[…]
Kitan was born in 1993. He had a human head. His eyes, his thinking, his communication, everything about this dog was different. He was a true Karakachan. It dawned on Kámen and Achilles that Kitan was probably one of the last purebred Karakachans and that the whole lineage was on the brink. A lot of things were on the brink. It was the 1990s, a long decade known as the Transition. The regime had collapsed and with it the state-controlled economy, including animal husbandry and agriculture. Cooperatives were dismantled, the agronomists and shepherds lost their jobs and a whole nation of buffalo, sheep, cows, goats and horses had nowhere to go.
Then came the post-communist restitution: if your grandparents’ property had been confiscated by the state, which was the case for almost everyone, you were entitled to receive a part of that lost estate which also included land and animals. But at this point, you had no idea how to milk a goat or care for a horse and you were living in a flat anyway. It was fifty years too late. So, you got rid of these animals by passing them on directly to the brokers who swarmed around animal auctions like vultures and gladly took them off your hands, then sold them to slaughterhouses and industrial farms abroad. Privatisation repeated the crimes of collectivisation.
Grazing animals had once been embedded in your family, with their own names and lineages. Your ancestors had slept with them and shared food with them. Now, just one or two generations later, their children and grandchildren were shipped off like slaves to some faraway shore or down the road to the slaughterhouse. It was a repetition of what your ancestors had already experienced first-hand.
And the Karakachan dog? Since the great Karakachan flocks were disbanded in the 1950s, it had endured a brutal fate. By 1990, it had been endangered for some decades. When the nomads were settled and their dogs went wild, the state invented an ‘anti-rabies’ policy which gave blanket permission to kill guardian dogs that were not used. This caused the first sharp decline in the Karakachan pedigree. It was further diluted in the 1980s by uncontrolled cross-breeding with other large dogs from completely different lineages like the Caucasian Shepherd Dog and Saint Bernard. This happened because there was no established standard for the breed.
Against this backdrop, Kámen, Achilles and Marina criss crossed the mountainous countryside in search of more dogs like Kitan. They found them with the last of the highland shepherds – endangered indigenous breeds of dogs, sheep, goats and horses, and no one else was interested in them because their commercial value was lost.
Over the next decade, the brothers’ mission was successful: to breed authentic Karakachan dogs and have the breed officially recognised and quantified, which had never been done before. Their dogs from Kitan’s lineage ignited interest, won competitions and began to sell at home and abroad, inspiring a whole movement in the world of dog lovers. This ensured the health of the gene pool. When Kámen and Kitan were invited to a television studio in the capital, because by then Kitan had become a celebrity, the dog walked the city streets on a lead as if he’d grown up there. But the Karakachan dog is not a pet. It needs a mission: to guard. The refinement of the breed over the centuries had been merciless. I heard of cases from the 1980s when Karakachan dogs who failed to react to a wolf attack were shot by their owners : who cried as they did it. You cannot feed a Karakachan dog that doesn’t work was the brutal logic, but it was more than that, there was a military ethic at work. You could not have deserters in the ranks. In fact, these dogs were used by the army from the Russian–Turkish War in 1878 onwards. Traditionally, shepherd dogs have one of their ears clipped as puppies, the right ear for males, the left for females, due to some antiquated belief that it made their hearing better. This was still carried out in places and Marina said there was some truth to the bit about the hearing, but the practice was slipping into the past, thank God. One thing was certain – these dogs were made to be one with the tough mountains of the southern Balkans and their web of large predators, grazing animals and humans. They were adapted for these conditions and could survive, but not thrive, as house pets. Guardian dogs didn’t just protect the flock from large predators. They also protected large predators from being shot by people with livestock.
If canine people like Kitan disappear, the mountain’s web will be torn forever. Mountain dogs, mountain sheep, mountain goats and mountain horses go together, and human livelihoods and psyches have been woven into this web for thousands of years.
Twenty-five years ago, a retrospective exhibition in the capital showed photographs of the last Karakachan nomads with their flocks in the hills, before they were settled.
‘These old men and women came, dressed in black,’ said Achilles, ‘they walked around the exhibition and cried.’
They were Karakachans who had been robbed of their animals and their paths fifty years earlier and put in apartment towers. Among them was a tall man who had spent ten years in prison for saying, in 1958, that the bandits who stole and slaughtered his animals on behalf of the communist state were – bandits. His white-haired wife was there too. Their daughters had grown up without him, just a plate on the table ‘for Dad’.
