Iva Apostolova

"Solitude is not an absence. It is a form of fullness. Almost no one understands this. They call it emptiness, oblivion, cold, collapse, even pathology. And it is simply a language, the most ancient of all. Spoken by sages, eccentrics, exiles, writers and women who go out in the morning with a book under their arm instead of a companion."
Sofia Proneikos, "Caryatid - The Vital Threads of The Soul"

One year ago, I published my book Caryatid – The Vital Threads of the Soul on Amazon. Today, as I look back on those twelve months, I feel a quiet yet extraordinary happiness, one that requires neither a solemn assessment nor any particular eloquence.
Through my own efforts, I managed to reach 1,437 people. My book is now in the homes of people in Germany, Austria, France, England, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, Canada, the United States and Australia. And however much this geography delights me, it remains secondary to a far more important fact: people from different cultures, thousands of kilometres apart, have found in my writing sufficient reason to devote a part of their lives to it.
I have always regarded time as the most personal of human possessions. We can give objects, share spaces and exchange words, but the time we devote to someone is finite and irretrievable. That is why I am particularly grateful to everyone who has allowed my book into their hours of solitude, into their homes, into that part of everyday life in which a person chooses for themselves whose company to keep.
I am also grateful to fate for this unexpected geography of human trust. I have had neither a major publishing house nor a publicity machine behind me, only my own work and the freedom to write the book I genuinely wanted to write.
One year later, what matters most to me is not that Caryatid has crossed oceans, but that it has been welcomed by people who owed me neither their attention nor their trust.
And how lovely it is, sometimes, to set all philosophical reflections aside and simply acknowledge that one is happy.

Thank you!
🙏🦋🌷

This photo is from that very first moment when I held my book in my hands! I felt the same way I did 10 years ago, when the doctors placed my son in my arms.

"A home library is a gentle comfort." Annie Dillard

Good night

In 1819, Francis, the future King of the Two Sicilies, visited the museum in Naples with his wife and daughter and encountered a feature of Roman civilisation about which apparently no one had thought it necessary to warn His Highness. Among the finds from Pompeii and Herculaneum were images entirely incompatible with the standards of propriety that nineteenth-century European society had so carefully cultivated.
The solution came with suitable monarchical decisiveness: the offending objects were to be separated from the rest of the collection. In 1821, the famous Gabinetto degli oggetti osceni appeared, the predecessor of Naples's Gabinetto Segreto, the Secret Cabinet, where antiquity enjoyed the peculiar privilege of being celebrated as the foundation of European civilisation while being locked away whenever it showed insufficient respect for the morals of its descendants.
I imagine the astonishment of a first-century Roman if someone explained that the descendants of the barbarians against whom his empire had fought would one day admire Roman law, architecture and literature, yet consider an image of the god Priapus a public danger.
And Priapus was hardly a marginal presence in domestic life. In Pompeii's famous House of the Vettii, he greets visitors at the entrance, weighing his impressive phallus against a bag of money. The owners, two wealthy freedmen, evidently felt no embarrassment about this composition. To them, it could represent fertility, prosperity, protection against the evil eye, and perhaps a certain sense of humour.
Which raises the question of who was actually better equipped to understand the symbol: the Roman who placed it on his household wall, or the European nobleman who, eighteen centuries later, insisted that such images be concealed from respectable people?
Of course, it would be equally mistaken to imagine Roman society as a realm of unrestricted sexual freedom. It had rigid hierarchies, different rules for men and women, and moral restrictions we would hardly describe as liberal today. But the Romans did not possess the same categories through which modern Europe began separating erotic imagery from the religious, magical, decorative and mythological.
The phallus could be an amulet, an image of a deity, a fertility symbol or a means of warding off harmful forces, without necessarily being considered indecent. Mythological love scenes belonged to a world in which the gods were under no obligation to observe the conventions of Christian propriety.
The history of the Secret Cabinet itself is particularly remarkable. It was opened and closed, access was restricted according to the political and moral attitudes of successive administrations, and in 1849 its entrance was even walled up. The collection became freely accessible only in 2000.
A civilisation had been buried beneath volcanic ash in AD 79. When it was finally excavated, part of it was buried again, this time beneath the moral prejudices of its own investigators.
There is something extraordinarily ironic about Europeans being prepared to resurrect antiquity as an ideal of beauty and reason, while insisting that it first be dressed appropriately.
Had Priapus been able to witness all this, he would probably have been particularly pleased with his historical fate: almost two millennia later, he still manages to alarm people who claim to have inherited his civilisation.

Calm evening

There are places whose history cannot be told in the singular without committing an act of violence against history itself. The Bulgarian Southern Black Sea coast, to which I belong, is one of them. And if I were to define its essence, I would begin neither with the antiquity of its towns nor with the succession of states that have ruled it, but with the fact that here, human belonging has almost never coincided entirely with political sovereignty.
A person could be born in a town whose name his ancestors had pronounced in Greek, live under an empire that did not speak his mother tongue, trade with people across the sea, and die without ever leaving his birthplace, although during his lifetime it had belonged to different rulers. For government chanceries, these were changes of sovereignty. For him, they were changes in the circumstances under which he had to continue living.
It is precisely here that we discover the essential difference between history written by power and history experienced by people.
Even in antiquity, the Pontus was a space of movement, not a periphery waiting motionless for someone to bring it civilisation. The sea connected communities whose relations cannot be reduced to the convenient formula of an encounter between Greeks and Thracians, because every such encounter involved negotiation, rivalry, mutual dependence, and a gradual transformation of perceptions of the foreign and the familiar.
Many centuries later, the same coast remained a place where political authority could change more quickly than the language spoken within a family, the customs of a harbour, or the memory of a community. There is nothing idyllic about this. The history of the Black Sea contains enough coercion, hostility, and displacement to protect us from the temptation to call every centuries-long coexistence harmonious.
Yet this is precisely why its memory deserves particular respect.
For the gravest historical losses are not confined to destroyed buildings. Sometimes they occur when a language ceases to be heard in the streets, when a surname becomes the only surviving testimony to someone's origins, or when descendants must search foreign archives for evidence of a life their ancestors considered naturally belonging to that place.
This is also why I regard the Southern Black Sea coast not as a territory whose past must be appropriated by a single national history, but as part of Bulgaria whose historical richness lies precisely in the impossibility of confining it within such a history.
Modern Bulgarian statehood does not need to erase earlier forms of belonging in order to be legitimate.
Today, when the Black Sea once again appears in international affairs primarily through the language of military security, strategic interests, and disrupted shipping, I cannot forget that for millennia these same waters carried not only armies and political ambitions, but also books, letters, families, crafts, words, and ideas that transformed life on both shores.
And when I speak of this place as my own, I do not mean a claim to exclusive possession. Quite the opposite: my belonging to it is inseparable from the awareness of how many people before me have called it theirs, sometimes in different languages, sometimes with incompatible understandings of history, yet with an equally genuine right to personal memory.
I do not wish the past to be corrected to make it more convenient for the present, nor to be turned into an indictment of people who bear no responsibility for the decisions of previous generations.
I wish only that it remain possible to speak of it with accuracy, dignity, and that intellectual freedom without which historical memory gradually becomes a decoration of the state.
For the Southern Black Sea coast is not merely the place where I live.
It is the place whose history I could not tell truthfully if I agreed to leave part of it unspoken.