Mouths Full of Earth: An Interview with Kapka Kassabova
Left: Kassabova. Photo: Marti Friedlander. Right: the cover of Border.
Borders, both physical and metaphoric, are reductive; you can be on one side of a boundary or the other, under this jurisdiction or that. The Balkan Peninsula has seen it’s fair share of imposed binaries; since antiquity, lines have been drawn and redrawn, separating Latin from Greek, East from West, and Communist from Capitalist.
In her new book, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, Kapka Kassabova is less concerned about which side of the border her subjects fall than she is with how they fall. Beginning on a Black Sea beach, Kassabova travels westward to small villages along the triple border of Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece, meeting lonely shepherds, forest rangers, former border guards, refugees, and human traffickers. The places she visits have been tragic and busy in recent decades—and all have deep ancient histories. Border features a myriad of characters and locations, but the situations stack up and echo, like a Greek chorus, into an unflinching portrait of those who exist in the liminal spaces between cultures, identities, and epochs.
Our conversation took placeThe Paris Review
