Border : a journey to the edge of Europe
(Book)

When Kapka Kassabova was a Child, the border between Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey was rumored to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall, and it swarmed with soldiers and spies. She remembers playing on the beaches of the Black Sea only miles from where an electrified fence bristled, its barbs pointed inward toward the enemy: the citizens of the totalitarian regime. In this extraordinary work of narrative reportage, Kassabova returns to explore that troubled triple border and discovers a place that has been shaped by successive forces of history: the Soviet and Ottoman empires, and, older still, by myth and legend. She paints exquisitely vivid portraits of the people who live there now: fire walkers, smugglers, treasure hunters, botanists, and border guards, as well as the ragged men and women who have walked across Turkey from Syria and Iraq. But the tug of the ancient world, of circular time and animism, is never far off. Border is an immersive travel narrative that is also a shadow history of the Cold War, a sideways look at the migration crisis, and a witchy descent into both interior and exterior geographies. Book jacket.