You cannot uproot that which cannot be uprooted!
Cheers to love, comrades! I get it, it's St. Valentine, blablah! But did you know it's also St. Trifon here in BG? "Trifon Zarezan", the patron of wine. Probably the successor of Bacchus, the most revered god around these lands in Thracian antiquity (fuck that grumpy old man Zeus!)
For centuries, nay, millennia, Trifon the Pruner (as Zarezan literally translates) used to go around vineyards on this very day and start clipping the young vines so they could grow lush and rich. Wine is big in this country. Also rakia, but today is all about wine. Red wine, particularly.
[You know the deal already: for atmosphere, first click on the video to play] --
Various rulers have tried curbing the people's affinity for drinking around these lands. Khan Krum decreed the uprooting of all vineyards across Moesia, Thrace and Macedonia in the late 8 century because drinking had started taking horrifying proportions among the people (but he didn't do that before having cut Emperor Nikephoros's head off and made a wine chalice out of it, how about that!) That whole uprooting thing didn't work. It was probably the first Prohibition Era in history, and it failed, and for a good reason. People went into caverns, basements and cellars and they still made the divine elixir for their pleasure. Wine continued to save them from the hardships of Byzantine and Ottoman yoke, too. In wine we trust!, they shouted around the table, raised toasts to the salvation of the nation, and into blissful oblivion they plunged.
This continued for 2 centuries under Byzantium and then 5 centuries under the Ottomans, with a couple of centuries of relative sobriety (and hence, independence) inbetween. You just can't hold off the drive for wine (and oblivion) for too long.
Then the Turks brought rakia along with them. Or was it the Greeks? There's a big, typically inter-Balkan dispute going on about that as we speak, some claiming it's an indigenous drink, and each and everyone of the rest claiming it to themselves, but who cares, no one remembers at this point. The only thing that matters is that the toasts increased.
The Russian saviors didn't change a lot, either. They brought vodka with them [see below the famous Repin painting with the Cossacs drinking wine and vodka while writing the Blood Letter to the Turkish Sultan]. Now, vodka is a pretty badass thing if you ask me. You don't drink vodka without a "meze" (appetizer). You just don't. One gurkin per one water-glass of vodka (in one gulp, bottoms up!) That's the established norm. Vodka didn't hold roots here, though. Rakia and wine already ruled the land, so they weathered off that assault eventually.
In Soviet times, Comrade Lenin even wrote in his treatise (don't remember which one, he had many of them and I'm too young to have studied them by heart in History class like my parents did) that "In Soviet Russia, wine big pest to Proletariat, it poison the mind and destroy foundations of Soviet communist society". No one dared to uproot vineyards under communism, though. Communism couldn't compete with the cute red awesomeness of wine (we also have some pretty awesome white wines around here, but red wine is TEH WINZ, period). Eventually communism embraced wine-making as "a viable segment of food industry", which has to be "modernized, mechanized, optimized and exported to countries near and far" to "promote the great Bulgarian cuisine" and the virtues of the "socialist way of life". And so it was said, and so it was done.
The propaganda placards showing drunkards with captions like "Look at this man, he used to be a sober and decent member of our society, but what has wine turned him into??" were gradually substituted with the friendlier depictions of Comrade Zhivkov (our own Tito, the Father of the Nation, the Sunlight of our Day, who barely finished elementary school but nevertheless somehow survived in power for 3+ decades until the Explosion of Freedom and Democracy). Dear Comrade was frequently shown pruning young vines just like St. Trifon Zarezan had done in Thracian antiquity. And the proletariat rejoiced! And raised toasts to the skies in praise of the glorious communism! [see below Dear Comrade, and his then-personal-bodyguard, today turned Dear Prime-Minister, Super-Boyko "Batman" Borisov]
That you can't defeat wine has become pretty evident in the Modern Day of Freedomdom and Democracycy. See, I work for the tourism branch of probably the largest wine-making conglomerate in the land, and rumors are that when our mega-bosses sat in their cigar-smoked room, pondering about what new business they should launch in these turbulent times of crisis and financial turmoil (and I don't mean the 2008+ crisis, in fact we've been in permanent crisis ever since the 90s, so what do you spoiled Westerners know about crisis?), a smart-head (I'm told it was my direct boss, what an honor) suddenly shouted "Eureka!" You know what people buy the most at times of economic strife, when there's not enough money to make ends meet? "What is it, buddy? Spit it out already!", the mega-bosses asked. Well, turns out it's TOBACCO and ALCOHOL. So they said, why not. Let's invest heavily in wine-making, let's establish "friendly relations" with some politicians who'll be particularly friendly to us in the years to come, and let's dominate this goddamned market! Cigarettes, wine & rakia, here we come!
