Kapka Kassabova reading at reading at "The Global Soul: Imagining the Cosmopolitan". Photo: slowking4/Wikimedia Commons

The Bulgarian-born writer Kapka Kassabova - whose latest travel book “Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe” has hugely impressed readers in Britain and been featured on the BBC, told BIRN that history repeats itself and the border is the place where this mirror effect is very obvious.

The author, who now lives in Scotland, spent three years roaming the obscure wilderness where the borders of Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece meet, a region rich in history, ancient cultures and mysticism, and which guards its dark secrets from the time when it also marked the border between East and West during the age of the Iron Curtain.

The result is a vivid travel memoire that brings together the powerful stories of the “border people”, including a former border guard, who used to hunt “diversionists” during the Cold War, oppressed Pomaks [а Slavic Muslim minority], refugees now fleeing Islamic State in Iraq and others – who “wear the scars of the border”.

But “Border” also tells a wider tale of the mysterious Strandzha mountain area, which spreads from the plains of Thrace to the Black Sea.