Bulgaria - A Travelogue

Cart with flowers in Veliko Tarnovo

Bulgaria is one of those nations that needs a proactive Minister of Tourism to lure Americans and West Europeans (not just the usual visitors from Romania and Russia) into its historic cities and Black Sea resorts.   It’s a country that should be known for more than its yogurt, feta, the wrapper Christo, and the 1978 ricin poisoning in London of the Bulgarian dissident, Georgi Markov.   What most tourists of Greece and Rome don’t know is that Bulgaria was home to one of the most advanced prehistoric civilizations, the Thracians, who 6,000 years ago were the first culture to have created objects from gold, which can be seen in the Archeology Museum of Varna, a city on the Black Sea coast.  With its Roman and Greek ruins, Orthodox churches, mosques built during the 500-year Ottoman rule, summer heat, and outdoor restaurant culture, you’d think you were exploring a Mediterranean country.

Although there are only 7.3 million Bulgarians, they have an active physicist community at CERN most of whom are working on the CMS experiment.  One of these Bulgarian physicists, Leandar Litov, invited Spouse to give a series of lectures at a physics summer school he had organized at Primorsko, a Black Sea resort town.  We had met Leandar and his physicist wife, Nevena, in 2004 when Spouse was at CERN on sabbatical; our daughters were eleven-year-old classmates struggling to learn French together at the local collège (middle school).  We had decided then that we would like to visit Bulgaria, and just last month, from June 12-20, we had that opportunity.  We stayed four nights in Primorsko, and then embarked on an exhausting whirlwind 4-day tour of this curious ex-Communist country.  

Roman amphitheatre in Plovdiv

Plovdiv

From Sofia’s airport we rented a car and drove to Primorsko with a Bulgarian physicist from CERN named Alex, and on the way we stopped for a 3-hour lunch and quick tour of Bulgaria’s second largest city, Plovdiv, famous for its Roman ruins, cobblestone streets, and 19^th century revivalist architecture, among other things.

Plovdiv cobblestone street,
Bulgarian revivalist architecture

Primorsko

The town of Primorsko is just like any beach town: shops selling hats, sunscreen, sunglasses, bathing suit wraps, and floating toys; bars and discos playing loud music late at night; outdoor restaurants; hotels, hotels, hotels.  In my wildest dreams, I never thought I’d ever have the opportunity to swim in the Black Sea, and for me, that was one of the most exciting activities of this trip.  Bathers could walk into the sea for what seemed to be a block or two, being lapped by gentle waves, with the warm and clear water still waist-high. Primorsko’s pristine beach is littered with sunbathers of all ages and sizes.  Men with nine-months-pregnant bellies strut as if they were flaunting seductive six-pack abs, and golden agers in their 70s and 80s are unabashed to lie topless on the sand nearby overweight middle-aged bleach blondes and young women with Barbie bodies.  

Primorsko's beach

Middle-aged Strutters

Topless sunbather

Nessebar

The physics school held an afternoon’s excursion to the celebrated island-city of Nessebar, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  Although prehistoric Thracian settlements existed on the island, Nessebar became known in the middle ages for its 40 churches, of which only a few remain, and none are used now for religious services.  A tour guide took us into one 10^th century church, St. Stephen’s, and explained the iconography and rituals of the Bulgarian Orthodox church.  I took a few flash-less photos before we were told that no photos were permitted.

Pantekrator Church

Icon frescoes in St. Stephen's Church

Varna

For archeology enthusiasts, Varna is a destination.  Its museum is renowned for exhibits of Thracian gold artifacts and stunning pottery.  But I had another destination in Varna, and that was to meet Mariya Koleva, a Bulgarian poet who writes in English, whom I had become acquainted with through an online writers’ group.  Mariya, her inventor husband Emil, and their endearing 3-year-old daughter, Silviya, met us Sunday morning at the hotel where Mariya gave me the first-ever printed version of her poetry ebook, “Sombre Chapbook” - with artwork by Emil.  They proposed being our tour guides, and escorted us to the Museum of Archeology, to the “petrified forest” of limestone columns, to Pliska, the first capital of Bulgaria from the 7^th to 9^th centuries, and finally, to Madara to see Bulgaria’s famous landmark hewed out of a high cliff – the Madara Horseman galloping over a lion, followed by a dog.  According to UNESCO (the Madara Horseman is also on UNESCO’s World Heritage List), this relief was carved approximately 710 AD.  Mariya, Emil and Silviya had made that day’s expedition from Varna to Madara impressive and unforgettable.  If only we could thank them by being their tour guides in the San Francisco Bay Area.  

