Peshterata na Sveta Marina

Worth a detour

Twelve kilometres east of Slivarovo, behind the old border wire, is a cave that was the largest cult centre of St Marina in south-eastern Thrace, drawing pilgrims from as far as Constantinople. Water dripping from its walls is collected in vessels on the floor and treated as holy. People left small tin or silver models of the diseased part of their body at the opening, in the belief that the illness stayed behind with them.

Story

Background

St Marina's holy places in Strandzha follow a pattern: a small monastery, a spring, and a tree on which worshippers tie a thread or a scrap of clothing so that the sickness passes into it and perishes. They lie outside the villages, always in a low, damp place — a cave or a deep ravine — so that reaching them means going down rather than up.

This is the largest of them. The votive offerings are the detail that stays with people: miniatures of a diseased organ, or of a whole human body, cast in tin or silver and left at the hole in the eastern wall or by the icon. The saint's day, the seventeenth of July by the new calendar, was in Strandzha a festival for the unmarried — the lefterski panagir — and it was kept at night, with the pilgrims feasting and then sleeping by the cave in the hope of a cure or of a sign in a dream.

Getting there is the difficulty and should not be underestimated. The cave sits in the Likudi locality very close to the Turkish frontier, reached from Slivarovo or by jeep from Kosti along the old dirt road on the Rezovska ridge. There is no surfaced road, no sign in any language and no phone coverage to rely on; the nature park directorate warns that Turkish networks take over near the border. Arrange it through the park's visitor centre or the Malko Tarnovo tourist office rather than setting off alone, and carry a passport.