There are places that enter the heart so simply, like only real things do. Whether part of a breathless route or rediscovered after a long communication with them, we always experience them in a special manner, we charge them with feelings and a special meaning.

My place is up north, far north

A severe landscape, a rocky red coast, an endless sea and steppe – this is the Yailata, a natural and architectural reserve that keeps my dearest memories. I can always run away there with my most wonderful thoughts, but it has to be in the summer. Because it suits it best. If you know about summer, you will agree with me.

When I set out north from Kavarna together with my foreign guest, in my journey to my own little promised land, for the first time I was not being led by emotion. I was about to make my way into its desolate charm with a companion – a planned break into the private property of the heart. While sunflower fields and meadows came one after another outside the car window, I thought: Who would imagine that only 22 kilometres from the beach parties is the Edge of the Earth? You just have to follow the sunrise from the village of Kamen Bryag. When you reach the steppe – you must go straight to the horizon. Yes! Walking is the best way to reach the Edge of the Earth. This way you have the time to adjust your senses to the space and silence.

Being in such a place is a gift. The last Bulgarian steppe with its wild grass and scattered rocks is in the plain behind us; in front of us is the sea – a beauty severe and constant, with terrific cliffs, cut 40 metres down. When you take one of the paths and start discovering the signs of life, you find an explanation for the peculiar feeling that doesn’t leave you from the first to the last moment. The air seems to be crammed with presence, the silence is crowded, because there were people here as early as in 5000 B.C. In the Eneolithic era they used to inhabit a cave city of over 101 niches in the vertical rocks. Later the Getae, “the manliest and the justest among all Thracians” according to Herodotus, have dug their sun temple here, the proto Bulgarians carved runes and a sacred symbol, and the Christian hermits marked the spot with a cross and an icon. In the haze, amidst the high grass we come across family tombs and sacrificial rocks from an ancient Sarmatian village (2-5th C.)

There is something mystical in the Yailata

As though time doesn’t run in its usual direction but is torn to pieces and scattered about the plateau. No wonder that completely real paths lead to the material clues of different epochs and cultures – traces of nomadic tribes, an early Byzantine fortress of 2-4th c. with partially preserved buildings and grape-presses made of stone. What we couldn’t see, we could imagine – Paeonia latifolia, Parapholis incurva and Adonis wolgensis, plovers, olive-tree warbler, stone-curlews… I noticed how the new guest at the Yailata meticulously collected details with his camera. Obviously, in the reserve with its 90 hectares, natural surprises and ancient past everyone makes a discovery of their own. Strong and real, this land is provoking and humbling. Before taking home another memory from here, I realized that Yailata belongs to me just as much as it belongs to anyone sensitive enough to understand it. This has something beautifully binding to it, doesn’t it?

The sun was halfway through its daily journey, when still emotionally bound with the Yailata, we went to see another place, which evokes other feelings and is completely different as a view.
We travelled toward the Bolata, a sheltered gulf in the delta of a swampy river – an almost unknown temptation for the connoisseurs of the authentic and preserved nature. Bolata is part of a little-known reserve inhabited by about 150 species of water-loving birds - herons, goosanders, moorhens, little bitterns, kingfishers, ducks… If you choose to spend your holidays in seclusion, a summer amidst the natural charm of a coast, untouched by the aggressive claims of the modern world, the Bolata is amazingly suitable.

By a winding path among the holes-covered walls of the canyon, we descended to the reeds. They were hiding the gulf – beautiful, truly beautiful, just like the Yailata, but so different! Here you face a tamed, almost still sea with a yellow sand line, with red rocks, their ends somewhat naively pink in the early evening hour. A melancholic landscape in mild colours and soft light that lure and caress the eyes – this is my impression of the Bolata from the short time we could admire it. We were in a hurry. We wanted to catch the sunset above Cape Kaliakra. I admit that sunsets are my favourite destination.

The sunset above Kaliakra is really special because it is adorned with birds

Red-backed shrike, isabelline wheatear in the steppe, shags, alpine swifts near the cliffs, rare rose-coloured starlings, pied wheatears, calandra larks and short-toed larks add unique charm to this place. It is on the air- highway Via Pontica, by which the birds embark on their epical seasonal journeys. Imagine a sky with thousands of white storks, pelicans, cranes – a glorious triumph of one of the eternal miracles, migration.

Because of the big and small miracles Kaliakra holds, it was proclaimed a natural and archaeological reserve – the only one in Bulgaria covering water territory. It comprises a significant part of the vastest Bulgarian steppe and the habitats of over 240 rare and endangered species, plants and animals. By the end of the 1970s the coastal cliffs were inhabited by the monk seal, which is endangered on a world scale.

The Legends

Numerous and multifarious like the birds here are the legends about Kaliakra. In honour of the first one we heard, very popular and somehow emblematic for the region and its ways, there is a stone obelisk – the Gate of the 40 Virgins. As they didn’t want to fall in the hands of the Ottoman enslavers, and wanted to keep their honour and their faith inviolated, forty Bulgarian girls plaited their strong young hair together and tied to each other they jumped in the dark abyss of the sea. They turned into seals and swans and their spirits are still haunting the place. Another legend has it that St. Nicholas, the patron of all sailors, was fleeing from the Turks, and God, wanting to help him, created more and more land beneath his feet. This is how Cape Kaliakra was born – the legend says – rocky land, beautifully protruding in the sea. The saint was nevertheless captured and now a slam chapel stands on that spot. In ancient times they used to keep there a miraculous icon of the Holy Mother of God Odygitria. Every night the lighthouse keeper used to light a candle before the icon to make the way of those sailing in the sea brighter. Narrow steps wind down from the chapel to a semicircular stone alcove, where – at 70 metres above the waves, reefs and underwater caves – the winds meet…

Ancient geographer Strabo says that king Lysimachus, one of Alexander the Great’s close generals, hid his loot in the rocky niches near Kaliakra. History never confirmed it but some people think that Lysimachus, who was fleeing and wanted to find refuge in Kaliakra, died in a storm and his whole fleet sank. The local fishermen say that ever since the rising tide brings golden coins ashore…

If you look from the sea – from the place where the girls have allegedly jumped, from the place where the prayers to the Odygitria used to come, and where Lysimachus has left his treasure forever – Kaliakra looks like a blazing sword, cutting through the sea. Whether you will believe that the rocks are red because they have absorbed the blood of the defenders of an ancient fortress, or you will soberly agree that this is due to the iron oxides in the rock composition, it doesn’t really matter. Kaliakra will remain the Beautiful Cape anyway.

The time we spent in the holiday village of Rusalka, built in the Taukliman natural reserve, went fast and with just one landscape – a secluded beach, a small island near the shore where birds trustfully alight.
Later we variegated our day visiting the first private plantation for cultivation of shelled molluscs in Bulgaria. It is nearby, in the Dalboka area, and yields high-class production. A summer afternoon on the open terrace in a restaurant at the seashore, where you hear the sound of the waves, a good kitchen and the company of a person you are getting to know – this is more than enough to guarantee a good mood. Our journey in the north Bulgarian Black Sea coast was coming to an end. As souvenirs we took views, captured with the soul, and settled impressions. The real final of our journey however was the dance party on the beach of Kavarna. After all, we were

In the Rock Capital of Bulgaria

And the merry noise and a bit of exaltation befit the summer – parades of the joy of life. If you know about summer, you will agree with me.

Radoslava Delieva
The photographs are provided by Kavarna Municipality