Stork Mountain by Miroslav Penkov

then the village was split in half—Bulgarians on one bank of the river, Turks on the other. “Brothers, we’re perishing,” the nestinari begged. “Give us some land.” And like before, instead of land it was a curse they received.
    But Saint Constantine is a merciful saint, the hag told Elif. And lo and behold the Turkish aga, ruler of Klisura, allows the vekilin to bow before him and listens to his plea. Sitting on the balcony of the konak , the aga smokes from his long chibouk , and his meaty fingers play with a rosary of red amber. He’s heard how terrified the rayas can get of these newcomers and so he wants to spite them, his little slave lambs, he wants to keep them full of fear. Besides, he’s not afraid of the sultan. He even has a bone to pick with him. “Why not?” he says to the vekilin . “I’ll give you land in the Bulgar hamlet. Build your village there if you will.”
    â€œBut the aga was a Turk,” Elif said. Her eyes had turned watery and red now, and they glistened like the pools on the shack’s roof down below us. “A Turk, like me. And therefore a wretch. Or so the hag told me. The aga, she said, couldn’t just give the infidels what they wanted without receiving some pleasure in return.”
    So the aga orders his soldiers to gather up all male nestinari in the courtyard. No more than twenty—young and old, beaten from the road, barely standing on their feet. As for the women and children, the aga lines them up against the stone wall so they may watch the circus that is about to unfold. He calls for his favorite zurla player. “Do you know what a zurla is, amerikanche ? Like the oboe, but cheerful and much louder. He calls for the gadulka player.” Elif made a motion with her hand, driving an invisible bow across a set of invisible strings. “The players gather, ready to play. All men back then, they wore sashes. The older folk around here still do. Ten, fifteen elbows of cloth wrapped around their waist. So the aga orders his soldiers to hold the end of each sash and pull. The sashes unwind and the men spin like tops. The zurla fills the yard with shrieking and the gadulka joins it. That’s how I imagine it at least. The poor things spin across the yard like mad, hardly able to stand on their feet as it is. The soldiers whip them with their whips. By now the children are crying, the women are screaming, and the aga, that wretched Turkish dog, stands on his balcony, laughing, throwing his own whip about, urging the soldiers to lash the men faster, harder.”
    Some of the men spin left and tumble to the ground on one side of the courtyard. Some fall on the other. Half and half, more or less. “You on the left side,” the aga booms, laughing. “I’ll give you land. Keep your women, keep your children. You on the right, I have no use for you. So scurry off.”
    The nestinari were split in half. But so they wouldn’t forget each other, the nestinari exchanged their icons, their bags of skulls. One group would safeguard the saints and ancestors of the other, a holy bond. They gave an oath, to reunite each May, on the feast of Saint Constantine, and dance together over the burning coals. One year in Klisura, the next in the village where the second group would settle, no matter how far away that village lay.
    â€œWhere did the rest of them settle?” I asked, and Elif shrugged.
    â€œAcross the Strandja somewhere. Some village that even today is part of Turkey. The hag told me, back then it had been Greeks who lived there, Greeks who’d taken pity on the nestinari and given them some land.”
    I struggled to wrap my head around this story. An ancient village, home to the first fire dancers, part of Turkey, in which the peasants were neither fully Bulgarian nor fully Greek, but a mix of the two. And Turks in what was now Bulgaria who’d given shelter to half the refugees and chased