The Peace Corps Files; Wednesday, August 15th, 2007

A post by "Blake the Megalomaniac" To see more posts click here

My trip to the Rock Churches of Ivanovo:

On Tuesday, I went on a day trip with some of my students from the summer English course that I have been teaching since I arrived in Ruse. Also, my new friend and hopefully someone who I will do a lot of work with over the next two years, Emo, came with us. He works at the Youth Center in Ruse and is an amazingly friendly and good man.

We took a train to the village of Ivanovo and hiked to the Rusenski Lom (Ruse Valley). It is a breath-taking plush river valley sandwiched between huge rock faces that have numerous caves carved into them that served as monasteries during Medeival times. The ‘Rock Churches of Ivanovo’ are one of the landmarks in Bulgaria protected by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-URL_ID=31064&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

Besides the beautiful views and challenging hiking trails the trip provided, we also met a very interesting man who collected the admission fee to enter the Rock Church that is still open to tourists. When we first entered into the church, he told us it would be 50 stotinki (roughly cents) for the four students we were with and 1 lev (roughly dollar) for Emo and I. We began talking, and it was clear to him that I was American and soon enough, I provided that I was in Bulgaria to teach English and work with young people here in different sorts of capacities. His reaction was one of skepticism to say the least. He believed that this situation was backwards. Bulgarians should be traveling to America and other ‘new countries’ and teach Bulgarian language and culture to these countries. After all, Bulgaria is thousands of years old and this area of the world cradled some of the first pre-modern civilizations 1000s of years ago during the Neolithic Period. American Nationals with a country who’s life can be measured in half the time that the Ottoman Empire spent occupying Bulgaria (to put things into perspective), according to this man, have very little to offer Bulgarians.

A very interesting perspective indeed. I could have responded simply by bashing this ethnocentric, idealistic paradigm so frankly expressed by this man. But instead, I thanked him for the chat. (Hey, at least he eventually let me enter the rock church for free) A wiser man than me once said something to the effect, “It is better to live humbly for a cause than to die nobly for one.” If I argued with this very proud man with the limited Bulgarian that I have at my disposal, I couldn’t guarantee that I would have the chance to live much longer (humbly or otherwise).

So instead, I let his thoughts marinate. I let this conversation serve as an example of the national pride that is ubiquitious in the Balkans. Sometimes this quality of culture can be evinced in such awesome ways (i.e. the folk festivals where countries show off their pasttimes to a excited and jovial crowd). Other times it can rear its ugly head in awful conflicts (i.e. the all too current debates over malleable borders and the Roma minority).

I guess for now, any sort of conclusion would be made in haste but that man surely served as an example of how ethnocentricity is very real to some people here in Bulgaria even during a time of political progession into the E.U. and cultural progression (not necessarily a good thing) into the globalized western world. -EJC