LG's Excellent PC Adventure

Kukeri is a celebration of Spring that is unique to Bulgaria. It traces its origins back to Thracian times and is meant to drive away the ghosts that come out in the Winter and to ensure a successful agricultural season. Traditionally, the celebration or festival takes place in the early Spring in mountain villages throughout the country. The participants are men from the village who dress in traditional Kukeri costumes and slowly parade up and down the town to the accompaniment of horns, bells and drums. For the most part Kukeri costumes consist of sheepskin pants, belts hung with cowbells and ornate masks or headpieces that can resemble anything from animals to mythical monsters. Each costume is custom made and uniquely individual. Kukeri is also an excellent time for the folk dancing troop of the village to perform and if any neighboring towns care to send their dancers, they're always welcome. So the men perform this ancient ritual and the ghosts of Winter are chased away and the crops are assured. There are three big Kukeri festivals held here, one in Pernik just outside of Sofia, another in Shiroka Luka way down south in the Rhodope Mountains and the third in Koprevshtitsa in the Sredna Gora.

I had a dentist appointment and was actually in Sofia the weekend the Pernik festival was being held. I was aware of it and knew of several PCVs who were going, but I missed it anyway. It wasn't for a lack of interest. One of the things I want to see the most here is a Kukeri festival. I just sort of ran out of steam that weekend and never made it to Pernik. So that left Shiroka Luka and Koprevshtitsa. Unfortunately, Koprevshtitsa came and went without raising a blip on my radar and I missed that one too. Shiroka Luka is the good one anyway. If you're only going to see one Kukeri festival, by all means make it the one in Shiroka Luka. It couldn't have been more perfect because the festival was being held on the national three day weekend in March.

Actually, it would have been a bit more perfect if I hadn't had the flu for two weeks. Matt and Jessie were planning to go from Stara Zagora and asked me to tag along with them. I just didn't feel like taking the four different buses that the trip to Shiroka Luka required and decided to stay home. I was finally beginning to feel better and I thought a quiet weekend at home would get me back on my feet. Then on Friday I got a call from Sara, who was visiting Brian and Kate, letting me know that they were all going to Kukeri on Sunday morning. All I had to do was catch a bus to Plovdiv and then a friend of Kate's would drive us there in her car. We'd be back in Plovdiv in time for me to catch an early bus back to SZ. It was perfect. So Saturday morning I slept late and made myself an excellent breakfast of bacon and eggs. Then I wandered down to the bus station to catch the bus to Plovdiv. I had a bit of difficulty crossing the main street here in town because there was a huge parade of men wearing sheepskin pants and cowbells. There were troops of folk dancers in wonderful costumes and traditional Bulgarian folk music echoed throughout the town. I had a bus to catch and didn't get to see much more than that. I cut in front of a large man in sheepskin pants wearing an enormous deer's head with antlers at least ten feet tall. The whole thing looked suspiciously like a Kukeri Festival, but that couldn't be because no one had mentioned that we had a really big celebration right here whenever I said that I really wanted to see one! Ten minutes later I was at the bus station and on my way to Plovdiv. I was sorry to miss the Kukeri parade in SZ but my consolation was that I was going to one of the three most famous festivals in the country.

On Sunday it turned out that we were not going to Shiroka Luka after all. Shiroka Luka is some 200 kilometers from Plovdiv and we were going to a festival that was much closer, in Pervanets. In a way this was even better because the festival in Shiroka Luka would be packed with tourists and half the Peace Corp and this smaller festival would be easier to manage and a lot closer to home. After one false start (we stopped in a town very similar to Pervanets but not actually Pervanets) we found the town, parked and took up positions on the sidewalk. We could hear the parade farther along up the street and could see the beginnings of it coming towards us. We got our cameras out and began to shoot.

Down the street they came but instead of the traditional Kukeri parade, this was a group of villagers dressed in Halloween costumes carrying enormous wooden replicas of Turkish swords. Many of them did have on the belts with cowbells and there were drums and horns, but for the most part there were small boys dressed as small girls who ran around whapping you on the back with inflated sheeps' stomachs. Everyone got whapped to some degree or another with large men, cute girls and friends seemingly taking the brunt of the whapping. This may have been to drive out evil spirits, to cleanse all and sundry of assorted sins or merely because the small boys really enjoyed having an opportunity to go around hitting strangers with inflated sheeps' stomachs. In traditional Kukeri only the men take part. The folk dance groups have women participants but Kukeri is a 'guy' thing. Pervanets, however, is much more politically correct than tradition demands and women were well represented in the rolling insanity. I exclude the group of four young men dressed a nuns, who whapped away with a somewhat religious fervor, from the ranks of women. There were real women taking part in the parade, most of whom were dressed in some form of harem attire and were shaking it to beat the band. The 'band' was one guy with a clarinet and two guys with drums. All in all the word that comes most readily to mind is 'bizarre'.

After brushing off each others coats, we bid farewell to Pervanets and the inflated inner organs of domesticated livestock. We drove a way up into the mountains and stopped at a terrific bakery out in the middle of nowhere to buy some of the best bread I've had here. That says a lot because the bread here is uniformly excellent. Then we drove back into Plovdiv and I caught the bus to Stara Zagora. I suppose in the back of my mind I was hoping that the Kukeri festival would still be going on in town when I arrived. It wasn't.

I'm hard at work now preparing a grant proposal that will help turn my agency into a ROSIO, that's a Regional One Stop Investment Office. The idea is to create one central location for collecting databases of information to assist potential foreign investors in making the decision to move here. This is basically what we do now, but on a less formal basis and we'd like to have the ability to improve our data collection capacity and to better represent the entire region. It's an important grant for us and we're putting a lot of work into it. A measure of the seriousness with which we are taking this application is the fact that it isn't due until the end of March and we've begun working on it now. Typically, we would go to panic stations a couple of days out and frantically hammer away at our keyboards until the last minute. Frantic hammering is the watchword of the day now and we'll be at it until the package is in the mail.

I have quite a number of vacation days stored up and I'm not allowed to use them after July 10th because the PC has a rule that no vacation may be taken within the last three months of service. I'm not sure why this rule exists, but it does. So, I'll begin taking my vacation time in April and won't be at work much between then and July. Then, I'll literally be on the homestretch. I COS on October 10th and will probably head for home a day or so later. Between now and then, I have to decide more or less where 'home' is. Maine, New York, Chicago, or maybe someplace sunny. I still have time to figure it all out. Right now I have to hammer away frantically or risk getting whapped with the sheep's stomach that Petya is inflating at her desk.