In front of Varna's Archeology Museum:
Emil, Mariya, CERN Wife, Eliana, and Silviya

Bulgaria's Petrified Forest

Pliskins in Pliska

Madara Horseman

Veliko Tarnovo

From Madara we drove to Bulgaria’s San Francisco, Veliko Tarnovo, a city with a long history built on a series of hills that overlook the winding Yantra River.  Veliko Tarnovo was the capital of the Second Bulgarian Empire from the 12^th to the 14^th centuries, but we had no time to visit its old fortress city and other sites because we had plans to meet friends in Sofia.  So we spent just one night and morning in this charming city with so much to discover that our time there was barely an amuse-bouche.

View of Veliko Tarnovo

A woman sweeping on Gurko Street

Sofia

In the capital Sofia – a city teeming with traffic, dotted with parks, packed with communist-era concrete apartment buildings, and alive with new businesses and stylish twenty-first century housing – we visited three religious buildings: the huge medieval-looking St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, which was built between 1882-1912 (I had no idea that Alexander Nevsky was a real person; I associated the name with Prokofiev’s opera and Sergei Eisenstein’s film); the authentic medieval and diminutive 10^th-century Boyana Church, embellished with extraordinary frescoes (another UNESCO World Heritage Site); and Europe’s third largest synagogue, which was completed in 1909.  Before World War II, Bulgaria had 50,000 Jews.  The Bulgarians, unlike other Europeans invaded by Hitler, saved almost all their Jews from extermination by the Nazis. 

St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral

Boyana Church

Sofia's Synagogue

We had dinner (and breakfast before our flight back to Geneva) at our friends’ tree-shaded apartment in Sofia.  These friends - Nevena, Leander and Michaela - had kindled our interest in their country when we met them in France almost eight years ago.  They were responsible for our being in Bulgaria this year, and for suggesting which sites of their captivating country to see during our lightning tour.  Merci beaucoup!  

Leandar, however, wasn't at home the two days when we were in Sofia.  At the conclusion of his Primorsko physics summer school, he flew back to CERN for two weeks of meetings. Nevena, who is engaged in an interesting non-CERN physics research project about medical imaging, remained in Sofia.  I never told her, but I think that she is also a CERN Wife...

CERN Wives and CERN Daughters in Sofia

CERN Daughters hugging good-bye

Higgs Boson

Enthusiastic physicists crowded the lecture hall, now an ersatz overflow assembly room.  The main auditorium had been packed by early morning with students and postdocs who had lined up before 5 AM on July 4 to procure a spot; other seats had been reserved for VIPs. They weren’t going to a rock concert.  Better than that, they were going to hear the results of two CERN experiments about the elusive Higgs boson.  

Overflow crowd in the lecture hall

Two non-physicist observers - CERN Wife and CERN Daughter - found seats by the wall in the lecture hall, and like everyone else in the room, sat facing a screen where two images from the main auditorium were posted: 1) a CERN logo noting "Higgs research update" and 2) views of the crowd in the main auditorium (where everyone in the overflow hall wanted to be).  

Waiting for the symposium to start

Lucky spectators in the auditorium,
as viewed on the screen at the overflow lecture hall

Like the scientists in the room, we too were excited to witness the "Higgs research update" announcements from the CMS and ATLAS experiments.  Although we might not have grasped everything explained by the two spokespeople - Joe Incandela of CMS and Fabiola Gianotti of ATLAS - we knew that the results of finding either the Higgs boson or a Higgs boson-like particle were extraordinary contributions to scientific knowledge of the natural world.

The Higgs boson is the particle that is believed to be responsible for giving mass to other elementary particles.  It is the last unidentified piece of the Standard Model, which describes all of nature at a fundamental level, except for gravity and dark energy.  The Standard Model has withstood concerted attack by experimentalists, who for 40 years have been trying to find ways of disproving it.  But they couldn’t.  If this discovery turns out to be the Standard Model Higgs boson, the Standard Model will have been proven correct yet again.  If it turns out not to be the Standard Model Higgs boson, further questions about the natural world would arise, which for physicists is even more interesting.  At least, this is what Spouse has told me.

So there we were, listening to the two spokespeople's reports about some of the most expensive, exciting, and exhilarating experiments in recent physics history.  Although CERN Wife and CERN Daughter needed further clarification to understand the talks and the graphs, the crowd's contagious enthusiasm needed no explanation.

