Articles:

Memories

Green forested mountains and blooming meadows blanketed by mist and dew greet the morning sun that bathes the land in its golden rays.  The smell of wildflowers and orchards in bloom carpet the land with colors of rainbow.  Each branch flower and sheath of grass sways in dance to the gentle summer breeze that bisects the land.  Rivers run their course; the headwaters here began.  They foam and froth from the earth to caress the land cool crisp springs flow and churn from hill and dale to forest floor, and field to give life to all they meet.  Wind around crags and snags, winding downward mountain passes, here and there they pool together spreading their flow to let beast, fowl, and men from their body drink their fill.  They are cold but not cruel, they are the source of life that waters all that kindles this paradise.  They are the pure waters that kindle life of the many streams.  They heave their bodies and in motion traverse their course to feed the river Leika, that is the heart of T’rsye winding its path to empty into Solounski bay.

 

From the breast of her bosom of Leika, her waters we drink, from her and her tributaries in grandeur rise.  The forest and beasts she makes abundant for she is the source of life to man and beast and to all that is life.  Clear crystal waters gush from the ground, foaming, emerging and merging in the form of rivulets, streams, and rivers.  They are pure, unspoiled and undefiled.  They are the essence of life.  They give succor to the forest, to bush, to field, to grass to man and beast and forge forward, with grace.  They are the givers to life, sustenance to the people, they are the litany of nature and the sustenance of all life.  In the valley and the mountains people herd their flocks of cattle and sheep for a chance to diet on grasses green in the abundance resources of the land.  The drover knows his herd.  He takes them to the green.  The dreary pastures are confident.  Golden fruit, taste of nature, fragrant rose, sweet and pungent to the sense.

 

This is T’rsye, a town located in the hinterland of Macedonia, the village proudly surrounded by mountains, hales and dales, valley, forests and swamp, yet unspoiled and undefined by the acts of man.  Nature and men evolving together.  Fiercely proud of their town and of their Macedonian Bulgarian heritage, they are a robust and tall, sun baked by sun and wind and hardened by their toils, they were born and bred are a hardy lot.  Never from them a whimper or complain, they faced life as it came.  They lived by their wits and lived life to its fullest ravaged by the elements, by toil and time, they are browned and hardened.

 

To capitulate with grace as you gaze upon the grace of fields in gentle sway.  Fields of strawberry with scrambling blackberries, raspberries, blackthorn and cherry.  Fruits of apple, pear spread their foliage of exquisite beauty.  Nut trees loom.  Coniferous, fruit, nut.  Flowers with tassels and green shoots sprouts among the havens of grass at river edge.  Smooth rich green leaves flecked some, others not, silver hairy, picturesque.  The meadow, forest, pasture and hayfield.  The superb beauty of the land is only surpassed by the splendid shrub and mountain Laurer cluster of tiny balls as honeybees and butterfly stoop to sip the blossoms honey.  With prolific blossoms of fruit trees, flowering shrubs and scented flowers, the shade and solitude of the forest comes alive.  Wild roses crowned with thorns are reigning beauties that brave the dangers of rocky hillsides.  Orange blossoms lend a touch to any bride.

 

You wander through orchards in inspiring awe in their fragrant bloom of delicate beauty, inhaling the fragrance of the bloom.  Your eyes feast on fruit and flower as in fields, valleys, rivers, nooks and crannies are carpeted with flowers of heavenly pinks, rose, reds, hues of blue, sunset yellows, reds, whites, sweet orange and yellows blossom with nectar sweet to the taste tend to ecstasy as they perfume the land with their fragrance.  The silence of the night is broken, birds soar the skies, fear rumbles in the forest wallows in the field of corn.  As the wolf’s howl at the moon.

