Shopi Erotic

The Shopi are a regional people rather than a nation. Ask someone from the hill villages around Sofia, Pernik or Kyustendil what they are and the passport answer is Bulgarian. Ask where they come from and the answer may well be Shopluk, the upland country where Bulgaria, Serbia and North Macedonia meet. Across those borders the same name belongs to people who are Serbian or Macedonian by citizenship and national feeling. What ties them together is a way of speaking, singing, dressing and joking that is older than the borders drawn through it.

Those borders are the defining modern fact of Shopluk. The Treaty of Berlin in 1878 gave Pirot to Serbia. The Treaty of Neuilly in 1919 then moved Tsaribrod and Bosilegrad from Bulgaria to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and Tsaribrod is now called Dimitrovgrad. For much of the twentieth century, Bulgarian and Serbian scholars argued over who the Shopi really belonged to, mostly by arguing over their speech. That speech falls within the western Bulgarian dialects and the transitional Torlakian belt, which shades between Bulgarian, Serbian and Macedonian. A Shop says mleko for milk where eastern Bulgarians say mlyako, and other Bulgarians pick up the difference within a sentence.

Faith is Eastern Orthodox, lived through the calendar as much as the church: saints' days, village fairs and midwinter rites with pre-Christian roots. Around Pernik, masked survakari in animal skins and heavy bells go from house to house at the New Year. They drive off evil and wish health and fertility on each household, and the town now hosts one of Europe's largest masquerade festivals. Shopluk is also known for its singing. Women sing in close two-part harmony built on grinding seconds, with a lead voice over a held drone. The grandmothers of Bistritsa, a village at the foot of Vitosha mountain, won UNESCO recognition for keeping that old polyphony alive. The shopsko horo is fast, tight-stepped and springy, a dance for people who do not tire easily.

Most Bulgarians meet the Shopi first through jokes. The stock Shop is stubborn, tight with money, suspicious of city ways and impossible to out-argue, and Shopi tell these stories about themselves with evident pleasure. The shopska salad of tomato, cucumber, pepper, onion and grated white cheese carries their name onto menus far beyond the region. Meanwhile, many Shopi villages have emptied steadily toward Sofia over the past half century.