Kapka Kassabova is an award-winning author of poetry, fiction and nonfiction, born in Bulgaria and now living in the Scottish Highlands. Her newest work of narrative nonfiction, Elixir, soars with the luminous prose and unflinching honesty we have come to expect from this brilliantly gifted writer.
Elixir is an extraordinary, profoundly moving book. The moment I finished reading it, I began again from the beginning, pausing only to order multiple copies for friends. Like Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass, Kassabova effortlessly integrates science and the sacred, addressing historical, ecological, and personal trauma with clarity, compassion, and hope. Elixir combines memoir, travel, history, ethnography, botany, philosophy, spirituality, eco-psychology, traditional Chinese medicine, and even alchemy, in a subtle, sophisticated exploration which defies categorisation.
Kassabova takes us deep into one of the least-known parts of Europe, the Mesta Valley of southern Bulgaria. In this remote place, impoverished in many ways yet rich in plant medicine and folk knowledge, she discovers ‘a long lineage of foragers, healers, and mystics’ living close to the earth in ‘a symbiotic system where nature and culture have blended for thousands of years.’
The Mesta river carves in a ‘smiling gallop’ through steeply wooded slopes where the Rila, Pirin and Rhodope mountains meet. In one of the wildest landscapes in Europe, still home to wolves and bears, Alpine pastures open up ‘in quick succession, a show the Earth had put on in an outburst of genius for its own delight.’ Here, Kassabova found, ‘Everything was still connected – peaks, people, plants. This place still had something of the old, wild kind – medicine, meaning, magic.’
In this unique ‘cultural ecosystem’, Christians, Muslims, and Roma have lived together for centuries. Elders are honoured for their practical skills and mystical wisdom, both gleaned from their intimacy with the natural world. Pilgrims come from far and wide, seeking the healers – mostly older women – whose reputations give them status and authority in the community. ‘All that we still take pride in comes from the women’, one man explains.
Many are Pomaks, indigenous Bulgarians who converted to Islam centuries ago. This religious minority has endured terrible persecution for generations, yet are barely known in the Western world. Kassabova asks, ‘How was it that these people have been a permanent part of the landscape yet remained invisible, the last unknown Europeans?’ She brings the Pomak women into crystal-clear focus, with ‘hands huge from planting, sowing, hoeing, digging, weeding, watering, harvesting, shelling, de-stoning, drying, stringing, milking, boiling, preserving, birthing, killing and cooking.’ Behind gentle voices ‘was the familiar steely note. Their power was not on display, only the fruits of their earthly work, yet behind them was the mountain. Always, the mountain.’
Kassabova’s writing is as daring and dramatic as the landscapes she paints. With constant shifts from broad strokes to fine detail, she playfully shares her delight in individual plants – such as a flower ‘that made you want to sit down beside it and forget your troubles’ – and transmits plenty of practical herbal knowledge, while always meditating on larger themes of ‘ailing and healing’.
Elixir interweaves emotional with geographical landscapes, tenderly illuminating individuals I really came to care about, against a terrifying backdrop of historical, political, and environmental calamity. Kassabova bears witness to ‘the devastating weight of the ecological and cultural disinheritance that the people of this valley have suffered,’ yet also to the fact that somehow, unbelievably, people survive. Despite war, subjugation, massacres, hardship, past totalitarianism and present kleptocracy, the Pomaks continue to care for plants, places, and people.
Kassabova writes: ‘The people of the valley are keepers of a rare knowledge, not only of mountain plants and their properties, but also of how to transform collective suffering into healing.’ Bulgaria has perhaps seen more than its share of collective suffering, but as violent ecological and economic upheaval spread everywhere, the ability to transmute tragedy into healing is a skill we all urgently need.
The Mesta Valley folk have their bitter side, but the sweet side reminds me of the peaceful, egalitarian civilisations of Neolithic Old Europe, and indeed, human settlement along the Mesta river has been continuous since early Neolithic times, ca. 6000 BCE. Although Kassabova does not explore this link directly, I can’t help seeing the life-affirming, earth-reverent, subsistence culture she describes as a living remnant of the pre-patriarchal Old European world.
