Sozopol seasons: "The season ends on Sunday," he says.
It is Sunday night, the sky paling from azure, toes in the sand, drinks on the camping table. His business is teaching water sports. "Do you have work (работа)?" he is asked.
"I have a job (работа)," he says, ruefully: "I just don’t have clients".

With askance glances at him for saying that the season ends on Sunday, when today it is not quite mid-July, he says that the season begins on Friday when the weekend trippers arrive, and ends on Sunday when they leave.

We find him on Monday, in a more ebullient mood, wetsuit on, the breeze in his greying curly locks; the wind is up; there are clients waiting.

Speaking of Sozopol: German was the language in which I was routinely addressed when first I visited Sozopol in summer 2001. Later, with the arc of the property market, it gave way to English. This year, it is Russian. The first two occasions, I reply in Bulgarian: "Sorry, I don’t speak Russian". On further thought, I drop the "sorry" in later incidents. Two estate agents that used to have their main display boards in English have replaced them with Russian-language ones. But for the Polish tourists at our hotel, their lingua franca with the staff is English.

Sozopol conversations: the credit crunch should have come two years earlier; it might have spared Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast some of the monstrosities hulking a stone’s throw from the breaking of the waves.

Sozopol shelter: Saturday night, a rainstorm deluges the town, rivulets rush down the cobbles, restaurant staff rush to cover tables with plastic sheeting. We take shelter from the torrents in a small bar in the old town. More people join us.

Our luck; the bar has an enchanting display of black-and-white photographs of old, unspoilt Sozopol, bare rock and bush along its capes where now construction squirms shoulder-to-shoulder. Unusually for a Bulgarian bar, the television is set not on Fashion TV but on Skat, the cable channel mouthpiece of Volen Siderov’s Ataka. Two regulars at the window gaze with hostility at all about them, from the drenching rain to us.

At each hairy, meaty hand there is a plate of lukanka and a glass of clear rakiya that seems venomous. Rain drips at the window frames and from the television, poison. It is rather like being in a short story, surviving a shipwreck only to wash up on a cannibal island.

Sozopol sightseeing: A poster for boat cruises offers trips daily to Bolshevik Island. Surely it is not still called that?
Sozopol by night. From the walkway above the rocks, it is easy to imagine the generation of fishers and traders who nosed their boats towards the shore, grateful for the sight of the lights of the town, less myriad then. The magic, eternal, is still there. Spasiba, Sozopol.