing comments such as I'm really impressed cause you've picked up the steps so quickly and You dance like a Bulgarian felt pretty good (yes, I am boasting a bit and I am aware of the fact that these comments might have been exaggerated, but I've decided to believe they weren't). So, as mentioned, people dance through the village and when they finally get to the main square, there's still some dancing to do on the main square. As Elešnica is divided in quarters, each quarter forms its own dancing group and they compete against each other and basically, the one that dances the best, wins at the end. The dancing goes on the whole morning, until lunch, and in the end you feel quite tired. The music, which is played by a group of gypsies, gets a bit loud and the costume actually gets heavy around the waist. At such a point you try your best for the very last dance and after the winners of the day are announced, it's time to go home and have lunch. Traditionally, Bulgarians eat lamb for Easter. The last time I had lamb was some 15 years ago at my aunt's place (and I didn't really like it) and considering I'm very picky when it comes to meat, I was a bit sceptical about having lamb, but I actually loved it. Obviously prepared by a professional, this tender meat just melted in my mouth. Another traditional dish Bulgarians make for Easter is kozunak (козунак) - a kind of an Easter cake. It's basically very soft sweet bread, similar to Italian panettone. So goooood ... 

I really had great fun the whole weekend, but I was a bit dead after lunch. Quickly, my Easter weekend came to an end as I had to get back to Sofia on Sunday night. My friends took me to the bus stop, which actually wasn't an official bus stop, but sort of an unofficial one in the middle of nowhere and even though it was just around 150 km to Sofia, the bus trip took three hours. It felt good to be back in Sofia, but I'm definitely coming back to Elešnica some day. 

A little Sunday get-away

Ever since I've started working weekends seem to having had merged into one day. In comparison to the whole working week my weekends are so short as I try to do all the things I didn't have time for during the week. The majority is these things consists more or less of shopping, going out and sightseeing. As I usually go shopping on Saturdays, Sundays are the sightseeing days and last weekend I decided to get out of Sofia with a Polish friend of mine. We visited the Rila monastery. 


In 1983, the Rila monastery was put on the Unseco World Heritage list. It was founded in the 10th century and according to Unesco, it "symbolized the awareness of a Slavic identity following centuries of occupation" (http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/216; 2012-03). The monastery was built in the middle of no where, on a remote location in the Rila mountains. Today, it is one of the Bulgarian gems and a must-see for every Bulgarian and non-Bulgarian tourist. Considering it is so well-hidden, it is not exactly a piece of cake to get there if you don't have a car. We managed to get there by public transport (bus), but as everything in Bulgaria, the trip was anything but ordinary.

First, we had to get to a bus station outside of the city and in theory, one of the trams was supposed to take us directly there. However, one stop before ours the tram stopped and decided not to go further. As we found out that we are just one stop away, we sprinted to the bus stop and found the right bus. Well, it was actually a mini-bus, already completely packed. However, this didn't stop the driver to sell us the tickets and get us on the bus, but we had to stand for more than two hours. In that moment I was happy I was short as otherwise I wouldn't be able to stand straight. On a small mini-bus there isn't even a lot of space between the seats, so it felt a bit suffucating sometimes. At some point the bus driver even started smoking, but he had opened the front window a bit and I was standing far away enough not to be disturbed by the smell too much. What was slightly more disturbing was the music on the bus. The driver was namely playing old Italian songs, mostly from Toto Cutugno, such as Lasciate mi parlare, Solo noi, Serenata and Felicita and also Ci sara from Al Bano e Romina Power. Considering there were some Italian tourists on the bus, I guess the driver wanted to make them feel more comfortable and the trip more enjoyable for them, but after an hour of old-school Italian music even the "Italian part" of the bus got fed up with it and started complaining that we're in Bulgaria, not in Italy. The driver then changed the music to Serbian music and the atmosphere in the bus changed in the blink of an eye and somehow everything became more authentic. 

The two-hour bus ride finally ended when we arrived to a little village called Rila, which is 30 km away from the Rila monastery. In Rila we had a half-an-hour break and it was so lovely to get off the little bus and strech my legs a bit. Rila is a little village of 3,000 inhabitants that have got quite used to every-day tourist groups taking photos of the misspelled Pharmacy sign, the old locomotive and the view of the Rila mountain range. 

Considering the bus that took us to Rila was so small, we weren't really expecting a better bus for the Rila monastery, but Surprise surprise!, a comfy 55-seat bus was waiting for us when we finished with the Rila tourist tour. Like little children we hopped on the bus, sat down and reclined the seats. I can't remember when I had last experienced such comfort! We dozed off in a flash and woke up just before the bus arrived at the monastery a few minutes after 1 p.m.. As we only had two hours (a bit less, actually, as the bus for Sofia was leaving at 3 p.m. already), we didn't waste any time and hurried towards the monastery. 

When you enter through the main gates you get struck by the beauty of the whole complex, which consists of the residential part, where the monks live, the monastery museum and the main church. The residential part is surrounding the whole complex from all four sides and, therefore, it looks more like a fortress than a monastery. The interior of the church is decorated with pure gold and the outside of the church is full of magnificent frescoes. 

Apart from the church there was another thing that quickly caught my attention. While I was taking photos of the monastery I spotted a few people with little plastic bags full of some kind of doughnuts and round loafs of bread and it reminded me of a comment I saw on some travelling forum. The comment was about the monastery's bakery where tasty doughnuts and bread can be bought. After wandering around for a few minutes, we found the famous bakery, which actually wasn't hard to find as a crowd of people in front of the bakery and a lovely smell of fresh doughnuts undoubtedly indicated we have to stop there. We bought a loaf of bread and two doughnuts each and sat at one of the wooden tables in front of the little bread-doughnut heaven. There was even icing sugar on the tables and as I tried to sprinkle it on the doughnuts, it flew everywhere (including other people's faces) because it was so windy, but after a few tries I got the doughnuts covered with a sugary layer. I have to admit, I could probably eat five or more of these doughnuts and continue even when my stomach was full, that's how good they were. If I ever come back to the Rila monastery, I will definitely buy (and eat) more than two.

After this little break we took a look at the souvenir stands and the surroundings, but there wasn't much to see, plus it was really cold, so we decided to go back on the bus. We took one last glance at the monastery and on the bus we dug into the bread we had bought at the bakery. Oh, the joy of freshly-baked bread ... 

Getting out of Sofia just for a few hours was incredibly refreshing and battery-recharging. I'm already planning the next little excursion to Bulgarian countryside and like this one, I'm sure it's going to be pretty special.