The Quest to Find the Sarashka Mosque

 

The Quest to Find the Sarashka Mosque

 

1 December 2025, Monday

With only a month to go until our great Eurozone adventure begins, Bulgaria’s banks were today selling euro starter packs.

Costing 20 leva, each pack contains:

• 42 shiny coins with a total face value of €10.23, covering every denomination.
• A European Central Bank pen with the little bit of chain still attached at the top.
• A balloon with a picture of the face of European Union President, Ursula von der Leyen.
• A packet of crayons so we can cross out ‘euro’ and write ‘roubles’ on our banknotes in five years’ time.
• An ‘England Didn’t Qualify’ tee shirt.
• A cyanide tablet.

 

2 December 2025, Tuesday

Almost every Bulgarian city saw a political demonstration last night. Our nation hadn’t shown its anger on such a scale since 1989 and the dying days of Communist totalitarianism.

The offspring of those Communists run the country now. The old corruption remains but enhanced by the trappings of modern capitalism. Drawing back the Iron Curtain only revealed neighbours with a greater range of corruption. Sofia’s politicians couldn’t wait to join in. We’re a small and poor country but the big guns will lend us cash if we support their wars.

Today’s headlines read ‘The genie is out of the bottle!’

 

3 December 2025, Wednesday

Priyatelkata had read that a vintage steam locomotive would draw carriages along the Gorna Oryahovitsa to Veliko Tarnovo line on 20 December. ‘How delightfully festive,’ she remarked. ‘Let’s do it!’ she insisted.

Before entering the ticket office this chilly morning, we checked the train buffs’ website so we’d know exactly what to ask for. We’d to choose between meeting the real-life Snow White or sitting on Santa’s knee, and did we want a little boy’s or a little girl’s toy? Toot! Toot! All aboard the Paedophile Express!

We spent our train fare on lunch in a safe grownups’ café instead. 

 

4 December 2025, Thursday

At the Vasil Levski Palace of Culture and Sport, the performance by the Sukhishvili Georgian National Ballet was ballet dancing at a hundred miles per hour and leaping in the air in amazing costumes with mesmerising live traditional music and women dancers dressed as ice queens and lads twatting each other with real swords that made sparks fly. It was utterly breathtaking.

Later, as I climbed the stairs to bed, with arthritic knees feeling like victims of a Provisional I.R.A. punishment squad, I resigned myself to the fact that I’d never be a participating member of the Georgian National Ballet.

 

5 December 2025, Friday

A Russian oil tanker called Kairos, disabled and aflame following a Ukraine drone attack in the Black Sea just north of the Bosphorus, ran aground near our seaside town of Ahtopol.

It’s claimed that the Turkish didn’t want it on their patch so they towed it there with a tug. The word on the prom is that it was a deckchair attendant rather than the Bulgarian authorities who spotted the unusual nautical activity.

In a statement this evening, our Defence Minister said the lady who owns the Punch and Judy tent is prepared for all-out war.

Don’t panic Captain Radov!

 

6 December 2025, Saturday

Should we ever acquire another dog, we already know what we’ll call it. What fun it would be to arrive at the vet’s and ask if Dr Petrova could have a look at our pet, Rover.

Responding to Crazy Ludo’s fourth serious injury, this morning she became Vet of the Week. When I collected the patchwork cat in the afternoon she explained that the fragile state of tissue badly damaged by his first injury was a major contributing factor to the severity of subsequent ones.

When we have five narrowly-avoided-death stamps on his card we’ll get the sixth operation free.

 

7 December 2025, Sunday

A haiku for a drizzly December day…

Black black black black black

Black black black black black black black

Black black black grey black

I mentioned to Ismail our neighbour that the weather outside was oo-zhas-no (ужасно, meaning ‘frightful’). In the fifty-odd years he’d lived in Malki Chiflik, this was the first he’d known there not to be snow in November, so perhaps we were lucky. But we agreed that deep and crisp and even would be cheerier than damp and grey and soggy.

Then Johnny Ten Levs came in sight gathering cash to buy a bottle of winter rocket fuel.

 

8 December 2025, Monday

Forty-five years ago today John Lennon was murdered and I started a part-time evening job in the Cock Beck pub near my home in Leeds. The atmosphere in the bar was sombre. A wall-mounted television showed the Beatles’ film Help! People cried. The grief around me intensified the pain of my broken heart.

Gloom lingered during my next shift, and the next, and the next. After three weeks I’d had enough and left.

Passing by thirty-five years later, I called in for a pint. Were they still showing respect for John Lennon or was it just Leeds’ most miserable pub?

