After breakfast we meet B to discuss the agenda for the day and then go to the market. On the way there I notice an old Lada so full of toilet paper that there is barely enough place for the  driver. Unfortunately it passes by too fast for a photograph. After going by a few outlying stalls we see a woman wearing a headscarf and what looks like a blue work overall standing under a hand-painted sign. We ask B to translate. She tells us it is a quotation from someone she doesn’t know called Mustapha Sharkov. It reads, ‘My fortress was always the Bulgarian nation, the Bulgarian people, my Bulgarian people’. With that, we really have arrived in new discursive territory.
In addition to claims that Orpheus came from this area, Velingrad is one of the towns that has a distinct Moslem presence and it is this presence and the possibility of making contact, through B, with some Roma families that has brought us here. L wants to make a photograph of the woman and B asks for permission. They get into conversation and the suggestion is made that B buy some butter. She does. |
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The photograph is then made, but not before the woman adjusts here headscarf, explaining that these slight alterations in how the scarf is worn are significant. Before she talked with us the roses and lace covered part of her chin. This is equivalent to asserting privacy in public. She now wants to ‘open’ her face to the camera. After a few photos B takes up the conversation again and we receive an invitation to visit her and her family in a neighbouring village the next day. In order to find her in the village all we need, she says, is her family name, Kapka, meaning ‘dewdrop’. B then tells us that in Bulgaria a drop of water is a metaphor for perfection. We already know just enough to be aware of the fact that names in this context are significant things and that, for example, Mustapha Sharkov was probably not born with that (Bulgarian) surname but with another, a Moslem one.
Having completed the arrangements we continue through the market. It’s a hot day though with a slight breeze and there is multi-coloured shade under the stall awnings. We pass a young Gypsy and B makes a quick snapshot of him. He grins, pulls out his mobile phone and makes a picture of us. Looking at the result he says something. B translates: ‘It didn’t work properly, we’re overexposed – we’re too white for his camera.’
As we cross the road I am thinking about the fact that to call someone a Gypsy here is not regarded by most of those to whom it applies as a pejorative term as it would be in Austria. In Scotland and England closely related groups are called Travellers, Gypsies, Roma, Romany Travellers and so on. Naming is a matter of power and self-determination and here in Bulgaria to ‘call somebody names’ has more significant socio-political implications. |