Joe Incandela talks about the Standard Model

Another graph: Exclusion for SM Higgs

Explaining P-Values

Fitted signal strength

Intent physicists listening to the lecture

The CMS discovery

Joe Incandela summarizing CMS results:
discovering the Higgs boson (or boson-like particle)

Fabiola Gianotti explaining the ATLAS experiment

Gianotti explaining more results

ATLAS experiment's discovery
of the Higgs boson

Further research is needed...

Fabiola Gianotti thanking the ATLAS community

Summary of the director general of CERN,
Rolf-Dieter Heuer

Standing ovation in the auditorium

What, though, is a “boson” and why a “Higgs” boson?  A boson is a subatomic particle that has particular symmetries.  The name “boson” was coined by the theoretical physicist Paul Dirac to commemorate the contributions of the Indian mathematical physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose (1894-1974).  “Higgs” refers to the English theoretical physicist, Peter Higgs, who hypothesized the existence of this boson in 1964.  Although 5 other physicists (Robert Brout and François Englert from Belgium, and the Americans Gerald Guralnik and C.R. Hagen with Tom Kibble from England) wrote papers on the same topic at the same time as Higgs, the boson responsible for mass is named after Higgs.  Was that because his name is the easiest to pronounce?

And then there is the connotation of the Higgs boson being called the “God particle”.  This epithet comes from a popular book published in 1993 by physicist Leon Lederman and science writer Dick Teresi: The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What Is the Question? Lederman wrote that the Higgs boson is key to understanding the structure of matter but is elusive.  However, he originally wanted to call it the “Goddamn Particle” because of its “villainous nature” - but the publisher wouldn’t let them use that term.

When Spouse had forwarded me the CERN press release several weeks ago about the July 4 seminar to update the scientific community regarding the Higgs boson search, I knew that I wanted to be at that colloquium, even if I needed to take Physics 101 again.  This was going to be a momentous announcement, and as an anthropologist, I wanted to be part of that audience and experience their exhilaration.  But I’m still a little unclear about term “boson.”  I agree with my cousin Nancy (a professor at Stanford University): considering how physicists name things like hard probes and hot quarks, wouldn’t a Higgs bosom make more sense?

Hard Probes

The beach at Cagliari, Sardinia

The language of high energy physics is something that social linguists, like George Lakoff, would enjoy, because these physicists explore a world they can’t see without the help of technology, and they create names - like quarks and gluons - for the concepts of their theories and experiments.  These names interest me, as an anthropologist.  But I don’t have the time or understanding to delve into the anthropology of high energy physics in order to analyze the words that are used to explain the physics knowledge that people talk about at CERN and elsewhere.  I just wish that I could ask George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, who wrote Metaphors We Live By (1980) to do such a study.  Or maybe a linguistics or anthropology PhD student.  The question is how high energy physicists use metaphor to explain what they are doing and thinking.  According to Lakoff and Johnson, metaphor refers to “experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.”   To use a metaphor, I’m in deep water just trying to write this, because I’m sure the physicists who read what I’m writing will say I’m wrong.  

Why the term “quarks”?  It was coined by the physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles and the discovery of the “quark.”  In fact, Gell-Mann took a nonsense word from James Joyce’s poem in Finnegan’s Wake: “Three quarks for Muster Mark!/Sure he hasn't got much of a bark/And sure any he has it's all beside the mark."  Quark – unbeknownst to Joyce – became a building block of matter.  But now with more theory and more discovery in high energy physics, there are differentiated quarks: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom.  Some of these terms, in Europe, had been called something else: open charm and beauty.  Talking about metaphor…

Lakoff and Johnson write that “many aspects of our experience cannot be clearly delineated in terms of the naturally emergent dimensions of our experience.  This is typically the case for human emotions, abstract concepts [my emphasis], mental activity, time, work, human institutions, and social practices, etc., and even for physical objects that have no inherent boundaries or orientations.  Though most of these can be experienced directly, none of them can be fully comprehended on their own terms.  Instead, we must understand them in terms of other entities and experiences, typically other kinds of entities and experiences” (Metaphors We Live By, 1980:177).

So, CERN physicists have quarks, gluons, leptons, and other things I’ve heard about but barely comprehend, but I do know that the names are sometimes arbitrary – as in quarks – or descriptive – as in “top quark” and “bottom quark” (which Lakoff and Johnson would say are metaphoric descriptions).  At times, though, I think that this physics community should hire a branding consultant to help them figure out that some names are not just descriptive of their own work, but connote distinct metaphors for non-physicists.  Take the name of a physics conference that has been occurring every 2 years since 2004.  The first one was at the coastal town of Ericeira, Portugal in 2004, and ever since, the conference has been somewhere near the sea: 2006 at Asilomar in California; 2008 at Illa da Toxa in Galicia, Spain; 2010 at Eilat in Israel; and this year at Cagliari, Sardinia (Italy).