And so it was said, and so it has been. Big business, big politics and big clergy have all united in their support for the cause - spread the glory of wine and multiply its profits! You can't uproot the vineyards of this country, no Sir. Not before you've pried it from the cold dead hands of the last surviving Bulgarian in the world!
And now I'm hearing some "post-modern" pro-Western hippies using some foreign words like "commercial" and "cool" on the reality shows on TV, and claiming Feb 14th is all about St. Valentine, the day of some wannabe Cupid. Excuse me, first of all St. Valentine is Catholic, OK? We're no Catholics, buddy! And two, Cupid was Roman, and we've always been in the Byzantine camp, got it? OK, by "being in the camp" I might rather mean we preferred spilling Byzantine blood for sports (we used to call them Romei, I remember that since I was a boyar in the Khan's court in my previous life as far as memory serves). But still. St. Valentine is an alien here, no matter what some foreign spies wanna tell me on the TV. And we don't like no aliens, OK? Just ask the Crusaders. You'll never uproot our vineyards, you colonial bastards, you! Neither the Byzantines managed to do that, nor the Ottomans, much less them bloody Russkies and their funny vodka. They all tried, but where are their empires now? Got my drift? Mwahhahaha! Wine is life. Wine is LOVE. Wine rules this land! Go home, whiskey drinkers!
Ps. If I knew how to make a Youtube vid like that guy, I would've put a traditional BG fur cap, a red waist belt, I'd have twirled my Balkanite moustache and yelled like one Dark Balkan Type: "Bulgar, Bulgaaar!"
Pps. But still, why can't we actually celebrate both St. Valentine & St. Trifon? I know, I know, that was a blasphemy. Sorry about that, Thracians! I meant no offense to Bacchus.
For centuries, nay, millennia, Trifon the Pruner (as Zarezan literally translates) used to go around vineyards on this very day and start clipping the young vines so they could grow lush and rich. Wine is big in this country. Also rakia, but today is all about wine. Red wine, particularly.
[You know the deal already: for atmosphere, first click on the video to play] --
Click to viewVarious rulers have tried curbing the people's affinity for drinking around these lands. Khan Krum decreed the uprooting of all vineyards across Moesia, Thrace and Macedonia in the late 8 century because drinking had started taking horrifying proportions among the people (but he didn't do that before having cut Emperor Nikephoros's head off and made a wine chalice out of it, how about that!) That whole uprooting thing didn't work. It was probably the first Prohibition Era in history, and it failed, and for a good reason. People went into caverns, basements and cellars and they still made the divine elixir for their pleasure. Wine continued to save them from the hardships of Byzantine and Ottoman yoke, too. In wine we trust!, they shouted around the table, raised toasts to the salvation of the nation, and into blissful oblivion they plunged.
This continued for 2 centuries under Byzantium and then 5 centuries under the Ottomans, with a couple of centuries of relative sobriety (and hence, independence) inbetween. You just can't hold off the drive for wine (and oblivion) for too long.
Then the Turks brought rakia along with them. Or was it the Greeks? There's a big, typically inter-Balkan dispute going on about that as we speak, some claiming it's an indigenous drink, and each and everyone of the rest claiming it to themselves, but who cares, no one remembers at this point. The only thing that matters is that the toasts increased.
The Russian saviors didn't change a lot, either. They brought vodka with them [see below the famous Repin painting with the Cossacs drinking wine and vodka while writing the Blood Letter to the Turkish Sultan]. Now, vodka is a pretty badass thing if you ask me. You don't drink vodka without a "meze" (appetizer). You just don't. One gurkin per one water-glass of vodka (in one gulp, bottoms up!) That's the established norm. Vodka didn't hold roots here, though. Rakia and wine already ruled the land, so they weathered off that assault eventually.
