Summer in Bulgaria: Elections, Grannies and Bear

BANYA, Bulgaria — Like the storks that glide in on their annual pilgrimage from Africa, we try to spend every summer in my wife's home village of Banya in southwestern Bulgaria.

Fittingly, it was one of Banya's storks that saluted us as fellow returnees this year by bombing our car with its well-digested lunch of frogs as we turned into the street where Anna grew up. With their 2-meter wingspans, these ain't pigeons, and the stork shit caked the roof like a jumbo pot of yoghurt. Anna studied the mess with approval, as if reading her fortune from the muddy dregs at the bottom of a coffee cup. "Kâsmet, kâsmet. It's good luck," she concluded. "It's a sign. It's going to be a great holiday."

She was right. Banya's swimming pools, quince rakiya and long mountain hikes were exactly the detox that a frazzled news editor needed. I was determined to discard my journalistic hat over July, and tune out as soon as anyone mentioned the news. Even though I would be in the country during an election that was meant to spell the end of Boyko Borissov's more-than-decade-long dominance of Bulgarian politics, I was not going to let "Boko the pumpkin head" — as he is nicknamed — foil my pursuit of Balkan Zen.

I will never downplay the importance of Bulgarian politics, I just naively thought I could ignore it for a while. In fact, there are high-stakes questions weighing on the nation. Is Slavi Trifonov, the showman who won the July 11 election, serious about flushing out the Augean stables of corruption and fixing a rule-of-law crisis that erupted in massive street protests last summer? Why are Bulgarians such bloody-minded conspiracy theorists on the coronavirus vaccine? I'll admit these are vital topics but, on my holiday, I'd vowed to...