The Last Shepherds of the Pirin Mountains

Book Review

Anima: A Wild Pastoral by Kapka Kassabova. Gray Wolf Press.

Anima, “soul,” is the last of Kapka Kassabova’s quartet of books about people and place in the Balkans. It’s not a food book, although being about mountain shepherds, it touches on milk and cheese. Above all, it contrasts modern life with ways that have lasted, barely, from ancient times into the present. Kassabova spent a season in the nearly abandoned Bulgarian village of Orelek, traveling high in the pastures of the Pirin Mountains and, below, visiting the closest real town. She worked with the animals and some of the few remaining people, who are passionate. They understood that she was there to write a book. She’s a translator, explaining one world to another.

Once, there were many more people and many, many more animals, especially sheep, living in the region or passing through. Some of the herds moved to and from local pastures each day. Others were transhumant: they traveled long distances to reach high summer pastures. The local herds and the long-distance ones passed through the same space. Dogs of different herds don’t get along, and if herds mix how do you separate them again? Kassabova compares the situation to “a game of chess on a giant open board with white pieces and black pieces, and once you made a move you couldn’t take it back. There was only one way: on and up. How did they avoid complete chaos?” The herds used to cross borders, until wars and politics put an end to it. Not to speak of the effects of collectivization and privatization. “The ruins of the Roman project lie under the ruins of the Ottoman project,” Kassabova writes, “and on top of those sit the ruins of the communist project, overseen by the empty hills that signified the current absence of any project whatsoever.” As the land is grazed less and less, the forest advances (even as some trees are felled for lumber), and the pastoral mosaic of trees, shrubs, and grass gives way to a narrower range of plants.

As the nomadic life ended, the animals essential to it began to disappear. Bulgaria once had 37 native breeds, and then in a few decades of the 20th century, six of them became extinct and the rest were threatened. Three of those that survive — a sheep, a guardian dog, and a horse — are among the oldest of all breeds. Each is named Karakachan after the most important nomadic people of the past, who produced them. The animals are vigorous, “primitive,” not so far from wild. The sheep are small and very long-haired, giving a special coarse wool.

Kassabova shares a mountain hut with a shepherd named Sásho, from whom she learns. There are still predators in the mountains — wolves and bears — and even with the guardian dogs, animals are lost. How do you tell, when there are too many sheep to count? Certain ones wear bells: you count those. At night, for protection, the flock returns to the enclosure by the mountain hut. A herd has its own will and logic, although a skilled shepherd can usually give it direction. But the notion that the shepherd leads isn’t quite right. Instead, Sásho explains, the shepherd follows so as not to lose stragglers, and there are the dogs to help.

With so few shepherds left, they normally work alone. Mountain walking is hard; shoes wear quickly through. The days are long, often cold and wet. The animals graze or simply linger. Patience is a given. You wait. When the shepherds have enough battery, which is exceptional, they scroll on their phones. In compensation for the hardships, there are joys — the love for and from animals, sometimes people, joy in the beauty of nature: “You realize these are some of the happiest days of your life.”

When the flock and Kassabova are back down at Orelek, the hundreds of ewes give birth to hundreds of lambs with as many as ten births taking place at once. Lambs mean milk, and the milking is still by hand. The sheep give only a modest amount, nothing like the yield of the highly bred sheep of Roquefort. The goats, which remain close to home, give much more. “The flavor of their milk changes every few weeks because it has been infused by different grasses,” Kassabova writes. It’s “creamy, subtly different each time.” Mainly, it makes yogurt and cheese. “Kámen’s goat yogurt is the best and that’s because his milk is the best. The thickest, most thrilling goat milk this mountain produces, and the most unpredictable.” The cheese is made by Andrea, a woman in town. You buy in person, and as good as her cheese may be, it fetches only seven euros a kilo. The low price of the mountain cheese is one reason why the breeds and shepherds struggle. High in the French Alps, Beaufort brings more than three times as much.

If you ever thought, as I have, that animals rotating through neat electric-wire paddocks of lush grass were the apex of grazing, the story of life in the Pirin Mountains is an illumination. Anima for me was one of the best books of 2024. ●