Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe

by Kapka Kassabova

History is written by the victors, they say, but it seems to me that history is written above all by those who weren’t there, which may be the same thing.

It is when we have an explanation for everything that we begin to feel reduced, plundered.

We are trapped in a prison of perception.’

‘When you have roots, the world’s your oyster. But when you don’t…’

Perhaps our species is doomed to repeat its unlearnt lessons with each cycle of history, as families do down the generations.

The border was an equaliser. No one was too exceptional to die a stupid death.

‘I was thirty, and suddenly I saw that I wasn’t living my own life. I was living some generic life already lived by millions of women.’

‘Church or mosque, it’s all the same,’ he said. ‘A place of God and silence. You have to treat it with respect.’

Settle down – the eternal instruction given by the unfree to the free, adults to kids, patriarchs to reprobates, people to dogs.

That we may all be robbed by devouring daemons disguised as policy and industry, that we may all walk down some road carrying in plastic bags our memories of forests and mountains, clean rivers and village lanes.