After an initial pang of disappointment, Vanya Rainova unlocks the secret of Sandanski and the region.
My initial, though short-lived, response to Sandanski was one of disappointment. My expectations trick me. Somehow I’ve layered my childhood impressions of the unique architecture of nearby Melnik upon memories of quaint spa towns and postcard images of Mediterranean towns in neighbouring Greece. The result was a fiction of a tranquil, optimistic, picturesque little town nestled at the foot of Pirin mountain, a restful respite that befits a spa capital.
In reality, Sandanski is rather large. Development of the town clearly picked up during the second half of the 20th century. Large apartment buildings – greyish concrete oversized matchboxes that are a product of communist utilitarian architecture – scar the city’s outer edges. More recently, a new surge of development is transforming the town’s landscape, with hotels and holiday villages springing up seemingly overnight.
No matter how Sandanski has changed throughout the centuries, the heart of the place, the mineral water that is in the centre of Sandanski’s seal, always defined its character. Long before of spa tourism became a concept du jour in Bulgaria, Sandanski was a well-developed balneology centre. The amazingly landscaped city park – more Brussels than Thessaloniki – still captures that mood of restful healing. It forces you to slow your walking pace, a change of tempo that you’ll find appropriate for the main street, Makedonia Boulevard, as well. The pedestrian artery of Sandanski is cafe-lined and full of people for whom walking seems an end in itself, occasionally interrupted by a cup of coffee outdoors.
If the region’s soothing climate and healing springs are what brings so many tourists here, we decide to follow the water. That is how we ended up in Rupite, a small mountainous protected area, a 20-minute drive south-west from Sandanski. Located on the right bank of the Struma River, its landscape is dominated by the volcanic eminence of Kozhuh. Although it is only 280m high, it rises like a mountain in the low and flat Petrich plane. At the foot of Kozhuh is a curative hot spring with a temperature of 71 to 78C. Rich in minerals, the water paints watercolours on the earth’s canvas, flowing abstractions in shades of moss green and rusty orange. A few women are doing their laundry at the source in the field. Some men are rinsing off large oak barrels, to the dislike of the man tending the bath.
The bath here is far removed from its sleek contemporary equivalents in Sandanski’s hotels. A strange giddiness overtakes me at the sight of the white stucco fence surrounding the blindingly green meadow, in the middle of which there are two concrete pools – one only with mineral water, the other with the healing algae that naturally grows in it. There is something magic about the place, and I’m grateful for its simplicity, for the way it fits unobtrusively into its surroundings. Relaxed in the warm, weightless embrace of water, I let my eyes wander along the sharp edge of the rock across. The sky above – piercingly blue.
I emerge from the water aglow, somehow lighter. As we leave the bath, we pass a pony grazing in be the road and scatter a bunch of hens and geese. The view is strangely idyllic. One can’t help but feel sad that flimsy plastic bags in pastel colours seem to be taking over the world. Against the backdrop of natural beauty, the bags tangled in the bushes are an eyesore.
Walking distance from the bath is the Church of St Petka, built at a site chosen by Vanga in 1992. There’s hardly a Bulgarian who hasn’t heard of Vanga, who lived and died in Rupite. Believers claimed that she had unique ability to foresee, though not change, the future, clairvoyance, prescribe individual healing with herbs, talk with flowers, and astral travel to various places on earth. To someone used to the ornate looks of orthodox temples, St Petka may look a bit ascetic. The icons were created by the noted Bulgarian artist Svetlin Rusev and found scant favour with the Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church for being too realistic and not conforming to the canons. With or without the official nod of approval, the place emanates tranquillity and holiness. It is surrounded by a spacious landscaped garden where visitors can find quiet and privacy.
If the spa hotel pool and the Rupite bath seem like two opposite extremes, but they are just two points on a spectrum, and Dolna Gradeshnitsa extends the possibilities. On the lowers steps in most people’s notion of the hierarchy of baths, to those willing to look for it, Gradeshnitsa offers a charm of its own. You might have to ask a few locals before you find your way to it. Once there, you’ll see a tiny house with a small yard and a large table under a vine. You’re welcome to have a picnic there. Though there is a male and female bath, if there are no other visitors, the keeper of the bath does not mind couples or mixed-gender groups of friends using a single pool. The facilities, if you can call them that, are primitive – a metal pipe of a shower, a plastic patchwork of a roof, glassless windows. But this is exactly where the bath’s beauty resides – in the blossoming tree you see through the hole on the roof, in the branches reaching inside through the window, in the rich colours. And, the power of water is not swayed by details of convenience.
