By LIONEL ROLFE

After living four years in Los Angeles, my wife got homesick for her hometown of Varna, Bulgaria, and wanted to return to the city where she was born and was reared. Not only was she worrying about her aging parents and family and friends, but she obviously needed to see if she could go home again, if only temporarily.

When she joined me in America, it was a decision made with some reluctance. She had some bitter sweet memories of her life in Varna, but the sweet ones grew as she battled with the new and alienating lifestyle of her new husband's hometown.

For my part, I fell in love with her first, but as I learned that she came from the native land of Orpheus and Sparatcus, the allure of going home with her grew.

Orpheus and Spartacus were Thracian, the people who inhabited the land before the Bulgers and the Slavs arrived. By the time that occurred, the Romans had slaughtered most of the Thracians. Still, it is estimated about a quarter of today's Bulgarians have genes from this ancient people from whom the Greeks took some of their most important Gods.

Bulgaria claims that it was the first European country, founded only six centuries after Christ, long before England, France and Germany were around.

Orpheus was the first and greatest singer and storyteller of all time and perhaps more of a legend than he ever was a man. He was most certainly kind of a God, or at least the son of a God. He was considerably before David of the Bible.

On quite a different note, some time after Orpheus, another Thracian, Spartacus, led the slave rebellions that eventually helped spelled the doom of the Roman Empire.
Orpheus, the legendary son of Calliope and perhaps Apollo, was the incomparable musician and poet of Greek legend. He could sing the birds out of the trees, they said, and interceded against the Sirens who called Greek sailors onto their inevitable doom on the rocks.

His great tragedy was one of the great love stories of Ancient TimesпїЅ"that of Orpheus and Eurydice. When Eurydice was bitten by a snake and went to the nether world, the Gods tried to keep the disconsolate singer on a more even keel. They gave him a last chance. They told Orpheus he could go to the Nether world and bring her backпїЅ"without once looking at her as he took her to the surface.

Of course, he had to look at her. And she was lost forever.

After that, he battled with female devotees of Dionysus, for which he had his head cut off. It floated down the river. They were angry with him that he didn't take one, or all of them, perhaps, rather than keep thinking of his beloved Eurydice.

It may not be without significance that a particular cave in the Rodopi Mountains is the supposed womb from which sprang Orpheus, after the sun had intercourse with the earth.
The existence of these two great heroes in an unlikely land intrigued me. Bulgarians today are mainly of Slavic extraction, and relatively peaceful.

In the sixth century the Slavs formed the first nation in Europe by merging their forces with the short, dark and fierce Bulgar warriors who rode out of the east from where the Tartars and Mongolians came swooping down. The Slavs tended to be tall, often blond and fair, and more agricultural than warlike. The Bulgarians and the Slavs made a pact: the Bulgers would defend the Slavs. They also intermarried.

Boryana said that as peaceful as the Slavs tended to be, the Bulgers were fierce. The Chinese successfully distracted the Bulgers from invading their land by putting naked women on top of the Great Wall. After that, the Bulgers turned around and headed west until they came to the land by the Black Sea.

The Thracian were an entirely different people, and it is hard to say how they mixed in with the modern Bulgarians, for they disappeared as a civilization more than 2,000 years ago.

They were a polygamous people who had no written language and certainly no notation for their song and dance, for which they were most famous. But they were effective warriors and horsemen, and everywhere in Bulgaria their tombs and cliffside sculptures and cities dot the landscape.

Varna was, like other Bulgarian cities such as the ancient Plovdiv, originally a Thracian settlement. It was a port city on the Black Sea more than 2,000 years ago. Its name was Oddesos.

We flew over the red tile roofs and tired high-rise apartment buildings where most of the population still lives, from the communist reign that ended in 1989.

The way the city pops out from under the gray and windy skies we flew through to get there, its enchanted quality came through. We were in a small, bumpy, twin-engine prop plane which bounced its way to the airport runway. The landing was quite well executed considering the turbulence.

It also looked incredibly green, and the Black Sea blue. It was a striking seaside town that was amazingly green, greener maybe even than London. It made me think we had arrived at a fantasy place, cut off from the rest of the world in a parallel universe.

It was May, not yet summer, so the sunlight was beautiful but not yet warm and the air
still brisk from the winds off the sea. These were what my wife called "summer rains."

