“When you paint Spring, do not paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots, but just paint Spring. To paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots is to paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots – it is not yet painting Spring.”
― Dōgen

Growing up, I didn’t much care for the apricot. We had a tree in my grandmother’s garden, and whereas my brother was a fiend for the crunch and sourness of the unripened fruit, I much preferred marmalade spread over freshly made flat pancakes. My relationship with the fruit only worsened when, after devouring a whole jar of kompot, I was violently sick with food poisoning. Decades passed before I was able to put one anywhere near my mouth again.

Until recently.

This region has always been the granary of the country — the zhitnitsa, from zhito, wheat — and it still is. In 1952, however, a decree of the Council of Ministers established a fruit research station up the road in the city of Silistra, and the apricot arrived here the way most things arrived in those years: by designation. Nowadays, Dobrudzha is also referred to as the capital of the apricot. Or so I am reading.

The Bulgarian for the seedling apricot — the one that came up from a stone, sourer and smaller, with a bitter kernel — is зарзала (zarzala). Among the rootstocks registered at the Silistra research station is one called Зарзала К1. The wild one is what everything else is grafted onto.

During a recent walk with Jessie in the fields on the outskirts of our town, I noticed that random apricot trees had been left unpicked, their fruit littering the ground, a sickly-sweet scent carrying on the air. All sorts of insects gorged themselves on it, and Jessie decided to rub his coat in the sticky ochre mess as well. If you can’t beat them, have dinner with them, right?

I mustered some courage (and no small amount of temerity) and began picking a single fruit from each tree that still had any clinging to its branches. I don’t recall having any expectations; my actions were mainly exploratory and driven by hunger. I didn’t think much of it at all until I started noticing not just the size and texture of the apricots, but their flavour profiles as well. What I wasn’t prepared for was the wide gamut of experiences a single kind of fruit had to offer.

To my mind, produce varied mainly by how it looked, how long it kept, and how it tasted. Well, now I also know that in the same orchard — depending on which variety was planted, and on whether a tree was grafted or simply came up from a stone — you can have fruit that at least on the outside appears near-perfect, while the flavour can still differ wildly. Every apricot on earth belongs to the same species. What separates them is which cultivar the grower chose, and what he chose it for.

My inexperienced palate picked out four distinct types (there may have been more):

• Non-sweet
• Sickly sweet
• Floral non-sweet, or plain nondescript
• Sweet with a hint of tartness

Guess which one makes the most sense to my mouth? Sweet and sour, of course. That is how I remember these suckers from my childhood. Supple flesh, nectar-sweet, ending on a high note of tart. It’s something special — if you haven’t yet tried it, have you lived at all?

This experience also prompted me to read a bit more on the matter, and in the coming weeks I’ll be reaching out to the research institute in neighbouring Silistra for comments. Why? That’s a good question. I didn’t think I cared about produce in general. Back in the UK, I knew that none of the fresh fruit and veg had decent taste — only the frozen stuff, if one is lucky enough to get a good batch, or the premium-priced heirloom items. But here, what with the abundance of arable land, the near-Mediterranean climate, and the sheer availability of agricultural equipment, seeds, and soil care, I should be able to select a few varieties, study them properly, and find something that I too could treasure someday. And not just for the sake of producing fruit, but for achieving the best damned thing short of an apricot from Damascus.

This effort also inspired me to look into classical Bulgarian literature. As it turns out, a great deal of it is in the public domain these days and ripe for creative use. I decided to try my hand at translating a short story and landed on none other than Yordan Yovkov’s “Bozhura”. Only afterwards did I notice how many fruit trees are in it.

And who knows? Mayhap I could have his entire collection of Legends of Stara Planina translated, compiled, and published with my name on it as translator. That would be nice. Or maybe I’ll leave this to the professionals after all — much respect to translators and people working on localisation projects.

Enjoy.

Bozhura

Yordan Yovkov (1880–1937)
From: Legends of the Stara Planina (Старопланински легенди, 1927)
Translated from the Bulgarian by Tsvetoslav Shalev

Source text: Йордан Йовков, Събрани съчинения в шест тома, том 2, Български писател, София, 1976 (ed. Simeon Sultanov), via chitanka.info. Yovkov’s work entered the public domain on 1 January 2008.

