num_pages: 400
description: In this extraordinary work of narrative reportage Kapka Kassabova returns to Bulgaria from where she emigrated as a girl twenty-five years previously to explore the border it shares with Turkey and Greece. When she was a child the border zone was rumored to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall and it swarmed with soldiers and spies. On holidays in the Red Riviera on the Black Sea she remembers playing on the beach only miles from a bristling electrified fence whose barbs pointed inward toward the enemy: the citizens of the totalitarian regime.Kassabova discovers a place that has been shaped by successive forces of history: the Soviet and Ottoman empires and older still myth and legend. Her exquisite portraits of fire walkers smugglers treasure hunters botanists and border guards populate the book. There are also the ragged men and women who have walked across Turkey from Syria and Iraq. But there seem to be nonhuman forces at work here too: This densely forested landscape is rich with curative springs and Thracian tombs and the tug of the ancient world of circular time and animism is never far off.Border is a scintillating immersive travel narrative that is also a shadow history of the Cold War a sideways look at the migration crisis troubling Europe and a deep witchy descent into interior and exterior geographies.
language: English
title: Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe
publisher: Graywolf Press