Released 29.05.25

The Conversation

This episode begins with a strange link between Bulgarian-born author, Kapka Kassabova, and Sophy: Georgi Markov. The famous Bulgarian dissident is buried in a rural churchyard near Sophy’s Dorset home. While he is perhaps best remembered for his assassination — by poisoned umbrella on Westminster bridge in 1978 — that’s “a pity”, says Kapka: his truth-telling is brilliant and his prose “well worth reading, for artistic as well as for political reasons.”

Kapka talks about her childhood in Bulgaria, before her family emigrated to New Zealand after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Her writing, however, constantly draws Kapka back towards her homeland. Her quartet of books: Border, To the Lake, Elixir and Anima, have consumed her: “ten years totally immersed, body and soul in these psycho-geographies.” Because for Kapka, “everything is a psychological experience, and geographies have always felt to me like people.”

Sophy and Kapka talk about Anima. In this book, Kapka travels to the Pirin Mountains in Bulgaria’s southwest corner, where the border meets North Macedonia and Greece. There, she stays with the Karakachans — perhaps the last true pastoralists in Europe. Kapka describes their fierce guard dogs and how they follow their sheep, moving to higher pastures for summer grazing. But their way of life is dying out. There’s a kind of haunting to the landscape, Kapka says: “it’s poignant to feel that you may be the last one”. There’s also danger in the mountains — weather, wolves, bears — but that kind of pastoral life has “always been the razor's edge”.

Kapka’s time in the mountains deepens into a state of “communication without words”. She begins to understand flock mentality and “morphic resonance” — tuning into the “hum” of the Earth, which has a striking synchronicity with the beat of a human heart. “There’s too much interference in our world,” Kapka says: “you have to go to a place where there’s none.”

Books discussed:

Kapka Kassabova
— Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe
— To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace
— Elixir: A Voyage into Alchemy 
— Anima: A Wild Pastoral

Georgi Markov
— The Truth That Killed