Balcony of house, Via Giovanni, Cagliari

On Via Giovanni, Cagliari

Back in 2004 when I’d first heard of this conference, I burst out laughing. “You’ve GOT to be kidding!” I said.  “What’s so funny about the name?” asked the physicist who told me he was going to be presenting a paper at the conference.

“Hard Probes?  A conference called ‘Hard Probes’?  What were you guys thinking?  Doesn’t anyone speak English?  There’s only one thing I can think of when I hear that term, and it has nothing to do with physics.” 

The physicists didn’t think my comment funny. 

Top part of the conference poster

Bottom part of the conference poster
(notice the beach scenes)

I was an accompanying CERN wife at two Hard Probes conferences, the one in Spain in 2008 and the one that just finished in Sardinia.  I enjoyed exploring Cagliari, savoring gelati, walking on the beach collecting tiny pink seashells as the water lapped my ankles, learning about a prehistoric people called the Nuraghi who settled Sardinia in the 18^th century BCE, and feasting at dinners with the physicists and some of their spouses. 

A Nuraghi fortress at Barumini, Sardinia

Physicists at Cagliari's beach before the banquet

At the Hard Probes banquet

But I don’t think that these serious scientists realize that the titles of their conferences could be metaphors with other meanings to other people, like the newest conference that’s going to be happening this October: Hot Quarks.

As I write in my blog bio, “Physicists could be considered bigamists because they seem married to their work.”  No wonder they have conferences called “Hard Probes” and “Hot Quarks.”

Metaphorical flower
on tables in the lobby and bistro at Cagliari's THotel,
where the Hard Probes 2012 conference took place

 

La Frère Fête Française à Ferney

Before moving to Ferney-Voltaire, I fantasized having a reunion in France of my coterie of high school girlfriends (and their spouses).  Decades ago our circle of seven young women of different religious and racial backgrounds hung out together before classes started, ate lunch together in our rural school’s cafeteria, and in spite of living miles away from each other, got together once in a while on weekends.  By our senior year we had become a congenial clique, although we didn’t allude to ourselves that way.  Our self-reference signified our social ideals: after an assembly during National Brotherhood Week in February of our senior year, we decided that the 7 of us were a Brotherhood.  From then on we called ourselves “Brothers.”

For over twenty years we’ve had Brotherhood reunions, most of which have taken place in the East Coast.  But as the Brother who lived so far away from all the others (California), and who was the oldest mom with the youngest child, I missed out on most Brofests, as we call our gatherings.  So I decided to host a Brofest in France, la Frère Fête Française.  

Although only two of the Brothers, Donna (whom I’ve known since kindergarten) and Jan (whom I met in high school), were able to make it to Ferney, our six-day Frère Fête introduced them to “my” part of France and neighboring Switzerland.  I prepared food for them from Picard, cooked meals from scratch, took them on trips to other towns and to stores I like (food stores, of course), and drove them through the undulating landscape of fields and farms, grazing cows and nibbling sheep, espaliered fruit trees and budding vineyards.  Sharing this part of the world with some of my oldest and dearest friends, and listening to their expressions of joy and wonder (not a Christmas cliché here) delighted me and vindicated me: yes, there are valid reasons why I enjoy living here.

CERNwife, Donna, and Jan

The Six-Day Frère Fête Française Whirlwind Tour

Day One:  Donna and Jan took the high speed TGV train (why don’t we have such trains in the US?) from Paris to Geneva.  After I picked them up and took them to the motel in Ferney-Voltaire to register and drop off their luggage, we headed up the Jura to a lookout point so that they could see the valley surrounding Lac Léman, Geneva, the Alps, and the part of France that has been my home since September.  Then we went to CERN to pick up my physicist Spouse (spouses, in the language of the Brothers, are referred to as “spice” – rhymes with mouses and mice).  And we did what many CERN scientists do in the late afternoon: sat around a patio table and sipped beer (Coke for Jan).

Having a drink at CERN

Day Two:  During the relaxing 45-minute drive to Annecy on a 2-lane country road, we passed through picture-postcard vistas of villages, rolling hills, farmland.  Annecy is an alluring city with canals, flowers, Renaissance buildings, boutiques and gelato stores, a chateau overlooking the town, a romantic botanical park that borders the clean and serene Lac d’Annecy (France’s second largest lake), and mountains that jut out from across the lake, where hand-gliders jump off cliffs and risk their lives for the views. The old town’s buildings and boutiques amazed Jan and Donna, who would have spent more time shopping if I didn’t complain about being hungry.  We bought lunch at a boulangerie/patisserie (a “formule” it’s called: one sandwich or pizza slice or quiche, a drink, and a dessert of choice for around 6 euros), and sat in the park near the lake to eat our picnic.  By late afternoon we returned to the Ferney area via the 20-minute autoroute drive because, as the spouse-chauffeur, I had to rush to CERN.  