 

The north wind creeps upon the heartland.  With biting cold blast of seeing cold forges forward its icy grip.  As summer heat warms, its hot arid blast, the cool breeze autumn overstates the land, only to befall to winter.  As all good things, all must come to pass, so true is this with the seasons.  Spring brings in life, summer nurtures, autumn reaps its harvest, and winter.  What of winter? Winter through the passing of the old, but with it brings in the new.  The icy winds of the north do blow.  Their breath creeps as death upon the village and white snow blankets the land, envelopes and covers it.

 

We are the highland clan, a people born of myth and folklore.  Little is known of us; little is written and remains a mystery to the outside world.  We are born of the highland, bred and raised in the bounty of the forest and preserved by trait, the girth of majestic mountains, and sustenance by the forest.  Majestic they are as they rise to the sky and cloaked by a mantle of green forest.  They are the givers of life, for mother earth has seen fit to choose the highland to give birth to the rivers, be the keepers of creatures of the forest, the woodland, and the grassland the sentinels that cover the hill and dale.  To the people of T’rsye this is their world.  A world lost in time and unaffected by man’s ordering of nature here man and nature walk hand in hand, not over dominates the other but both sustain and preserve each other.

 

The land is now devoid of human habitation.  It is slowly reclaiming back in its bosom what was it to keep.  This was not always so.  Let us go back to a time when this land of our heritage and ancestry teemed with life, where the sounds of humanity echoed through the glade of the forest which gleamed with the glistening ray of the sun, to the glen whose streams glide and guile as they journey hither and hither through thick lush dark forests and of the wood that blankets the land and whose boughs dance to the gust of wind, swaying to the tune of the season.  To the grassland that stay always green and gather the dew from the morning mist and gently rolls with the cascading winds.  To the mountains that rise to meet the morning mists, these are sentinels that keep hidden, this space in perpetual time, that protect the bounty of the wilds, the beasts, the grassland, the forests and gives sustenance, life, and meaning to that that is part of nature that dwells in its domain.

 

To an era when day was measured by the rise of the sun that sets above the peaks of the east, to the sound of the crowing of the rooster, becoming all to arise to a new day as the rays of the suns magnificence bathes the land with its golden halo, passing time as it arches above the clear, crisp blue azure skies, moving ever so slowly toward the sunset far to the west, a sign that the day’s activities are to come to an end as it disappears over the western rise.  This is not the end of the day, for then follows the night, the time before the dusk, the dusk before the dawn, always the day, always the night, from time memorial in perpetual motion.  It is now the time of the crescent moon and the full moon, ochre red to golden yellow, would as if by magical prowess appear in the night skies bathing a swath of light across the dark terrain and always adorned by a halo of translucent stars that twinkle as if dancing a minuet around the bride.  Both star and moon give notice to the beast of the forests and to awake the night hunters to howl their songs to the winds.

This is perpetual life adorned with the call of the wild batted with the glory of forest, river, valley, glen and fauna.  This is nature at its best, it is the home thatch of man, the playground of the beasts, the domain of life, the essence of all.  This world by nature is a heritage to all living things.  It is also the domain of men.  This is the home of our people – The T’rsyani.  This is the story of our people, our land, our heritage our tradition, our culture, our hopes, our destiny and our life preserved.  From time immortal passed, through ancestry, through divine intervention and natural selection to be what we are – T’rsyani of T’rsye

 