We must have prowled everything in central Varna by foot, from the famous Sea Garden, which reminded me ever so much of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, the Opera House, which houses an Internet club underneath it, the cathedrals, the city hall, which once had housed the ruling Communist Party, the low-lying churches built that way because under the Ottomans, Christian churches were not allowed to rise above the mosques the Turks were busy building.

Much of Varna is in the past. The bottom floor of many buildings are shops and the below the ground shops you got to down narrow, stone chairs. Upstairs are the residences. There are also lots of farmer's markets, where Bulgarians rightly or wrongly warily watch their wallets because there are so many Gypsies around.

Still, each area of the city is very much its own community.

To be sure, there are supermarkets, and even a mall or two, but the malls are empty because most Bulgarians just can't afford their prices.

It was not impossible to be taken by the charm of the place. The Orient Express, history's most fabled luxury train, ran through Varna in the 1880s. At certain times in the history of the Orient Express, Varna was the last stop to Istanbul, which was completed not by train but by ferry.

How many ancient tree-lined cobblestone steps did we climb, how many cobblestone sidewalks did we stumble down? Cobblestone sidewalks can be quite difficult. The high-rises were made of cement, but most of the older buildings in the city center, are built with lots of dark, very beautiful hardwood.

Trees and benches are everywhere, even on the wide boulevards. They lead to some of the city's greatest landmarksпїЅ"the Naval Academy of Varna has been training merchant marine and military sailors for years. The University of Economics Varna which Boryana graduated is nearby the Sea Garden.

Earlier she had studied mathematics and science in Leningrad, and was a programmer on old main frames for well more than a decade.

And finally, how could I, a longtime resident of Los Angeles, not be impressed by the large Roman ruins everywhere? Right in one of the best neighborhoods of the town is a large Roman bath ruin several city blocks big.

A bit of the image of an enchanted seaside town was tainted for me when we walked out of the baths and saw a bookstore at which point our guide told us an unsettling story.
Since communism, Bulgaria is run by a mafia. Everyone belongs to the mafia, former communists, monarchists, and everything in between. And this mafia plays tough. When a journalist wrote a book about the mafia naming names a couple of years ago, not only was he killed, but tall muscular men with arrogant ape like gaits in black uniforms went around making sure no bookstore had copies left.

Most of the leadership of the communist party, now calling themselves social democrats, are the sons and daughters of the communist elite who used to run the country. Many of these privileged sons and daughters got much less provincial educations than they might have at home.

These socialists returned from other lands with a strong taste for a different kind of society. So now there are big black luxury cars, Cadillacs and Mercedes, you name it, everywhere. How well are they representing the people, these self-proclaimed socialists. Many people have become sour trying to make ends meet in an economy whose costs since joining the European Union have risen almost to American levels, but where wages are typically still $300 a month.

Today's so-called Reds run for office promising better medical care, pensions, not allowing the Americans a military base in Bulgaria, but do just the opposite when they are in power.

The left supports right-wing measures, like regressive taxes that mostly hit the poor, privatizing medicine while the so-called right parties adopt more progressive measure, several Bulgarians told me.

Politics are bizarre in Bulgaria, almost everyone agreed.

Nonetheless, Boryana could see I was enchanted with her city, and she kept asking me if I had ever seen a city like this. Of course I hadn't, but then I thought of something.
"I do know partly a city like Varna. In fact, it should become a sister city."
"What's that?"
"San Francisco. It's a seaside town built before the automobile, so its streets are narrow and there's lots of rain and fog and sun and wind. And it has Golden Gate Park, very similar to the Sea Garden."

After a moment, however, I relented. "There are still many things about this city whose history easily rivals that of the Gold Rush."

Our trip began auspiciously. Two days after we arrived in Varna, we learned that the Varna Museum of Archeology was opening an exhibit of nine Thracian treasures dating back 7,000 years.

Boryana was especially excited because the museum was housed in the magnificent 150-year-old building she was very familiar with. Before it became a museum, it was the high school she attended.

Varna's geography adds to the sense of history here. The Black Sea, which is big enough to look like any ocean, is not that old. It was created about 7,000 years ago when a much smaller lake became the Black Sea when a melting glacier sent water cascading across the Bosporus from the Mediterranean, drowning many ancient lake side communities. It is even likely that the true story of Noah's Ark is buried there somewhere in the bottom of the Black Sea.