On “gypsy” (циганка). I have used “gypsy” throughout rather than “Roma.” The word is now widely read as a slur in English, and I have not chosen it lightly. But “Roma” entered general use in the 1970s, and putting it in the mouth of a 1920s narrator would flatten something the story depends on: Yovkov’s narration keeps Bozhura at a deliberate distance, and the modern word would lend her a sympathy the prose withholds. The alternative — leaving tsiganka untranslated — would mark her as a foreign object, which seemed to make matters worse. The discomfort of the English is, I think, close to the discomfort the original produces in a Bulgarian reader nowadays. Or at least I hope so.

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Kaluda the gypsy woman sold trifles that served her mostly as cover for her begging: white and red clay, fuller’s earth, dried cornel berries, spindles. All of this sold poorly — the women haggled, paid little, and some bought nothing at all. But the old gypsy had noticed that things went better when her daughter Bozhura was with her.

When Bozhura was little and if the weather was cold, she would shiver with her whole body, just as her mother had taught her, and the women would be moved. In actuality, beneath that pity lay hidden their astonishment that this lovely child could belong to a gypsy. But Bozhura was now a young woman. The great black eyes of the once-shivering gypsy child looked out boldly, devilishly; she had grown tall, her body slender and supple, like a wild briar in bloom. And only because of her, her laughter and her beauty, which took hold of everyone as though by spell, the women, such misers at any other time, bought Kaluda’s cheap goods and paid her handsomely. They even gave a little extra, carried away by an ache they did not want to admit to: envy.

Kaluda did well out of all this. At last she had found the key to her trade, and she wanted Bozhura to accompany her always. But Bozhura was not one to be ordered about. To ask anything of her meant to make her turn her back and do as she pleased. Especially in springtime. “Marta‘s in, we go out,” the old gypsies would say at that time, baking themselves in the sun. And Bozhura seemed to go half-wild: her eyes lit, her body did not feel the weight of her clothes — exuberant as the fruit trees, drunk on the sun, like the bees that hummed about the apple blossom. She ran around neighbouring houses, made old folks laugh, played with the children, and dragged behind her the sighs and the burning looks of the young gypsy men.

Neither pleas nor threats from Kaluda helped. A quarrel would rise, the kind to be heard only in a gypsy’s house. And if at last her mother could get through to her, it was most often by promising that they would go to hadji Valkos’ as well.

Bozhura loved going to that house. When she was little and hanging on to her mother’s skirt, she would come into the wide yard behind its high walls, and her eyes would widen; she wondered at the old box trees, at the vine arbour, at the basil pushing up between the stone flags. And when, on the eve of some feast, the whole contents of the house happened to be carried outside, then the bright dyes of the carpets and the rugs, the gold thread and the satin of the costly gowns, all that wealth would make her giddy. And still what she marvelled at the most were the pink branches of the ‘Holy Sepulchre’ willow, that wondrous tree which only hadji Valko had in his yard.

Now Bozhura came into hadji Valko’s yard cheerful and easy, and looked neither at the box trees nor at the willow. She came here for Ganaila’s sake, hadji Valko’s daughter. Her beauty, which she knew she had, made her look down on every other woman; only with Ganaila did she feel she came as an equal. Bozhura thought of her as the fairest of maidens. She wondered, only, why Ganaila took no pride in her own beauty, and seemed as if not to notice it. She worked, and yet looked languid and lazy. And without tending to herself, without asking for it, she grew lovelier by the day, plumped up, her body ripening and swelling like fruit.

It could not be said that Bozhura loved her. Bozhura didn’t love anybody and she couldn’t grow attached to anything for too long. But in Ganaila she saw everything she herself did not possess, yet wanted to have: she liked her skin, white as milk, her fair hair; she marvelled at that clean, fragrant flesh hidden away in the soft folds of the silk. And if all of it had been something that could be stolen, she would have stolen it gladly.

Sometimes she would gaze at Ganaila. She watched her fixedly and slyly, and at the same time rapt and entranced, the way a savage looks at his idol. Her eyes burned; she said nothing. Then, carefully, as though afraid of causing her pain, she would stroke her white arm, bared to the elbow, with her hard fingers and whisper:

“Look at you… white, white… how beautiful you are…”

Ganaila laughed.

But Bozhura was a gypsy, and this outpouring of genuine tenderness she did not want to go for naught: she would beg for a glass bracelet, some worn-out garment. And as her boldness grew, she would pick the finest carnation herself, and, with it in her hair, look at her reflection beside Ganaila in the window glass.