The forest stiff and bare, choked by winter drifts of snow now spurt out buds to renew their ritual of welcome.  Green grasses mined under flattened penetrate this winter cover to carpet the land and bring abundance to insect life and a sanctuary to many.  Flowering plants rise a brisk as they dance in the cool breezes of spring.  There is life everywhere, the crickets chirp their mating call in fields that flower.  Frog croak there as is their demeanor by the riverbank.  Here and there, one after another busy themselves, laying claim to domains left unclaimed.  Every insect, every fowl and every animal blend together and give a vibrant cheer that life out of desolation had returned.  Their coats of fur, plumage, armor and skin are a spectrum of color.  Some take to the skies, to the trees, to the bush and to all manner of abode that is borne out of instinct.  There remains not an inch of earth left unclaimed.  All manner of things is created as they build, create and go about their business.  They are a community, members of a prehistoric past, that thrive, hunt and are hunted but yet survive to build a new, day after day, year after year, age after age.  They are the life and hope of the land, a recipe of survival.  They are the pollinator of flowers, the caretakers of the forest, the controllers of disease, the givers of life, the sustenance for others to survive, they are all that and more.  This is the act form of nature that remains unappreciated when it is in abundance and is lamented by all when is lost.  This paradise of wildlife is part of our home, our chattel, our gift that governs our way of life.  Their destiny is our destiny, for their abundance, they help seed the ground, nurture it and grows.  For each has a job to execute and interact together to bring about the fruits of life.  Without them the land becomes desolate, dark and forbidding, a moonscape where nothing grows and nothing ever will, but they are there and every year these caretakers of nature renew life in the spring.  This in nature at its best and we T’rsyani in this solitude of inhibited spirit of life and unbridled joy joined our way of life to theirs.  We shared a common trait, we lived in nature and with nature.  We follow the natural law of survival that make the people strong but compassionate, desirous but understanding, happy but considerate and they formed our attitude and our way of life.  We learned to thrive in natures wonder.  We bordered on the civilized world but kept our natural instinct intact.  We relied on the land to sustain us and our basic need and learned the secrets of the land.  We were self-sufficient, we learned to create our implements from natures gifts, our medicine from its herbs, our food from its land, our clothes from its domesticated animals, our colors from the plants that pocked the land, our dwellings from the heart of the land, our warmth from the abundant wood and much more than what we now can imagine.  This was our shanrala.  We named each place by its character, by the things we loved and by the things we thought all to important.  We were T’rsyani and it is a fact that a person could be anywhere in the area of the range of T’rsye and a name of a rock, a tree, a place, a rivulet a mountain can be given and all and every T’rsyanets could locate the person by its name.  This was familiarity and boundaries, fields, and areas were the means by which people identified what was his, what was hers and where was the community land.  There could be no deception for everyone knew what belonged to whom and they respected their ancestral claims and never contested a claim.  Deeds were hardly used and T’rsyani based ownership by ancestral deed of land, that as passed on from father to son, from family to family, from generation to generation.  They were happy then, they created what they need and bought only the trinkets of the civilized world when the world around them changed and could offer them respite.  From labor, otherwise, life remained unchanged for untold generations.  Their culture, their beliefs, their dress an ideology remained unperturbed by the changes that were to shape the world.  They knew that the world was changing, accepted the change but kept their old ways until they could no more.  But that is in the present, let us go back to the time of our grandparents and in the times before them when family, loyalty, honor, respect and all that was of value was part of the way of life.  This is the time we must remember because we must understand them that we may understand ourselves and why we are the way we are today, what our future is to be and where we are headed.  It must be remembered that they, our ancestors are not foreign to us, but it is only safe to say that we would be foreign to them.  We, the younger generation have forgotten a way of life that was held highly esteemed and those that can remember are now old becoming fewer and fewer, maybe lamenting the passing of a way of life, but unable to pass onto us their experience, their history, their culture and their way of life.

There is a delicate balance between life and death.  The people acknowledged such when a babe was born was a time to glorify the family.  In death they mourn and wail to grieve the passing of a brethren, and kinsmen.  They lived between despair and ecstasy.  They accepted life and death as the will of God.  They accepted death as a reflection of infinity.  From the myriad of deep despair in the belief in the prophetic saying “it was written” without such a belief and in the existence of an almighty life, life would seem meaningless and without value.  To exist in those reckless times when life was at best cruel, and fraught with hunger, the people needed to be of a strong constitution.  In the midst of life, death was prevalent.  When death came, it came with a vengeance and not always did it take the old.  Who knew their maker to be near?  It took the young through disease, the mother at the birth of a breach baby, the young lad cut down by the implements of war, everyone when famine gripped the land and nature took its toll in ways that are least expected, cruel diseases struck young and old as epidemic swept the land and natures wrath took the weak and spawned the strong.

