Bulgaria: Simple Luxuries in the Hills

To travellers, Bulgaria retains the image of a cheap and cheerful holiday destination, with the emphasis on the cheap, writes Clive Aslet for Britain's Telegraph. Photo by Telegraph

From the Telegraph

Clive Aslet

Bulgaria has a reputation for being brash and tacky. But there's a simpler, more luxurious side, finds Clive Aslet.

Something you notice about Bulgaria is the insects. Bees drone, crickets chirrup – and you notice them, because, in the pine-clad Rhodope Mountains, there's no other sound. Well, that's not quite true: the woodpecker in the trees by the church near Villa Gella, where we were staying, produced quite a volume of drumming, and occasionally a village ancient would shout as she drove a cow into a barn. Otherwise silence. To a British visitor, it is about the greatest luxury you can get.

Insects are to be seen as well as heard. Butterflies of every hue meander across the mountain paths. Big fat grasshoppers do their best to disguise themselves as leaves. The swallows that nest under the eaves are making a feast as they dip and swoop overhead. God bless the old Communist regime, under which Bulgaria suffered for so many decades. It left the countryside untouched. Velvet dark skies can be studied at an observatory at Smolyan, the nearest town to the villa, which lies in the south of the country, near the border with Greece.

The scent of herbs rises from meadows that are spangled with wild flowers; they've never had fertiliser sprayed on them. Orchids proliferate, not just in one colour, but two: purple and yellow, side by side. I saw wild lupin, geranium, strawberry, thyme, clematis, fennel – just a handful of names among the scores of plants. Sheep nibble them, and in due course are slaughtered one at a time, as needed, on the spot. Visit quickly, before the EU gets wind of it.

Let's not be sentimental. Bulgaria hasn't altogether overcome the dismal legacy of the 20th century (and indeed the centuries of occupation that preceded it). To travellers, it retains the image of a cheap and cheerful holiday destination, with the emphasis on the cheap. Corkscrewing up the mountain roads on the way to the villa, you notice their poor state of repair, particularly when navigating hairpin bends at speed and coming face to face with a wandering donkey. The more affluent travellers to whom Bulgaria is now trying to appeal may choose to avoid all this by doing the journey by helicopter. To them, it will represent, like other things in Bulgaria, unusually good value. And from the air, the unspoilt nature of much of the scenery will be all too apparent.

Unlike in Britain, traditions don't need to be revived here – they're second nature. Where we stayed, butter was made fresh every day from creamy unpasteurised milk, taken straight from the cow. Yogurt, jam, bread, pickles, fruit juices and practically everything else we ate was home-made from local farm produce. We glowed with the health of it all: salads of tomatoes and cucumber that never taste the same in Britain, dishes that are similar to Greek cuisine but with different names (tzatziki here is tatarator), long on vegetables and robustly flavoured.

The day might start with a soup?on of fermented cabbage juice, or an elixir composed of apple vinegar, honey and salt. We could almost feel our arteries unclogging. Don't imagine, though, that the architect of this old-style cuisine is a babushka; far from it. The mother of the family that runs the villa, she is a retired biochemist who used to be responsible for water purity for most of northern Bulgaria. Women have always learnt the arts of cooking here, and the line of transmission from mother to daughter has not been broken.

The setting for her cuisine is not exactly typically Bulgarian. The Villa Gella combines log fires and pantile roofs with sophisticated interiors, steam rooms and an ayurvedic philosophy, expressed in salt that comes from the Himalayas. Respect for the old can be seen in the furniture made from beams that survived from an earlier house on this site. Due to its inaccessible mountain location, it took six years to recast the villa in a super-modern, super-luxurious style.

The result shows how far Bulgaria has moved in some areas of its tourist offering. Winter ski resorts are improving their facilities and the Small Luxury Hotels of the World group has found two properties in the country worthy of including.

This is a complex land. Sofia, which we flew to, is the capital. It only became so in the late 1870s after Bulgaria wrested de facto independence from the ailing Ottoman Empire, of which it had formed part for half a millennium. The country was aided by the Russian "Tsar Liberator" Alexander II, commemorated in an equestrian statue here. Until it was appointed as the capital of the new Bulgaria, Sofia was a provincial town of 8,000 souls. So it is not Paris.

That said, it is not unattractive. The Stalinist architects who refashioned the city in the Fifties were stuck in what now seems an unexpectedly decent classical groove. Their works include the Parliament Building (formerly the headquarters of the Bulgarian Communist Party) and a number of other grand official buildings maintained to a rather higher standard than that of the woeful apartment and factory buildings that persist from the Communist epoch. We ate lunch in a building still known as the Russian Club (really the Crimea restaurant).