Jan, CERNwife, and Donna at Annecy
(Jan's photo)

 

Crooked door of an old Annecy store

Lily of the Valley decorated chocolates (from May 1)
at one of Annecy's gourmet chocolateries

Day Three:  This day we relaxed in Ferney-Voltaire.  In the morning we walked to Ferney’s marché (yes, Jan and Donna were sufficiently awed), did a tour of Voltaire’s chateau in the afternoon, and ate dinner at a captivating country inn located in Echenevex, a village nestled in the Jura foothills. 

The three Brothers at the Ferney market

Jan and CERNwife in front of Voltaire's chateau

Dinner at Auberge des Chasseurs, Echenevex

Day Four:  Lac Léman, the largest lake in Switzerland (known as “Lake Geneva” to many Americans), is so picturesque that describing the lake and the towns, mountains, terraced vineyards and villages that surround it is impossible without seeming platitudinous and vapid. Some scenery is better just to experience. That’s what we did on Day Four by taking the 2-lane lake route (rather than the 4-lane autoroute) to the captivating Swiss town of Morges, where we strolled through a somewhat boring crafts fair that was held in Morges’ 13^th-century chateau.  Then we drove to one of Switzerland’s spectacular tourist venues, the medieval Chateau de Chillon, built on a rocky promontory that juts into Lac Léman within site of snow-covered Alps.  Walking through the cobblestone courtyards, climbing up and down stairs, examining various rooms of the chateau, and exploring the dungeon, where Lord Byron’s graffiti signature on one of the columns is marked by a frame (remember, he wrote “The Prisoner of Chillon”), we were like children playing make-believe.  Chateau de Chillon casts that spell.

The moat at Chateau de Chillon

Lord Byron's carved graffiti (framed)

In the world of make-believe

Day Five:  The salad bar at CERN’s cafeteria awed Jan and Donna as it had me.  My CERN Spouse just doesn’t understand how the three of us could get so excited by a salad bar, but we can.  After lunch he put on his tour guide cap and took them to the Microcosm, the museum that explains the kind of physics experiments that occur at CERN.  We headed to a model of the detector used in the ALICE experiment, which, considering Spouse works on ALICE, formed the framework for his explanation of CERN physics.  From the Microcosm we drove to the ALICE experimental site, but we couldn’t go down 100 meters into the tunnel to see the real detector because the site has been closed to visitors and employees since March: the experiment’s collisions of particles are occurring down there.  I think that by the end of the day, Donna and Jan were more impressed with CERN physics – whether or not they understood it is another story – than they had been with the CERN cafeteria.

Model of the ALICE detector at the Microcosm

Spouse, Donna and Jan at ALICE display

Day Six: Yvoire, regarded as one of the most beautiful villages in France, fills with tourists during vacations and holidays.  Although Yvoire is said to be a medieval village, in fact, most of its gray stone buildings hail from the early Renaissance, although its chateau (it seems as if every village I’ve written about here is dominated by a chateau) began its life during the 14^th century.  From Ferney-Voltaire, one can get to Yvoire by taking a boat across Lac Léman from Nyon, Switzerland, or one can partially circumnavigate the lake by skirting Geneva (our way of getting there).  We walked around its cobblestoned streets, admired the colorful potted flowering plants that decorate the gray buildings, peeked into Yvoire’s shops, and ate a leisurely lunch of “filets de perche” – tiny perch filets fried in butter and served with pommes frites – the specialty of French and Swiss restaurants bordering Lac Léman.  Walking fast and not going into stores, tourists could see Yvoire in 20 minutes or less.  It’s a small treasure.  But we went in and out of boutiques and tried on clothes, walked into galleries and tourist shops, and relaxed at a restaurant by the harbor – with a view of Switzerland across the lake - for our midday meal of perch filets.  We stayed in Yvoire at least 3 hours.  Maybe more.

A street in Yvoire

CERNwife and Donna eating dessert, Jan with spoon

Day Seven:  I picked up Jan and Donna from their hotel at 7 AM and drove them to the Geneva Airport for their flight back to Washington, DC.   After our usual emotional Brotherhood good-byes, I left them in the departure section of the airport and walked downstairs to the arrivals.  My 89-year-old mother was coming for a two-week visit.