In Soviet times, Comrade Lenin even wrote in his treatise (don't remember which one, he had many of them and I'm too young to have studied them by heart in History class like my parents did) that "In Soviet Russia, wine big pest to Proletariat, it poison the mind and destroy foundations of Soviet communist society". No one dared to uproot vineyards under communism, though. Communism couldn't compete with the cute red awesomeness of wine (we also have some pretty awesome white wines around here, but red wine is TEH WINZ, period). Eventually communism embraced wine-making as "a viable segment of food industry", which has to be "modernized, mechanized, optimized and exported to countries near and far" to "promote the great Bulgarian cuisine" and the virtues of the "socialist way of life". And so it was said, and so it was done.
The propaganda placards showing drunkards with captions like "Look at this man, he used to be a sober and decent member of our society, but what has wine turned him into??" were gradually substituted with the friendlier depictions of Comrade Zhivkov (our own Tito, the Father of the Nation, the Sunlight of our Day, who barely finished elementary school but nevertheless somehow survived in power for 3+ decades until the Explosion of Freedom and Democracy). Dear Comrade was frequently shown pruning young vines just like St. Trifon Zarezan had done in Thracian antiquity. And the proletariat rejoiced! And raised toasts to the skies in praise of the glorious communism! [see below Dear Comrade, and his then-personal-bodyguard, today turned Dear Prime-Minister, Super-Boyko "Batman" Borisov]
That you can't defeat wine has become pretty evident in the Modern Day of Freedomdom and Democracycy. See, I work for the tourism branch of probably the largest wine-making conglomerate in the land, and rumors are that when our mega-bosses sat in their cigar-smoked room, pondering about what new business they should launch in these turbulent times of crisis and financial turmoil (and I don't mean the 2008+ crisis, in fact we've been in permanent crisis ever since the 90s, so what do you spoiled Westerners know about crisis?), a smart-head (I'm told it was my direct boss, what an honor) suddenly shouted "Eureka!" You know what people buy the most at times of economic strife, when there's not enough money to make ends meet? "What is it, buddy? Spit it out already!", the mega-bosses asked. Well, turns out it's TOBACCO and ALCOHOL. So they said, why not. Let's invest heavily in wine-making, let's establish "friendly relations" with some politicians who'll be particularly friendly to us in the years to come, and let's dominate this goddamned market! Cigarettes, wine & rakia, here we come!
And so it was said, and so it has been. Big business, big politics and big clergy have all united in their support for the cause - spread the glory of wine and multiply its profits! You can't uproot the vineyards of this country, no Sir. Not before you've pried it from the cold dead hands of the last surviving Bulgarian in the world!
And now I'm hearing some "post-modern" pro-Western hippies using some foreign words like "commercial" and "cool" on the reality shows on TV, and claiming Feb 14th is all about St. Valentine, the day of some wannabe Cupid. Excuse me, first of all St. Valentine is Catholic, OK? We're no Catholics, buddy! And two, Cupid was Roman, and we've always been in the Byzantine camp, got it? OK, by "being in the camp" I might rather mean we preferred spilling Byzantine blood for sports (we used to call them Romei, I remember that since I was a boyar in the Khan's court in my previous life as far as memory serves). But still. St. Valentine is an alien here, no matter what some foreign spies wanna tell me on the TV. And we don't like no aliens, OK? Just ask the Crusaders. You'll never uproot our vineyards, you colonial bastards, you! Neither the Byzantines managed to do that, nor the Ottomans, much less them bloody Russkies and their funny vodka. They all tried, but where are their empires now? Got my drift? Mwahhahaha! Wine is life. Wine is LOVE. Wine rules this land! Go home, whiskey drinkers!
Ps. If I knew how to make a Youtube vid like that guy, I would've put a traditional BG fur cap, a red waist belt, I'd have twirled my Balkanite moustache and yelled like one Dark Balkan Type: "Bulgar, Bulgaaar!"
Pps. But still, why can't we actually celebrate both St. Valentine & St. Trifon? I know, I know, that was a blasphemy. Sorry about that, Thracians! I meant no offense to Bacchus.