Meanwhile hadji Valkovitsa was settling up with Kaluda. And still with the scoop in her hand that she had brought the flour out with, the old woman would look at the two girls with her mild gaze, welling up from somewhere deep, and smile. Hadji Valko was also outside, tall, white-haired, grand as a king. He was overseeing the masons digging in the yard and laying red pipe — hadji Valko was building a cheshma, the one thing still wanting to his renown. And he saw what went on by the window. But apart from Ganaila he had neither a son nor a daughter, so he let her do as she liked, and at the same time watched carefully where the two gypsy women’s hands went.

One thing Bozhura could not understand. Ganaila was beautiful, but why had she been turning away, for so long now, everyone who came asking for her? Who was Ganaila waiting for, who was she hoping for?

Bozhura went up and down the entire village; she knew all the gossip, every intrigue; she knew what was being said about Ganaila, and who they meant to match her with. She gathered these secrets and took joy in them, as though they were her own. And when one day she came and told Ganaila everything, it seemed to her that she had been robbed. She would fall silent and wait to see whether Ganaila would say anything at all. But hadji Valko’s daughter remained as languid and unmoved as ever. Then the gypsy’s eyes would blaze with a terrible hatred. One thousandth part of what she had told her would have been enough to make her the fortunate one. And this white doll seemed to have in her breast not a heart but a stone!

Once, towards evening, Bozhura and her mother were coming back from the woods. From the opposite end of the village, beyond the houses, on the road that came out from behind the hill and cut across the green meadow below the coppices, two horsemen appeared. A little white cloud of smoke rose above them; a shot rang out. The horsemen seemed to glide down towards the village; two more white clouds rose above them, and the bluffs at Starcha gave back another two shots. By old custom, travellers gave word with gunshots that they were coming home.

That was all the mother and daughter thought of it, and they forgot it, tired from the road and from the heavy clay they were laden with. When they came into the village it was already dark, and the first thing they noticed was that at every gate women had come out. Kaluda walked ahead, taking no notice of the women, and if she glanced left and right it was to see whether anything had been forgotten somewhere, so that she could slip it under her apron. Some way behind her came Bozhura. Her load did not bend her at all; she stayed upright and supple as the column of a whirlwind. It was dark already, but her eyes flashed from time to time. A whole swarm of children ran after her, shouting:

“Bozhuro! Bozhuro! Give us a bozhur, Bozhuro!”

“Oh, come on!” she would call back cheerfully, not a bit cross. “Where would I get you a bozhur…”

And leaving the children to shout as much as they liked, she would stop in the dark and listen to what the women were saying. In one place she heard them naming one and the same name over — Vasilcho. In another they were talking again about this Vasilcho, running through his kin, his riches. In a third, along with Vasilcho, they named Ganaila too. Bozhura pricked up her ears.

“It’ll come to nothing!” someone was saying, and Bozhura knew her for Zhechevitsa, the one who always wore a big geranium on her kerchief and knew a great deal. “It’ll come to nothing, mark my words. As if hadji Valko, of all men, would hand his daughter to that drunkard Vasilcho!”

Bozhura’s curiosity grew. Passing from one bunch of women to the next, keeping always to the dark under the eaves, she found herself unexpectedly at Boncho’s inn. A bright yellow light spilled out of the windows and the door and split the darkness in twain. Two horsemen stood there, now lost in the dark, now stepping out into the light. Bozhura pressed herself against the wall. Which one was Vasilcho? It could not be this elderly man she was looking at now. But then in the dark a horse pranced, horseshoes rang on the cobbles, and another horseman came into the light. His horse was black, roused and slick with sweat, its heavy mane loose; he himself was a strapping young man with a fair forelock under his tilted kalpak and his chepken sleeves flying behind him. There — this was Vasilcho. He raised a large cup, drank, and what was left he poured over the horse’s mane. Bozhura heard her heart, pressed against the stones of the wall, knocking. The horses pranced again, now in the dark, now in the light, then turned and galloped away up the street. Sparks flew up from under their hooves.