 

9 December 2025, Tuesday

The Mayor of Malki Chiflik received official correspondence from the President of the European Central Bank advising him that in preparation for Bulgaria’s admission to the Eurozone our local lad Johnny Ten Levs should be renamed Johnny Five Euro and Eleven Cents.

Johnny should also be converted from four-star to unleaded to comply with European Union directives on air quality. Buying him another tube of Maika Valyak (Майка Валяк, meaning ‘Mum Rollette’) simply wasn’t enough. Johnny pointed out that his daily bottle bank deposit of at least six empties renders him more of an environmentalist than any of the rest of us.

 

10 December 2025, Wednesday

Damp weather, veterinary care responsibilities and heavy-duty gardening demands had recently restricted our leisure time activities. To put matters straight this sunny day, we searched for the ruins of the Sarashka Mosque in the Old Town quarter. Destroyed in the 1890s when Bulgarian forces sent all the Ottomans back to Ottomania, no trace of it remained as other buildings had since sprung up and collapsed on the site. But we did find the distressingly neglected remnants of the underground steam hammam. Tunnels where sweaty men in the nip once wandered were now carpeted with empty beer bottles and crisp packets.

 

11 December 2025, Thursday

Choosing a favourite, we spent thirty minutes listing the Orthodox monasteries we’d visited. Something we’d never have predicted before emigrating to Bulgaria, but today’s trip to Sokolovsky Monastery near Gabrovo sparked the conversation.

The colourful old church, the spectacular mountain scenery, the story of the monks’ bravery in the uprising against the Ottoman Yoke, and the cat that became our guide all captured our hearts. In the middle of a courtyard immersed in flowers and greenery, the murmur of water flowing from a white stone fountain built in 1865 by master craftsman Kolyu Ficheto was all that disturbed the silence.

 

12 December 2025, Friday

Mass protests across Bulgarian in recent weeks prompted the government to resign but it’ll make little difference to our lives. We change governments as often as we change our underwear i.e. about twice a year. Until there’s an election they’ll continue to draw salaries.

Stanley Baxter died. I was slightly pleased because I thought he’d died twenty years ago, and greatly saddened because he had been the first person on the television to make me laugh.

Other news causing delight and sadness was the visiting deer that’s been eating our precious plants. But what could be more precious than nature?

 

13 December 2025, Saturday

Via an old Woolworth’s cassette tape played on a constant loop in Billa supermarket since 1973, Roy Wood was telling the world he wished it could be Christmas every day. I noticed this as a table groaning under the weight of Stollen (not stolen) bread cried out for a defibrillator.

I was sure that Billa’s shareholders with seasonal profits in mind would join Roy in his wishing. But had they for even a second considered the spread of the diabetes problem across Europe and the dire consequences of eating 365 (or multiples thereof for the gannets) mince pies per year?

 

14 December 2025, Sunday

An eggcup’s capacity of yellowy-red messy mass squirted from the hole in Crazy Ludo’s leg when the vet touched it. Shortly afterwards our beautiful sunny day was swamped with icy fogginess the minute we stepped outside in full gardener’s kit.

To lift our spirits, we turned to retail psychotherapy and became the proud owners of a state-of-the-art Vileda Supermocio - Torsion Power Model, which is much the same as an ordinary mop bucket but with a turbocharged wringer facility. It had been on my bucket list since the day I discovered the concept of floor mopping (Thursday 14 December 1972).

 

15 December 2025, Monday

I want to weep, every cell in my body aches and fire rips through my brain when I hear of groups of innocent people gathering on the sand to eat and enjoy each other’s company, as friends and families are inclined to do, and then to be murdered in cold blood by the evilest lifeforms to currently blight our beautiful planet. In Gaza it’s happened every day for years but yesterday similar horror struck on Bondi Beach in Australia. Since then, selective empathy has swamped the world as I’ve struggled to distinguish between the genuine theories and the conspiracy ones.

 

16 December 2025, Tuesday

Last week a message from Energo Pro (the local electricity boys) informed us that our power would go off for a couple of hours from 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday 17 December.  A couple of hours, experience had taught us, was the Bulgarian term for an indeterminate period of time.

Today at 2:00 p.m. our electricity went off for a couple of hours. Working a whole day ahead of schedule, we had to admire their efficiency. Unable to do anything else this dark afternoon we discussed the possibility that today’s outage was merely a rehearsal for something bigger and better tomorrow.

 

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Image:

I don’t have a photograph of the Sarashka Mosque because it was destroyed in the 1890s and I didn’t live in Veliko Tarnovo then. So here’s my own photograph of the Cock Beck pub in the fashionable Crossgates district of Leeds in 2015.

 

Part Two:

How to Make Money with a Broken Spirograph