The land now lay silent.  No human voice breaks the stillness of the night, no hoe tills its soil, no man reaps the abundance of the fields.  There are no tears of joy to wet the land, no tears of woe fall no more on this sacred ground.  This was not always so.  This place was once peopled and made alive with the clamor of feet and the voice of man.  Desolate it is not, it is now the realm of the beasts of the wild.  The land is blanketed in majestic splendor as it is reclaimed by nature and home to all that were there before man intruded into their domain.  It cradles the graves of our fathers, our mothers, and that of our ancestry.  To us it is alive in our thoughts and memories.

 

This was our ancestral home, and we hold its memory dear to our hearts.  We are here, in a faraway land.  Our homeland is there where it always was, where it always be.  Its essence is embedded deep into our soul and branded into our conscious mind.  We are far yet we bear its name and carry this essence to our grave – we are the Trsyani of T’rsye.  One day this will dissolve itself from our nature and from our living memory, but today is not the day and what tomorrow will bring is not for us to say.  We can only say we remember, we saw, we partook in its vibrancy, supped of its abundance, lay in its domain upon our birth and stayed in its bosom in our passing in eternal bliss.  With it we saw the best of times and the worst of times.  We danced in merriment and cried tears of woe, but always it brought to us a new day and renewed hope for the future.  It was always ours and we were hers.  When we left, we held our sorrow, but the land cried as rivers swelled and trees swayed as in mourning at our departure.  In its pain the land slowly blanketed all the land with natures best to keep our existence a secure one that not any disturb those interred in its bosom, those that are in deep sleep for all time.

 

The land will keep and wait the day that the children of those that were may one day return, to come back and reclaim the heritage that is theirs through us their bygone ancestry.  It now waits patiently in the hope that T’rsye may once again become part of the whole.  That is not for us to say, it is the thought for the future generations of T’rsyani living in Macedonia.  Today let us dwell on the past and the present and give tribute to our existence and that of our hometown to leave a testament of it to our children and the generations thereafter.  This story like others is melded from the minds of those now forgotten, they remembered in the fabric of space and time of the part in the history of life.  That past today creates the present that becomes a bygone era when recreated as the present of each generation.

 

The past has many faces, this is but one.  It is delivered from the veil of the mist of time, a time forgotten to those in the present and for those yet to be born but is entrenched in the memories of those that are in the here and now.  I am him, you are her, they are them, for we will all become the past, yet create the present and propagate the future.  This story is but a flicker of memory in a long struggle for identity to be what we are, to affirm the past through our ancestry and by association.  Ancestry is but a passage of time of ones being, passed on from generation to generation, on and on throughout the ages if unwritten it is to be lost in the myriad mists of time.  If written it will be remembered for a time, but never everlasting.  But lest it be lost those that possess the knowledge may in the least pass on the lineage to the following generation.  Even though faceless the past remains it is recreated in the image of our souls and imbedded in the seed of life that is passed on from generation to generation to give sustenance to our spirit to be what was passed on to us individually.  We cannot reincarnate the past of those before us but have the ability to remember it and those that passage of time has returned back to the land and to dust.  When written it is preserved, and gives meaning to our existence, to understand all that we are and to look to the past to understand the future and not be consumed by uncertainty.

 

The land from the depths of mystic time, when myth and lore ruled supreme had remained untouched and unspoiled by the mad of man.  Men did dwell in its bouquet of effervescent beauty but took care to preserve this habitat in its intended form.  Even to this day it maintains essential beauty of the natural world and allows our people to reap that what it offers.  We are not natures owners, and in respect for its natural laws we became the caretakers of this living paradise.  The land became the heart and soul of T’rsyani.

