SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT IN BULGARIA

‘Sinemoretz, a tiny, picture postcard, village of 400 inhabitants only 10km north of Turkey, maintains Bulgaria's most beautiful beach, nestled below a high grassy buff.’*

*Let’s Go Eastern Europe 2002 Edition.

The days in Sinemoritz are long. It is now a little after nine thirty and already an age has passed since the first stirrings of five o clock. Morning is the most wonderful time here. The sunrise can match anything the Aegean has to offer. If sufficiently awake it is well worth a visit to the beach. When the sun catches the sea on fire, when a mellow wind brushes against your cheeks, you know both that you are alive and that life holds the possibility of a certain kind of happiness.

Here you are as likely to be awoken by a crowing cock and the chuckling of chickens as by the rays of sunlight that pierce thin curtains and illuminate the quite little village with it nameless streets. Streets, if the dusty little tracks can be so dignified, that surround a barren patch of grass that for all intents and purposes marks the centre of Sinemoritz. From here each day at 7.00 clock the mini bus sets out for Bourgas, then leaves the sleepy village to its own devices. A one donkey town, surrounded by sea and the beautiful Strandza. When the wind whips up it can be fierce and unforgiving and the winters here can be severe, with ice forming on the inner walls of bungalows and unoccupied hotel rooms. But in summer it is hot, very hot, and the cool breeze is made very welcome. This is Bulgaria at its very southern tip. Just ten kilometers away you are in Turkey, effectively Europe proper ends here.

The days are long and warm and peaceful and the nights are starlit and brooding, for this is also a dark country, Thrace; much has been buried here, a place of history and shadow. Sometimes great electric storms are thrown up over northern Turkey. You hear nothing, but fabulous light shows illuminate the clouds. When this occurs with a full moon, as it did toward the end of July it is like watching the approaching end of the world.

The people here are characterized by a polite reticence and a lack of curiosity bordering on the perverse. Little English is spoken but even from those who do have a command do not expect enquiries about yourself, they are content to let you be.

July 2002.

Morning, heavy dark coffee, strong cigarettes and light wine, the fishing boats return. Out on the decking I set my book to one side, feeling now all reflection, all memory, all senses swimming in early drunken amazement at the richness of it all, simple joy at being alive and being me.

‘World is crazier and more of it than we think.’[1]

The decking starts to burn under the morning sun, under a cloudless sky the smooth sea accepts the windsurfer gliding across its sun brushed surface.

‘The drunkenness of things that are various.’[2]

I watched the elephants in Kenya in a lodge up above a watering hole, the human race suddenly vanishing, only the elephants, the gazelles and the predators, a quivering cheetah and a lion, brooding through my binocular eyes.

There are elephants in Bulgaria too, though of a different species, their presence only felt, their sad eyes watching you. Sometimes on the beach they were there, mournful as ghosts. Again sometimes I passed them on the road to Tsaravo or watched them wondering half crazed by the pumping techno music through the streets of Primorsko. Though for some reason they inhabited the airport in Bourgas in numbers. I don’t think anyone else heard the strange elephant calls, the wail of loss as I looked into the eyes of the woman I loved.

When an elephant dies it dies slowly, breathing becoming ever more shallow, a collapsing heart, shot at a distance through ignorance and the clumsy stupidity of man it eyes the world with a deep knowing sadness as it is murdered.

The elephants in Bulgaria are now extinct.

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[1] Snow Lioius McNiece

[2] Ibid