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'Dark and mysterious and beautiful' Financial Times Set in the
valley of the Mesta, one of the oldest inhabited river valleys in
Europe and a nexus for wild plant gatherers, Elixir is an
unforgettable exploration of the deep connections between people,
plants and place Over several seasons, Kassabova spends time with
the people of this magical region. She meets women and men who work
in a long lineage of foragers, healers and mystics. She learns
about wild plants and the ancient practice of herbalism, and
experiences a symbiotic system where nature and culture have
blended for thousands of years. Through her captivating encounters
we come to feel the devastating weight of the ecological and
cultural disinheritance that the people of this valley have
suffered. Yet, in her search for elixir, she also finds reasons for
hope. The people of the valley are keepers of a rare knowledge, not
only of mountain plants and their properties, but also of how to
transform collective suffering into healing. Immersive and
enthralling, at its heart Elixir is a search for a cure to what
ails us in the Anthropocene. It is an urgent call to rethink how we
live - in relation to one another, to the Earth and to the cosmos.
'Exceptional' BBC Wildlife
Kassabova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria and grew up under the drab,
muddy, grey mantle of one of communism s most mindlessly
authoritarian regimes. Escaping with her family as soon as possible
after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, she lived in Britain, New
Zealand, and Argentina, and several other places. But when Bulgaria
was formally inducted to the European Union she decided it was time
to return to the home she had spent most of her life trying to
escape. What she found was a country languishing under the strain
of transition. This two-part memoir of Kapka s childhood and return
explains life on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
In the valley of the Mesta, one of the oldest inhabited river
valleys in Europe, where the surrounding forests and mountains are
a nexus for wild plant gatherers, Kapka Kassabova finds a story
with vast resonance for us all. Elixir is an unforgettable
exploration of the deep connections between people, plants and
place. Over several seasons, Kassabova spends time with the people
of this magical region. She meets women and men who work in a long
lineage of foragers, healers and mystics. She learns about wild
plants and the ancient practice of herbalism, and experiences a
symbiotic system where nature and culture have blended for
thousands of years. Through her captivating encounters we come to
feel the devastating weight of the ecological and cultural
disinheritance that the people of this valley have suffered. Yet,
in her search for elixir, she also finds reasons for hope. The
people of the valley are keepers of a rare knowledge, not only of
mountain plants and their properties, but also of how to transform
collective suffering into healing. Immersive and enthralling, at
its heart Elixir is a search for a cure to what ails us in the
Anthropocene. It is an urgent call to rethink how we live - in
relation to one another, to the Earth and to the cosmos.
When Kapka Kassabova was a child, the borderzone between Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece was rumoured to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall so it swarmed with soldiers, spies and fugitives. On holidays close to the border on the Black Sea coast, she remembers playing on the beach, only miles from where an electrified fence bristled, its barbs pointing inwards toward the enemy: the holiday-makers, the potential escapees.Today, this densely forested landscape is no longer heavily militarised, but it is scarred by its past. In Border, Kapka Kassabova sets out on a journey to meet the people of this triple border - Bulgarians, Turks, Greeks, and the latest wave of refugees fleeing conflict further afield. She discovers a region that has been shaped by the successive forces of history: by its own past migration crises, by communism, by two World wars, by the Ottoman Empire, and - older still - by the ancient legacy of myths and legends. As Kapka Kassabova explores this enigmatic region in the company of border guards and treasure hunters, entrepreneurs and botanists, psychic healers and ritual fire-walkers, refugees and smugglers, she traces the physical and psychological borders that criss-cross its villages and mountains, and goes in search of the stories that will unlock its secrets.Border is a sharply observed portrait of a little-known corner of Europe, and a fascinating meditation on the borderlines that exist between countries, between cultures, between people, and within each of us.
A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week Lake Ohrid and Lake Prespa. Two vast
lakes joined by underground rivers. Two lakes that have played a
central role in Kapka Kassabova's maternal family. As she journeys
to her grandmother's place of origin, Kassabova encounters a
civilizational crossroads. The Lakes are set within the mountainous
borderlands of North Macedonia, Albania and Greece, and crowned by
the old Roman road, the via Egnatia. Once a trading and spiritual
nexus of the southern Balkans, it remains one of Eurasia's oldest
surviving religious melting pots. With their remote rock churches,
changeable currents, and large population of migratory birds, the
Lakes live in their own time. By exploring the stories of dwellers
past and present, Kassabova uncovers the human history shaped by
the Lakes. Soon, her journey unfolds to a deeper enquiry into how
geography and politics imprint themselves upon families and
nations, and confronts her with questions about human suffering and
the capacity for change.
Kapka Kassabova is a young Bulgarian emigre poet who writes in
English but with a European imagination. Her well-travelled poems
speak from different parts of the world and different moments of
history, but they always speak of the many ways to be lost and
disoriented: in a place, in the past, in fear, in love, in the very
quickness of life. The voices speaking here - from a Roman
housewife to a Chinese bar-owner in Berlin or an Argentine DJ - are
the voices of the heart-sick, the culturally jet-lagged, people
from photographs, the "tenants" of lives, cities and destinies.
This is what we all are, have been, or will be.
Kapka Kassabova first set foot in a tango studio ten years ago and,
from that moment, she was hooked. With the beat of tango driving
her on and the music filling her head, she's danced across the
world, from Auckland to Edinburgh, from Berlin to Buenos Aires,
putting in hours of practice for fleeting moments of dance-floor
ecstasy, suffering blisters and heart-break along the way. Here, in
sparkling, spring-heeled prose, Kapka takes us inside the esoteric
world of tango to tell the story of the dance, from its Afro roots
to its sequined stars and back. Twelve Minutes of Love is a
timeless tale of exile and longing, death and desire, love and
belonging.
Kapka Kassabova is a young, Bulgarian $emigr$e poet, now living in
New Zealand, who writes in English but with a European imagination.
These poems in her third collection explore the emotional and
spiritual territory of the traveler and the dispossessed, the
spaces between memory and being, exploration and doubt, and desire
and loss. Her novel, Reconnaissance (1999), won a Commonwealth
Writers' Prize for Best First Book.
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