Bozhura watched them go, glued to the wall. So this was who Ganaila had been waiting for, she thought, and her hatred for hadji Valko’s daughter flared up with all its force. But that same moment she remembered Zhechevitsa’s words — hadji Valko would not give his daughter to this drunkard Vasilcho. That gladdened her; she peeled herself off the wall and set off home. She wanted to sing, she wanted to run. Great stars trembled above the black roofs and seemed to smile at her. Behind her the coppices were rustling. She had heard them before. Now it was as though they were hearty men’s voices, singing…

This happened on Saturday. The next day, Sunday, like every feast day, went by with bagpipes at the dancing, with the glint of satin finery, with laughter at the cheshmas. Monday came and the village fell quiet. Only the looms clattered and the spinning wheels hummed. But early, very early, up on Brado, at the tavern, fiddles struck up. Vasilcho was drinking. And it was not hard to see why he was cheerful for show while his eyes were guilty and sad, and why, when he raised his cup, he looked towards hadji Valko’s house and stayed lost in thought. Ganaila had turned away yet another lot of matchmakers.

Sometimes the fiddles moved off from Brado, died away somewhere in the narrow lanes, rang out clear across the squares. With his chepken sleeves loose and the fiddlers walking ahead of him, Vasilcho would go past the hadji Valkos’. But their gate stayed shut, the walls were high as a fortress’s, and on the dark panes of the windows not the corner of a single curtain lifted. Vasilcho went back to the tavern.

Right beneath the upper veranda where he stood was Bozhura’s house. All day the gypsy woman hides in the shade of the fruit trees and looks through the wattle fence. Towards evening she took up the broom and set to sweeping the yard.

On the table in front of Vasilcho, among the cups of black wine, lay a heap of apples. Vasilcho took one and threw it at Bozhura. He missed; Bozhura pretended not to have noticed. Vasilcho threw a second apple and struck Bozhura on the arm; her bracelets rang and scattered on the ground. Bozhura straightened up. In vain she wanted to appear angry — she drew her brows together with an effort, with an effort drove the merry laughter out of her eyes.

“Vasilcho!” she cried. “Chelebi, you’re a gentleman. Why make sport of me? I’m a gypsy. My father makes spindles, my mother sells them…”

She turned, flung her hair back and hurried off home. Vasilcho watched how she bent and swayed in her smooth walk. And when she was gone he lifted his cup. The fiddlers struck up, and the drum boomed out loud.

From then on Vasilcho was at Brado every day, at the tavern. Some days the fiddles played for him, some days not. But he never went past hadji Valko’s house again. He stood on the upper veranda and looked always towards Bozhura’s yard.

Autumn came; few good days were left for working, and Bozhura, her father and her mother went into the woods. Her father was cutting ash for spindles and lime for troughs. Kaluda, dishevelled and ugly as a yuda, went about the rocks, disappeared into the shaded hollows and gathered healing roots. There was work for Bozhura as well. She made little flat cakes of white clay and dried them in the sun, and gathered brushwood. She grew tired of all of it, and after a while, as soon as she noticed no one was watching, she slipped away and ran.

She came out of the woods, crossed from one bank of the river to the other and set off uphill. Rocks rose in front of her and she climbed them. Up at the top she stopped and stood straight. Before her, big as a lake, Kukov pool gleamed. The sun fell on it, dividing it in two: on one side lay shadow, and there the water was green and the hollows under the bank showed dark, while from the banks downward long roots ran like black snakes. But the rock where Bozhura stood was all bathed in sunlight, the water below it was white, still and smooth as glass. It seemed to have no bottom; in it could be seen both the sky and the white clouds.

Bozhura went down, came to the very edge of the rock, crouched onto her knees and leaned over. In the water, like a mirror, her image swam up, looked at her and smiled.

Here was her secret of the last few days. Never had she seen herself so well. She had looked at herself sometimes in the windows of the hadji Valko house, but there it had seemed to her that she was black, as though smoke-blackened. Blacker, perhaps, because Ganaila stood beside her. But here she is alone. And she is beautiful. So this is what her hair is like, black as elderberries. And these eyes, and this little freckle under one of them. And she is lovelier still when she laughs. She is not white, but she is not black either. Her face is like the clay of a water jug, poured over with glaze.

She stretched out her arms with her fingers laced together; her pointed breasts, which pricked her shirt from inside, lifted; she half-closed her eyes and sighed. Then she started, came to herself and looked around. There was no one. The mountains stood blue in the distance, the field below was yellow, and in the woods her father’s axe could be heard. And sun, sun fell everywhere in rays, like rain. A heaviness came over her; she clasped her knees and stayed there on the rock, still, her head down.

