Kapka Kassabova is celebrated for her poetic accounts of rural communities dwelling at the margins of modernity, but also along a border zone in the southern extremity of her native Bulgaria. In her previous book, Elixir, her chosen people were the Muslim Pomaks of the Rhodope Mountains, with their ancient herbalist traditions. In Anima, she explores the world of transhumance pastoralists, known in Bulgarian as the Karakachan and in Greek as the Sarakatsani.
It is not so long ago that the Greek component of this extraordinary sheep-herding tribe acquired cultural cachet in this country. American and English anthropologists hurried off to study and write about them (notably J.K. Campbell in Honour, Family and Patronage, 1964). In the first quarter of his book Roumeli, Patrick Leigh Fermor described a romantic encounter with a Sarakatsani wedding party. What these writers reflected was a deep regret for the waning of nomadism in the European landscape. Kassabova catches here the dying echo of its last voices.
Transhumance may be recognised by Unesco as an intangible expression of human heritage, but it is almost entirely extinguished as a lifestyle. Even the people with whom the author resides and whose lives she describes with enormous sympathy and insight are not themselves nomads. They are largely well-educated Bulgarian ecologists, motivated to salvage a trinity of domesticated animals which have long been the foundation of the Karakachan way of life. These are an indigenous, now endangered, breed of horse; the curly-horned Karakachan sheep (which, the author suggests, may be some of the oldest genetic stock in the world); and lastly their dogs.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in