Marina, Kámen and Achilles, soon joined by ‘the other man’, continued combing through the Bulgarian highlands and started buying the odd mountain sheep here, five there, until a small flock was harnessed. The young enthusiasts were interested in animals, not people, but inevitably they came across the last of the animal people. They were all marginalised, often from minorities or the traumatised survivors of collectivisation, communist exploitation, labour camps, post-communist anarchy and the contempt of a self-loathing society. Many of them were Pomaks in the Rhodope Mountains – the Bulgarian-speaking Muslims of the southern Balkans. Emin was a Pomak, and his father had got into horses in the 1940s when he was hired by a Karakachan family. Like the Karakachans, the Pomaks had suffered a brutal assault – the state had taken their Arabic-Turkish names and replaced them with state-approved ones in the 1970s. They held on to their animals because that’s all they had left. The Pomaks were conservative and had remained close to the land, to old ways of speaking, old breeds of animals and old mountain knowledge. It was in these isolated communities that the young enthusiasts found indigenous dogs, sheep and horses.
There was the shepherd Zebeko, so devoted to his flock that he slept inside a dog’s hut with his legs sticking out. His Karakachan dogs were bearded and speckled, and not for sale. They were a type of dog that disappeared with him. There was the crippled shepherd Sbirko (Motley), so called because he kept all sorts of animals. He lived in a hut above the pen and having lost the use of his legs, he watched his dogs take the flock out to pasture every day, then bring them back without fail, his army of orphaned animals. No help came. Sbirko was near starvation. After two years of visiting him and passing the tests he put the brothers and Marina through to seeif they really cared, knowing he was at the end and that he’d found a good home for his animals, Sbirko gave his flock to the young enthusiasts. And died, taking the century with him. His black mountain sheep were the base of today’s flock. There was a young shepherd called Tahir. They encountered him in the same state in which I discovered Emin: sleeping under a plastic sheet in rags, kept warm by dogs and hanging on to his sheep and goats. They brought him here and he became a super shepherd. That was how the dying village of Orelek was reinvigorated by a bunch of smart, hard-working idealists. They threw themselves into rebuilding the metropolis of lost animals. The flock grew. Two human children were born – Alex and Theo – and many lambs, puppies and goat kids. Enthusiasts and volunteers joined in. Everybody slept where they could – caravans, ruined houses, and washed in the river. ‘The other man’ and his shepherd father stayed in Orelek for nine years. Tahir became like a son to the old shepherd but after a few years, he left to grow his own flock in his own mountain, where in every glade there had been a dairy house, and where in one wealthy estate in the nineteenth century – Agush Aga’s estate – ceramic pipes had connected the milking dens to the dairy and through them flowed the milk of 12,000 sheep. One hundred dogs had guarded that flock. His mountain was the homeland of a man who wasn’t a shepherd but who had walked the land with his flute, followed by animals: Orpheus. Tahir cried when he left Orelek with twenty-five sheep and two dogs in tow, along with the parting gift of a choice ram from the old shepherd.
After Tahir came other gifted shepherds. There was Vangel, a dog whisperer like Kámen, who became like a brother to ‘the other man’. But when a volunteer fell in love with Vangel and the couple asked to stay on and work together, it was ‘No’. There was no room for couples. More losses followed. The biggest one came when ‘the other man’ and his father left and with them, most of the sheep. An unhappy agreement was reached between Kámen and his now ex-partner, in which Kámen was left with a handful of sheep and two rams. He started all over again. And again, he grew his flock to the size it was now: 700. The other man and his father made their exit down into the gorge with their detachment of animals. They had a strong flock, but no base.
This happened fifteen years ago. The two men have been sworn enemies ever since. Kámen did not even speak his name – he was ‘the other man’.
[…]
A whole change of culture. Kámen had shed his dark mood. The flock came into view. They were scattered like black dominoes on a white board and several Karakachan dogs came over to greet Kámen, regally, without breaking into a run.
‘Keep close to me,’ he said. ‘The rest are fine but Balkán will bite you.’
Balkán growled. He was old and the leader of the pack. His eyes were inflamed – perhaps from staying up all night, keeping watch. He had that almost unbearably loyal look on his face, a Karakachan look, his chest prominent as if covered in medals of fur. It was the fate of the best shepherds, to put the flock first and suffer in silence.
The guardian dog is ‘the only animal perfectly trained for the service of others,’ said an unnamed naturalist a few hundred years ago. I saw this in Balkán’s red eyes.
The sheep came into sharper focus. They were a mineral black-brown and with their small, dense, woolly bodies, they looked as old as the stones. Snouts to the ground, moving as one even when they were scattered – it was a scene I knew from some old life of mine. Their faces were distinctive, with velvet snouts under their curly hair, and as finely drawn as a pharaoh’s head.
