For centuries that ancient village prospered, protected by the great sultan himself. There in this village the first nestinari danced. Bulgarians and Greeks alike, living together, speaking a language of their own. Each May, Saint Constantine descended upon the peasants like a storm, and after him, like light spring rain, merciful Saint Elena followed. Each May, for centuries on end, the nestinari built tall pyres and danced in their coals. Until, one day, the Turks burned down the village and slaughtered as many fire dancers as they could.
“Why, Grandma?” Elif had asked the hag. “Why, why!” The hag had answered, “Does the dog need a why to suck the marrow from a bone? Does the Turk need a why to slaughter the Christian? They weren’t pretty like you, my dove, the Turks back then. Back then the Turks were ugly hunchbacks with wolf teeth, thirsty for Christian blood.”
“That’s what she said.” Elif laughed and sniffed the burning joint. “Hunchbacks and with wolf teeth at that.”
The village had been torched and ruined. The nestinari nearly wiped out. Only a handful had survived, taking their icons, their holy drums into the thick oak woods. Fear not, my children, a man had cried, their leader, the vekilin. And it was this vekilin who led the survivors north through the Strandja Mountains in search of new land to call home.
“But no one would have them, my dove,” the hag told Elif. They would come to a village, ruined and in rags, their stomachs churning, their lips cracked and bloodied. The village nobles would gather at the square and the vekilin would fall before them on his knees. “Give us some land from yours,” he’d beg them. “It could be stones, thorns, nettles, we aren’t picky. Let us call it our home.” But when they saw the icons with the tails, the drums, the bags of bones these people carried — because the nestinari also transported the skulls of their dead — the villagers grew frightful. The madness of the fire dancers scared them, the grip of Saint Constantine, the wrath of the sultan, who had suddenly slaughtered the very people he’d protected for centuries on end. And this past protection too made every village angry. “Why should we help them?” the peasants fumed. “While the Turks trampled on us, these dogs were dancing. While we cried, they burst with laughter. It’s their time to weep now, and ours to be merry. You holy lepers, scurry off!”
For weeks the nestinari roamed the Strandja Mountains, until one day they reached Klisura. Even back then the village was split in half — Bulgarians on one bank of the river, Turks on the other. “Brothers, we’re perishing,” the nestinari begged. “Give us some land.” And like before, instead of land it was a curse they received.
But Saint Constantine is a merciful saint, the hag told Elif. And lo and behold the Turkish aga, ruler of Klisura, allows the vekilin to bow before him and listens to his plea. Sitting on the balcony of the konak, the aga smokes from his long chibouk, and his meaty fingers play with a rosary of red amber. He’s heard how terrified the rayas can get of these newcomers and so he wants to spite them, his little slave lambs, he wants to keep them full of fear. Besides, he’s not afraid of the sultan. He even has a bone to pick with him. “Why not?” he says to the vekilin. “I’ll give you land in the Bulgar hamlet. Build your village there if you will.”
“But the aga was a Turk,” Elif said. Her eyes had turned watery and red now, and they glistened like the pools on the shack’s roof down below us. “A Turk, like me. And therefore a wretch. Or so the hag told me. The aga, she said, couldn’t just give the infidels what they wanted without receiving some pleasure in return.”
So the aga orders his soldiers to gather up all male nestinari in the courtyard. No more than twenty — young and old, beaten from the road, barely standing on their feet. As for the women and children, the aga lines them up against the stone wall so they may watch the circus that is about to unfold. He calls for his favorite zurla player. “Do you know what a zurla is, amerikanche? Like the oboe, but cheerful and much louder. He calls for the gadulka player.” Elif made a motion with her hand, driving an invisible bow across a set of invisible strings. “The players gather, ready to play. All men back then, they wore sashes. The older folk around here still do. Ten, fifteen elbows of cloth wrapped around their waist. So the aga orders his soldiers to hold the end of each sash and pull. The sashes unwind and the men spin like tops. The zurla fills the yard with shrieking and the gadulka joins it. That’s how I imagine it at least. The poor things spin across the yard like mad, hardly able to stand on their feet as it is. The soldiers whip them with their whips. By now the children are crying, the women are screaming, and the aga, that wretched Turkish dog, stands on his balcony, laughing, throwing his own whip about, urging the soldiers to lash the men faster, harder.”
Some of the men spin left and tumble to the ground on one side of the courtyard. Some fall on the other. Half and half, more or less. “You on the left side,” the aga booms, laughing. “I’ll give you land. Keep your women, keep your children. You on the right, I have no use for you. So scurry off.”
The nestinari were split in half. But so they wouldn’t forget each other, the nestinari exchanged their icons, their bags of skulls. One group would safeguard the saints and ancestors of the other, a holy bond. They gave an oath, to reunite each May, on the feast of Saint Constantine, and dance together over the burning coals. One year in Klisura, the next in the village where the second group would settle, no matter how far away that village lay.
“Where did the rest of them settle?” I asked, and Elif shrugged.
“Across the Strandja somewhere. Some village that even today is part of Turkey. The hag told me, back then it had been Greeks who lived there, Greeks who’d taken pity on the nestinari and given them some land.”
I struggled to wrap my head around this story. An ancient village, home to the first fire dancers, part of Turkey, in which the peasants were neither fully Bulgarian nor fully Greek, but a mix of the two. And Turks in what was now Bulgaria who’d given shelter to half the refugees and chased away the others. And Greeks in what was now Turkey who’d sheltered the rest.
“As clear as springwater,” I said, and Elif asked me which spring I meant — the one that came from Turkey, or the one that was all Bulgarian? We burst out laughing and laughed too long. It could have been the smoke she blew my way.
“So did they meet?” I said. “Each year?”
“For centuries they did. The hag saw the Greeks. She traveled to their village and danced with them, back when she was still a girl. Back when Saint Constantine was kind enough to claim her. I wish you’d seen her, standing before the sickly girls. An eighty-year-old woman, bursting at the seams with jealousy. Over some saint. I wish you’d seen the longing in her eyes. I told myself, this hag and I, we are the same woman. Her breath stinks from the garlic and mine from spite. She hates the girls, I hate their parents. We both want something we’ll never have.”
“What do you want?” I said, trying my damnedest not to laugh.
“Freedom, my American friend. Not just here in the nest, but down below. I’m not free, and I want to be. You understand? And I don’t think I’ll ever be.”