Communism is only one of the tragedies to have befallen this country. In front of Sofia's Alexander Nevski cathedral, resplendent with golden domes, is a sculptural group commemorating the Battle of Kleidion in 1014. The Byzantine emperor mercifully spared the lives of the Bulgarian soldiers he had defeated, merely blinding them instead; the Bulgarian tsar died on seeing them stumbling home.

That's the Balkans for you: history's weather gauge is set permanently to disaster. "Bulgaria," explained our guide, Andrei, philosophically, "has usually made bad choices." It played a losing hand in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13; during the two world wars, it sided with Germany; then came communism. Now, although not a member of the eurozone, it finds itself in uncomfortable proximity to crisis-ridden Greece.

But don't let the catastrophes of the more recent past eclipse the riches of the civilisation that existed several millennia before Bulgaria came into being.

To the ancient world, Bulgaria was Thrace, occupied by a mysterious people who mined the earliest known gold. This they worked into the astounding treasure that is displayed, during the winter, at the national museum in Sofia and, in the summer, in Black Sea locations such as Varna. From Panagyurishte came drinking vessels of great splendour, their design incorporating the heads of women and animals, dating to around 300BC; near Pleven they excavated 26lb of gold objects that appear to be pot lids, but were surely something more princely.

It was a very old civilisation, which believed in three routes to immortality: the asceticism of hermits living in caves, frenzied partying and death in battle. To the Greeks, they appeared rather like Essex girls, getting revoltingly drunk and blinged to the earlobes. The men played dangerous games of a Russian roulette nature, sitting with nooses around their necks and seeing how quickly they could cut themselves down when their chairs were kicked away from under them. Slow reactions and they died. But hey, they became immortal.

These goings-on made the Greeks think that Thrace was the home of Dionysus, the raucous god of wine. His spirit lives on, in the vineyards which older readers will remember as the source of throat-stripping party wine, but whose vintages now win international medals. New wineries such as Terra Tangra are producing delicious, complex reds and seductive whites, using blends that include local grape varieties, alas not yet available in British off-licences.

With wine went music: Orpheus, son of the muse Calliope, whose mastery of the lyre charmed the gods themselves, is believed to have come from the Rhodope Mountains, his myth being supposedly based on the story of a real prince.

Orpheus, the story has it, studied in Egypt and the pyramid-shaped Mount Orpheus, visible from Villa Gella, recalls these student days. When he descended to Hades to retrieve his beloved wife, Eurydice, it was through a cleft in the earth known as the Devil's Throat, reached through a gorge of precipitous cliffs. A tunnel through the granite rock allows visitors to this part of the world to make their own journey to the underworld – in this case taking the form of a giant subterranean cave into the depths of which waterfalls crash and splash. The noise inside is deafening; the spirits of the ancients seem still to be with us.

Despite its violent past, Bulgaria has maintained a sense of historical continuity. In Plovdiv, the country's second city, people go happily to work around its spectacular Roman amphitheatre and colourful 19th-century merchants' houses. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church survived the Communist decades, against the odds; even the previously ruined church at Boyana, outside Sofia, has been restored and declared a Unesco World Heritage site on account of its extraordinary 13th-century frescoes.

Culturally, there is much more to explore. The folk singer Valya Balkanska, whose high-register lament was sent out into space as one of the representative achievements of the human race on the Voyager spacecraft in 1977, occasionally still gives performances – including at the Villa Gella. Elsewhere folk dancing abounds.

The charm of Bulgaria is that these joys can be arranged with a minimum of fuss, for this land of natural beauty remains beguilingly informal. Near the Devil's Throat, I stopped at a wayside stall for an impromptu honey tasting. The girl at the stall gave me little spoons, each with a different dab of honey on it – one harvested when the thyme was in blossom, another when the dandelions were out. To a jaded British palate, the simplest of things are sometimes the most luxurious.

A seven-night stay at Villa Gella (07780 009266; villagella.com) costs ?7,200 for up to 12 people. The price includes accommodation, half board and the services of a chef.

EasyJet (easyjet.com) flies to Sofia from London Gatwick and Manchester: one way from ?28.99, including taxes. Wizz Air (wizzair.com) also offers low-cost flights from London Luton to Sofia.

Clive Aslet is editor-at-large of Country Life magazine.

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