На Юг

Beach studies: long shadows, a man buried to his ankles-up, faces drawn in sand, one determined surfer on a knee-high wave — and a white dress walking into the Black Sea because the day demanded it.

The travelling company, unnamed but essential: beach bars held down, cliff sunsets witnessed, one gentleman filming everything on a shoulder-mounted relic already ten years obsolete.

The working shore: blue boats registered ВАРНА, one patient fisherman per fifty metres, and the evening line-up hauled out beyond the tide.

Roadside commerce: melons by the tonne from a blue truck, a horse carriage waiting on fares, markets that assemble under trees at dawn and vanish by two.

Devnya, where Bulgaria makes its cement: monuments to industry, panel blocks numbered like specimens, and a lonely modernist hotel beside a museum of Roman mosaics — the two best floors in town, two thousand years apart.

The silo cathedral: grain elevators and cement works shot like monuments, because that is what they are — the region's true skyline, rusting with enormous dignity.

Parting frames: an EU flag propped by a wounded tree two years before membership, a defaced political poster, and a general accepting flowers forever.