Welcome to Vulture Town

A kettle of vulture’s circle high in the sky, with wings wide and necks outstretched to surf the summer thermal draft. In the valley below the Arda river loops and doubles back on itself, a naked man basks on the shingle beach. A kilometer beyond sits the town, sitting dead center in the crater of a flaccid volcano, the town is empty, its population dwindling since the gold mine closed leaving behind tumbleweed pensioners. This description is beginning to sound bleak but this is the eastern Rhodope Mountains in Bulgaria and nothing is ever as it seems.

Steeped in history and shrouded in mystery the forested peaks of the Rhodope cover around 12,000 km’s of Bulgaria on the Balkan peninsular, the town of Madzharovo a stone’s throw from the border with Greece.

It’s the land of Orpheus and serpents and dancing trees, and where the landscape has been carved by dragons.

With its population now hovering at around 500 its gold rush days are long gone, during the communist times when the mine was open the town was flush with cash, in the now shuttered and somewhat forlorn-looking Sky Club Bar they would come from miles around just to rub shoulders with the wealthy miners, their salaries five times that of the locals, in fact they couldn’t get rid of it says Veselina who used to work behind the bar back in the day, with nothing but Rakia and beer to spend it on, they would roll up wads of Leva to prop up wobbly table legs she laughed.  And is there still gold in dem hills? Oh yes, she says assuredly and the prospectors still come and sift and silt along the seams, ever hopeful of what the ancient Thracian tribes had thrived on.

Just outside town on a forested bluff beside the river is the Vulture Visitor Centre, bustling with volunteers twitching with anticipation at the imminent arrival of a couple of chicks from Prague, that is to say, a pair of Egyptian vulture fledglings from Prague zoo.

The magnificent Egyptian vulture was once a common sight above the peaks of the Balkan peninsular but is now globally under threat. Needless to say increased urbanization, exploitative agricultural practice and poaching have all contributed to their steady decline. But somewhat surprisingly the tables may be turning and it seems the human population in Bulgaria is now in decline and the vultures are having something of a renaissance.

Marrin, the ruddy-faced center manager swigs from his cold can of Kamenitza beer and tries to explain the state of the local food chain;

 It’s all to do with the cows he says;

 Cows? I question and pull the ring on my beer.

 Da, they are wild and rare.

Rare wild cows I ponder as Marrin sups on his beer as though he has explained everything.

Marrin detecting I am a bit slow on the up-take goes into further detail;

The Rhodope short horn cow is one of the last remaining indigenous cattle still surviving in Bulgaria, one of the last of the European prehistoric breeds; numbers had fallen to a few hundred. Predatory wolves being the chief culprits so the local farmers would use poison to combat the wolves, not only the cows and wolves would fall victim but the vultures feeding on poisoned carrion set out for the wolves would also get caught up in the rural carnage.

Wild cows, wolves, vultures. I shifted uneasily in my seat and eyed the surrounding forest with suspicion.

With help from the Bulgarian Bird Society and funds from the European Union a truce between the wolves and farmers has been holding long enough to reverse the decline, the successful preservation and protection of raptors such as the Griffin and Egyptian Vulture is just part of the re-wilding of Europe that has also witnessed the re-introduction of Bison to Bulgaria, missing for centuries.

The chicks from Prague have arrived and after having electronic tags attached by the BBS team they will be settled into a hack perched on the side of the mountain in preparation for life in the wild.

A task not for the faint of heart that will involve the scaling of a Rhodope peak with the birds carried in crates strapped to the backs of intrepid Sherpa-esq team members. Scrabbling over scree and hauling along rope pulleys, with the river diminishing in size and the vistas growing grander, it’s a long way down.

The absolute dedication and commitment to the cause could not be more evident as one of the BBS experts laden with a heavy wooden crate abseil from the summit and places the juvenile Vulture in the hack.

As the summer heat subsides and autumn approaches the migration will begin, a not unfamiliar story; from the barbed wire boundaries of Europe, across Anatolia into the Middle East and Africa, a journey in search of resource, safety, and security, a journey fraught with risk, a journey of hope and the struggle to survive.

Madzharovo has turned its back on its industrial past and is rebranding itself; the giant murals painted on the side of communist housing blocks are testament to a proud new vision.

And what of the naked man sunning himself on the banks of the Arda I hear you ask? He, much like the nearby town is returning to nature.

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John

John Wreford is a professional photographer based in Istanbul, Turkey.

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