 

It was a magical way of life with all its charismatic beauty and brutality it became beloved.  It was a land of clean blue skies with fresh aromatic purified air.  It was the land of fragrant trees that bloom and carpet it breadth with living color, with giant robust trees of all manner shape and form that stand majestically astride and skirt the splendorous hills and mountain rivers, of streams, of rivulet and fresh clean springs that gurgle from the heart of the land and flock toward the rich harvest of the ground, it roars and thunders as it cascade by leaps and bounds to race downward gorged valleys cutting deeper chasm’s into the spirit of the land and spread through virgin forest to quench the thirst of its inhabitants and awake living matter to seed to a renewed life.

 

The land was a way of life, the creator of life and the giver of life, of culture, of ancestry and part of our heritage.  Our fealty is to the land and to our brethren that enjoy it majesty and that remains undaunted to this day.  No matter how far and where a T’rsyanets may reside in the world, the umbilical cord to their ancient ancestral homeland remains intact.  This feeling of belonging preserves and unites the many T’rsyani that have left behind what was preserved as their heritage and to this day carry its name to retain the idea of ancestry and homeland.  This too is embedded into our children and keeps a loyal association to a land they have never seen, to the people they may never know a way of life they may never enjoy and a culture that may one day seem foreign as was with us with this new land that we now call home.  All is still well for there is a gene pool that still resides that will carry our name.  The land to this day remains hidden away from the bustle and jostle of the modern world.  It only skirt and skirmishes with the new at its boundaries.  It is never changing, it remains sprite, unhindered by man’s modern eccentricities.  It is fresh and natural without the trappings of man that contradicts the natural order of nature made over into a grotesque silhouette of nothingness.  This is the place of ravishing beauty, mushrooming mountains, grassy glen and broad hidden valleys.  It is nourishing in the splendor of its forests, a home to wildlife, frothing rivers and sparkling streams.

 

It is bountiful in fruit, in seed and in any other manner that allows life to thrive and reap its harvest.  Rocky knolls jut out unexpectedly like old fortresses in thickets of wood, some covered in coats of lichen and monoliths of stone are natures monuments erected to its majesty.  Mountains stand as sentinels and meet the sapphire sky and guard its hinterland from the encroachment of man’s notion of civilization.  It is, as well the sanctuary to wild beasts that roam unperturbed and frolic in gay abandon in an enclave of safety from extinction.

 

This is our home – the highland and our people the highlanders.  They are the embodiment of the land., strong, sturdy, compassionate, permanent and of an unyielding manner.  The land is a fixture of the world, the people a fixture of the land.  The land perpetuates life that is never pretentious.  The people reap the succulence of this gift of life and toil in determined enthusiasm in this, their haven.  This is their paradise, for this is their paradise a world unspoiled, clean, clear and sparkling and of abandonment of the woes that fester in men as lice on a deer.  This land, this place was never mundane on mute, but a divine inclusion into our life.  It is the quintessence of the once natural world, it is the land of our ancestry, where those before us were born, passed their days to manhood, womanhood, adulthood, parenthood, bathed in the glory of their age and were reclaimed by the soil in their passing.  For this we became beholden to it, anoint its memory, hold it dear to our hearts and chant it praise for as long as we can muster strength and with a burning passion in our hearts, we look towards it in remembrance of what was ours and what was so endeared.

From the heights of Mt. Loundzer, I could see the dreams of my people, the spirit of our ancestors, the rituals and their culture and of what was their essence.  Now in ruins, the abode of our people is reclaimed by nature.  Where once feet trampled its soil, the grasses dance, the forest are dark and forlorn and the animals of the wild frolic in gay abandon and feast on one another.  There are no more T’rsyani to care for the land reap its harvest.  This is the now, then it was not the case.

T’rsye.   T’rsyani’s Eternal Inheritance.          Photographed,  June 15, 2005