The cold breeze ruffled the dogs’ coats. They looked heroic. It was an animal army, a complete world without humans. Everything went still. I wanted to kneel on the marble floor of the corrie because these really were the oldest animals in the world. You looked at them and you could see that they’d come through slaughter.
I tried to count them but gave up. Mountain sheep were the first grazing animals to be domesticated, but this lot looked pretty wild.
The Karakachans had preserved their animal breeds in a remarkably unadulterated state. This in itself was a sign of the long-standing nomadic existence of these people and animals: it showed that their contact with civilisation was merely transactional. Their deepest contact had been with the natural environment. This is why their sheep remained semi-wild. In the first half of the twentieth century, there were between half a million and a million of these sheep. In November 1957, army lorries blocked the roads and took the migrating nomads’ animals, leaving three sheep per family. The Karakachans were literally pushed off the road and forced between four walls. This is called sedentarisation, to rhyme with homogenisation. When the flocks were taken, the dogs dispersed and went wild, howling like wolves. But they were in fact following the north–south trails – all the way from here to the Aegean Plains. And then, at the end of the season, they would come back along the trail. Without the flock. Without the humans.
This was foreseen by Karakachan seers.
‘If the Karakachans die, everybody dies,’ they said. Sheep, dogs, horses, donkeys and humans. It is not a coincidence that the animals they bred took their name.
By the end of 1958, the number of mountain sheep had decreased to 158,896. All Karakachan sheep were swept into the industrial project of increased production – of meat, milk and wool. They were immediately interbred with others, like Merino. In the 1980s, 33,000 tonnes of wool were produced for the textile industry every year. Forty years later, this industry was gone too. The odd artisan is left spinning wool.
Many died of broken health at the crossroads of fortune where their animals were taken away. Others resigned themselves to living between four walls while still wearing their thick woollen clothes and getting hired as the best shepherds around in the summer season. True, they were now employed by the very industrial-agro complex that had wrecked their way of life, but at least they were able to live in the open for half the year – the men, that is, not the women. In Greece, a handful of Sarakatsani continued to travel in summer along a south–north axis, but it stopped at the border. The annihilation of the last shepherd nation in Europe delivered a clear message: modernity had no place for free-moving people and animals.
This flock, these dogs, symbolised what was left of it.
The dogs walked with us, seven of them. With a crook under his arm and Balkán at his side, came the shepherd. He was dark and unshaven in faded tracksuit pants and a peaked cap. He smiled warmly and took my hand in his. His other hand was swollen and purple.
‘What’s with your hand?’
‘Ach, it’s on the mend,’ he said breezily. A gap in his teeth dented his smile. But his eyes were hidden.
Kámen inspected two sheep bitten by an adder. They limped a bit.
‘Kito, come. This is Kito. And Kasho. Gashta the pants. Baguer. Redhead.’ The shepherd introduced me to the dogs. ‘Balkán is best left alone, eh, my boy.’
Kámen sent the dogs off. He didn’t like it that his shepherd was introducing me to them. And when the shepherd said, jokingly, ‘These sheep are only his on paper, otherwise they’re mine,’ Kámen abruptly herded them up the corrie. The dogs followed.
We sat by the top lake and The Privateer’s cowherd joined us. He was a skinny young guy with blue eyes discoloured by sadness, or booze. The tourist path passed along the ridge above and by law, the grazing animals had to be 100 metres away from the path. People came down from Thunder Peak, skirted the two glacial cirques and continued onto the well-trodden paths of eastern Pirin. Hikers were like pegs along the ridge, but this was an empty world. The two shepherds kept each other company for lack of any other.
‘Where’s the bear?’ said Kámen. ‘I couldn’t sleep thinking of that bear.’
‘She’s around,’ grinned his shepherd. He’d seen her on Kamen klet, pushing her cubs one by one to the edge of the forest.
Last year, a bear came to the pen. The dogs barked their heads off but didn’t attack.
‘I threw a stone at her, and she threw a stone back at me. Like a person,’ the shepherd recounted. ‘Then she picked up a sheep and walked off with it tucked under one arm. Like a person.’
We laughed. The shepherd was forty-ish and handsome, in a rakish way, his skin full of sun and wind. When he took off his hat, I saw the pain in his clear eyes.
[…]
Published in: Kapka Kassabova, Anima: A Wild Pastoral, Vintage, London, 2025, pp. 31–35, 46–48.