Something stirred in the water. Bozhura leaned over and looked: her image swam up again, she smiled, and so did the other Bozhura in the water. Suddenly she very nearly cried out. Another image had appeared in the water, the image of Vasilcho. He was looking at her and smiling. For a minute Bozhura was confused; it seemed to her that he was coming from below, from the depths, there where the sky was blue and the white clouds could be seen. Then she turned — Vasilcho was standing behind her. She saw his eyes and understood that she should run. But a sweet warmth spread through her whole body, and her legs went weak. Vasilcho took her by the hand. She resisted, and still she went after him, wherever he led her. They hid themselves in the woods. Here and there a few branches with reddened leaves were shaking, and still showed their way.

* * *

No secrets left undiscovered for the village, and above all no secrets left for Zhechevitsa. With a big geranium in her kerchief, bobbing as she talked, she whispered to the women:

“He told Bozhura he’d come back and take her. Oh, he’ll come back all right — when my father comes back from the grave too. Said to her: ‘Wait for me, I’ll come back; only if they lead my horse back and bring my kalpak, then know they’ve killed me, and I’m not coming back.’”

And this was the talk at every gate, evening after evening. A year had gone by since Vasilcho, astride his black horse, had gone from Bozhura’s sight. A year went by and many things happened. Ganaila had married, but misfortune knocked at the door of the hadji Valko house as well. Hadji Valko died just when he had finished the cheshma he had built in his yard. Bozhura went up and down the village as before, but alone now and with a child slung on her back. She carried her shame openly and hid her sin from no one. And she believed that Vasilcho would come back.

“Simple thing! Simple thing!” the women would cry. “And you believe that drunkard will come back. He’ll come back on Kukovden!”

“He’ll come back — how should he not come back!” Bozhura answered patiently.

But sometimes this talk, this mockery they hounded her with, drove her wild.

“Bad, was he,” she would say to herself, her eyes shining like a she-wolf’s, “a drunkard, was he! That’s how I want him! Let him drink. Let him run wild. That’s how I want him! And let him beat me, let him trample me under his feet. Oh, Vasilcho, Vasilcho…”

Sometimes she remembered Ganaila, and when she went past their house she would look in through the open gates. The box trees showed dark like great balls; the vine threw its shadow over half the yard. And in the middle of the yard the cheshma showed white, hadji Valko’s new cheshma. Once she came upon father Mindo there, who, holding his spectacles steady with both hands, was spelling out the inscription on the cheshma: “THIS HERE CHESHMA OF HADJI VLAKO, SONNE OF PENOV…”

He drank from the little copper cup, and as he wiped his mouth and looked at Bozhura with less than kindly eyes, he said to her:

“You drink too, Bozhuro, drink, daughter. Drink and say: God rest hadji Vlako!”

Good or ill, when a man’s fortune moves, it moves. Not three months had passed since hadji Valko when Ganaila’s husband Radul died too. Ganaila was left a widow and drifted about the yard like a shadow, whiter still under her black headscarf.

Bozhura did not pity her. Her own grief was great, and there was no room in her heart for the sorrows of others. She listened more to what was being said around the village. And talk went round that tormented her, muddled her, swayed her this way and that as a storm wind sways a fruit tree. Once she heard that Vasilcho was coming home; but that same day she heard that Vasilcho was coming home, true enough, but that he was to marry Ganaila. And she who had heard so much talk felt this time, at the bottom of her soul, that this could come to pass.

She wanted to go to Ganaila, to throw herself on her, to tear her face, to pull out her hair, to kill her. But afterwards she would fall into despair and her strength would leave her. And without crying out, without tearing at her own hair, just as she stood, her head propped on her arm, she wept, and the tears ran down her gaunt face. What fault was it of Ganaila’s, she thought. Ganaila is a lady. Ganaila is rich, and Bozhura is a gypsy. So let Vasilcho marry her; they are a match for one another. And she will go to their house, she will stroke her white arm, her fair hair. She will lay herself down on the flagstones and kiss her feet. If only she would let her in the house, if only she would not shut the doors on her!

All night she did not sleep. And all the while it seemed to her that a horse was running on the cobbles of the street and horseshoes were ringing. In the morning she went out with her child on her back, stepping like a shadow, and did not herself know where she was going. Suddenly a high wailing, a woman’s wailing, split the village. Bozhura went cold. The wailing came from Vasilcho’s house; his mother was weeping. Bozhura’s head spun, her legs gave under her. She could barely drag herself home, and sat down by the wattle fence. Outside people went past, talking, but she understood nothing. Later, as though through sleep, she heard the deep voice of father Mindo.

