The Bells Still Ring in Breznik

I arrived in Breznik on the morning of Survakari, the last day of the old Bulgarian winter calendar. The road from Pernik had been empty for twenty minutes, the fields white and still under a low grey sky, and then suddenly the village appeared — a scatter of concrete houses and a church with a cracked bell tower. By nine o'clock the streets were full of men wearing goat-hide coats turned shaggy-side out, their faces hidden behind towering wooden masks fitted with real ram horns and painted in scarlet and black. The bells — six, eight, sometimes twelve per dancer, strapped to the waist with leather belts — weighed anywhere from twenty to a hundred kilograms. When they moved, the sound was not music. It was a low, arrhythmic roar that you felt in your sternum before you heard it with your ears.