{"id":803,"date":"2015-07-24T16:18:01","date_gmt":"2015-07-24T16:18:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=803"},"modified":"2015-07-24T16:37:26","modified_gmt":"2015-07-24T16:37:26","slug":"dionysus-bulgarian-hero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=803","title":{"rendered":"Dionysus, Bulgarian Hero"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"photo\"<\/a>I\u2019ve been traveling through Bulgaria trying to get a handle on its nature. \u00a0Is it East or West, Mediterranean or Slavic, old or modern? \u00a0Something clicked when I remembered that Dionysus was called \u201ca foreign god.\u201d\u00a0 And that dazzling, charismatic god came from Thrace, name of ancient lands of Bulgaria. \u00a0 Ah hah!\u00a0 Not because holiday makers are staggering drunkenly in fields, stripping and dancing ecstatically.\u00a0 They are not having sex with maenads in enlightening mysteries – or at least not that I know.\u00a0 The main mysteries I\u2019ve seen are the crowds on the town beach, lying cheek to jowl on the crescent of sand squeezed between rocky cliffs, under the hot sun.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s that Dionysus came to the Greeks as an outsider, and remained different.\u00a0 He was an Other even when he got his own status, canonized on Mt. Olympus.\u00a0 And Bulgaria is that dazzling star that was on the edge of the Greek world, that was both great and was always on the margins.\u00a0 Even though Bulgarians see themselves at the center, they have a doubleness: their relations with more powerful neighbors have shaped their history.<\/p>\n

Back to Dionysius, who before becoming god of Ecstasy was the main Thracian god of life, death and rebirth.\u00a0 Taken to Greece, he came to represent others that don’t fit into conventional society.\u00a0 Other ways of looking, other ways of arriving at knowledge.\u00a0 Ways of participation outside reason, of receiving the epiphanies that arrive from elsewhere.\u00a0 Dionysus is \u201cthe god that comes\u201d when you least expect it.<\/p>\n

Twenty-five centuries ago in the 4th century BC, the Thracians formed a bilingual \u201cmulticultural\u201d society with Greek settlers in this modern-day polyglot beach town that has been called Apollonia, Sozopolis, and now Sozopol. That\u2019s the alluring charm of Bulgaria, crossroads for so many cultures, invaders, languages, tragedies, multiple ways. \u00a0 Lying on the beach squeezed between rocky cliffs, in a packed smattering of humanity, I never knew how many languages I don’t know. \u00a0 There is something very civilized, worldly, humane in these old stones, these cultural bones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been traveling through Bulgaria trying to get a handle on its nature. \u00a0Is it East or West, Mediterranean or Slavic, old or modern? \u00a0Something clicked when I remembered that Dionysus was called \u201ca foreign god.\u201d\u00a0 And that dazzling, charismatic … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[274,195,273,271,272],"class_list":["post-803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-apollonia","tag-dionysus","tag-greek-gods","tag-sozopol","tag-thrace"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4D5qU-cX","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=803"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":808,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803\/revisions\/808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}