“God’s work, Peno, God’s work!” the priest was saying to the sexton. “You don’t know what’s waiting for you. What is a man? A machine. It goes click and it’s broken. There, hadji Valko, his son-in-law Radul — gone. Now Vasilcho too: what with the horses, what with the drink and the talk, and… konets! There, they’ve brought his horse, brought his kalpak too. They killed him in the Dabrava. God’s work, Peno, God’s work!…”

Bozhura heard what she already knew. How long she stood like that she did not remember. Then she got up and went out of the village by the shortest way. It was early spring; the field was greening, and across from her the mountains were reddening with the sun going down. Bozhura went past the cemetery, and among the graves where candles glimmered she saw Ganaila. She was not weeping, she did not so much as stir, herself like a black cross among the black crosses. Bozhura felt neither gloating nor pity. Her pain fell deep and dulled.

She went on down towards the field. It was as though someone were leading her and she followed obediently after him. They saw her — this they remembered afterwards — out in the field by the great boulder, still with her child on her back, still on the path that winds down towards the river. And later, when the woods were darkening and the hollows filling with gloom, others had seen her sitting on the very edge of the rock above Kukov pool. She sat there, bent over, still, her arms round her knees, gazing into the dark cold waters of Kukov pool. Dusk came down; no others passed by after that to see her.

And Bozhura sat on the rock. In her mind there was no thought; before her eyes it was dark; she did not see the water, did not hear it lapping. After a while the child behind her began to cry. She started, and the grief that had lodged like a lump in her breast broke out, her tears came pouring. She wept for the first time on that terrible day. And her tears ran, and she grew lighter. And the dark before her lifted; the water grew bright, still, clear as glass. Deep, deep within it were reflected a blue sky, white clouds. And there out of those bright depths her image swam up, and beside it another — the image of Vasilcho. He is young, he is handsome, he looks at her and smiles. And calmed, happy, Bozhura fixes her eyes on that image, smiles, and leans further and further over the water…

No one saw her ever again.

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glossary

bozhur — the wild peony (Paeonia peregrina), deep red, growing wild in Bulgarian meadows. Bozhura’s name is its feminine form. The children’s chant — Give us a bozhur, Bozhuro! — asks her for the flower she is called after.

Brado, Starcha, the Dabrava, Kukov pool — local place names, given as the villagers give them: without explanation. A дъбрава is an oak wood, but Yovkov capitalises it, so it is a name rather than a description.

chelebi — Ottoman Turkish term of address, roughly sir. Marks the speaker’s social position as below the person addressed. Bozhura uses it to Vasilcho at the moment she is most drawn to him.

chepken — the chepken is a short braided jacket whose long sleeves hang free from the shoulder rather than being worn on the arm; the arm passes through a slit and the sleeves stream loose. Ottoman Turkish çepken, of the same family as the Spanish ropilla, the Hungarian mente, the Polish kontusz, and the medieval English hanging sleeve. A sleeve that cannot be used is a declaration that the wearer does not work.

cheshma — a built public drinking fountain with a spout and a basin. Constructing one was an act of charity and of self-memorial, normally inscribed with the donor’s name. English had conduit for this and lost it when piped supply removed the reason to build them; the Durham and Northumberland dialect word pant survives in street names.

hadji — here a Christian title, borne by one who has made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. It attaches permanently to the name. Lowercase throughout, following the source, where it functions as a status description rather than a name element.

konets — an archaism in Bulgarian even in 1927, meaning end; in the modern language the word means thread. Father Mindo reaches for it one syllable away from konchina, the ecclesiastical word for a death, which shares its root.

Kukovden — “Kuko’s day,” a saint’s day that does not exist. To say a thing will happen on Kukovden is to say it will never happen. It shares its name with Kukov pool.

Marta — the personification of March in Bulgarian folk belief. Marta’s in, we go out marks the first warmth of spring.

kalpak — a tall brimless cap of sheepskin worn with the fleece turned outward, usually black. Believed to protect against the evil eye as well as against cold. The object brought back as proof of Vasilcho’s death is the thing that was meant to keep him safe.

yuda — a malevolent female spirit of Bulgarian folklore, related to the samodiva. Long-haired, associated with springs, pools and whirlpools; blamed for sudden illness and for drownings. Not a reference to Judas. Kaluda is compared to one four paragraphs before Kukov pool first appears.