My own extensive travels in Bulgaria for dance research started in 1990, right after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and through the subsequent decades of crisis which wracked the country (shatteringly portrayed in Kassabova’s earlier books, Border and Street With No Name). I’ve been through the mountains of southern Bulgaria, even up the Mesta Valley, where I bought herbs and honey from Pomak women just like those Kassabova describes – perhaps their antecedents, or perhaps the same, in this place where so many live long by keeping alive the ancient ways; where, as one local says, ‘I got the tail end of the old life and held onto it for as long as I could’.
As the author’s quest for healing leads her ever further from the beaten track, her parallel interior journey is equally intrepid. Kassabova’s lyrical language reveals the transformations effected upon her by herbs, land, and healers, in an astounding feat of personal and transpersonal exploration which stands alongside the very best travel writing.
Kassabova’s portrayal of a disappearing world can be hard to bear. Her prose is breathtaking, the stories heartbreaking. Tears sprang to my eyes continually as I read. With her ‘urgent and unforgettable call to rethink how we live—in relation to one another, to Earth, and to the cosmos’, Kassabova courageously shines light on incalculable anguish and loss, yet the triumph of her book is that she never gives up hope; she always finds, and shares, evidence of ‘the spiral dance of the earth that weaves a spell against extinction’.
This is the alchemical gold we are given from the exquisite crucible of Kassabova’s writing, as her pen distills the essence of her immersion in this world to craft an unforgettable ark of revelation and salvation. The very ink with which she writes is itself an elixir.
Elixir: In the Valley at the End of Time © 2023 by Kapka Kassabova, out now in paperback from Graywolf Press.
Kassabova’s previous award-winning books include Border, To the Lake, and Street With No Name. Visit Kapka Kassabova’s website here.
Watch this space for an excerpt from ‘Elixir’, coming on FAR later this month.
feminismandreligion.com 
wow – you convinced me – wrote down the book and will be reading it – thanks so much
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Me, too! I look forward to reading it! When you started to describe this culture, I, too, thought of those Neolithic Old European people. How wonderful to see such a culture surviving so long, giving us a living example of how to live better and more sustainably, and how tragic to learn of their history and the calamities they face.
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European history contains many threads which weave through the lives of any of us with roots in that area of the world. Bulgaria is nestled above Greece in the heart of a mountain region, and adjacent to the Black Sea. Kassabova suggests that we can have an instinctive “body-earth memory” in regard to rituals, myths and customs of our ancestors, especially if we have not been uprooted from our lands. Here is an observation she makes:
“Human culture begins in nature. That is the memory. When you live without nature, you forget. When you come to a place like this, you remember.” p.93
Kassabova, in that passage, was referring to a spot in the forest where people left items of clothing tied to the trees as part of a request for healing. She refers to such spots as “dressed-up woods” and notes that each such spot she had encountered in other countries was usually near a spring. Kassabova considers each a “place-specific pilgrimage blended with nature worship, stirred by gestures from a remote past”.
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Paula, thank you for your comment. I am so glad you have also read Elixir and that you mention Kassabova’s visit to the woods where people have tied clothing to the trees. She points out that this custom is widespread, though such places in the Balkans ‘have a faint Christian or Muslim flavour depending on who lives there at the time’, and refers to a similar place in northern Scotland, the Clootie Well of Munlochy, near where she lives. It is not far from Findhorn and I have been there several times through the years.
A couple of my previous posts on FAR talk about clootie wells and ‘wishing trees’ in Greece, Armenia, Ireland, and elsewhere, and in relation to the Goddesses Mokosh and Brighde:
‘The Dance of Memory: The Wishing Tree Part 2’: https://feminismandreligion.com/2015/05/02/the-dance-of-memory-part-2-the-wishing-tree-laura-shannon/
‘The Goddess Mokosh’: https://feminismandreligion.com/2016/02/06/the-goddess-mokosh-by-laura-shannon/
And of course, you and I and all the other Pilgrims to the Goddess who went to Crete with Carol Christ have had the experience of tying a ribbon on the ancient sacred myrtle tree at Paliani. Carol described this in her post ‘Giving Back to the Mother’: https://feminismandreligion.com/2013/11/18/giving-back-to-the-mother-by-carol-p-christ/
I love coming across these sacred trees and wells wherever I travel, and I loved reading about the one in the Mesta Valley. I wonder if it’s a living tradition in North America at all where you are?
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Thank you for posting this review. I enjoyed the same author’s earlier book Border, but this material, for me, describes – in story, description, and with humour -the complex relations of human social structures in the greater contexts of Mother Earth and the Cosmos.
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