Perhaps because I'm not an old news reporter for nothing, we barged our way into the chamber at the Varna Museum of Archeology where the exhibit was being opened, and the mayor and museum director and people in all their best duds, pontificated like the dignitaries they no doubt were.

This was not the exciting part. The really exciting part was that we had cameras in our hands and while it is not normally allowed to photograph such as the nearly 3,000-year-old gold mask of a great Thracian King, we were able to do so.

Staring at the mask close up was a revelation. Standing so close you could see the flaws, there were none. I wondered if the artist who had done this mask was the greatest Thracian artist of all times, an artist of Orpheus' level.

The Thracian were making incredible gold statues, masks and jewelry long before they did this in Mesopotamia. The modern look of the most ancient gold pieces was astounding and even shocking up close.
There was a distinguishing thing about almost all the Thracian kings, warriors, and beautiful women, in those sample s of Thracian art. And that was a certain kind of nose, known as a ski-nose. It's straight up and down, like a ski slope, and tends to be narrow. And that same, distinctive nose is not uncommon among the Bulgarian population today, and it is clearly there on Boryana's face.

The Thracian did not have a written language, and most of what was written of them was by the Greeks, such as Homer and Plato.

But Bulgarians have long had a reputation for their folk music, which is made particularly distinctive because of an extra beat that sometimes shows up in musical notation within the same measures. You might call it the "nine eighths" measure.

Even those who taught Bulgarian choral music and dance in the public schools and universities could not say with certainty that today's folk music had roots in the music Orpheus played.

But might the distinctive Bulgarian dancing come directly from the Thracian, perhaps from Orpheus himself? He was the archetype of music and dance of those ancient people.
Although the music scholars we talked with said that they couldn't say what ancient Thracian music sounded like, they smiled with evident agreement at the notion that the Thracian beat still lives on in Bulgarian song and dance.

Boryana and I drove through the Thracian Valley, still a rich agricultural valley, and up into the Rodopi mountains, to Velengrad. We were with a group of native revelers and sportsmen, and on Saturday night they danced hard.

Boryana proved to have a Bulgarian's affinity for dancing, a distinctive kind of dancing and music that obviously harkens back to something very primeval.

She clung to the wall and even cried. She was visibly moved at the sight of Bulgarians dancing, then cautiously approached the dance floor. Soon, she was dancing the ancient dance with an innate ability.

Velengrad is named after an orphan, a martyr in the anti-Nazi struggle. It is a mountain resort town, where a lot of the country's revolutionaries have traditionally come from. Mountain folks are among the nation's toughest people.

The next morning, most of the revelers went and climbed a peak while we took a narrow gauge train deeper into the mountains in Bulgaria's southwestern region. We went to Bansko, now a skiing town, but one that was the home to one of Bulgaria's great 20th century revolutionaries and poets. Nikola Vaptzarov was eventually killed by the Nazis.
Boryana says that from the struggle against the "Turkish Yoke" to the underground struggles against the Nazis, the country has produced its heroes. The country is full of museums of their lives and struggles.

The miniature train was incredibly slow as it worked its way up a deep river canyon from Plodiv, high up into the mountains and high green meadows where the rich earth is still plowed by men and women, only sometimes with horses. Plodiv, like Varna is an ancient town begun as a Thracian community long before the Romans came.

"Only Bulgarians ride trains this deep into the countryside," Boryana said as we journeyed into the heart of the Rodopi mountains.

Bulgaria has always found its soul in the mountains. It is from the mountains the Thracians reigned, that Orpheus sang, and more recently, Bulgarians fought off the Turks and later the Nazis.

You can see that the country's resistance to foreign oppressors has come from its mountains, a prime example of which was the Rila Monastery which dates back to the third century, but in the 19th century was the seat of resistance to the Turkish Yoke.
So it is somewhat sad that when you tour the ancient Thracian land from the Thracian Valley into the Rodopi mountains today, you see a Bulgaria which looks like it has been devastated.

Many farmers don't have running water and electric water. They are mostly tenant farmers, who used to produce in communes, where they at least they had mechanization.
A country with a seven million declining population, everywhere you see abandoned buildings, large ones, smaller ones, in the countryside.

Bulgaria, which once had an amazing agricultural output, today imports many of its peaches and tomatoes, staples of its diet, from Turkey.

Some old communists say it is a tragedy. Others who defend the closing of the communes say Bulgarian agriculture is still in transition to something new and better.

Everything apparently is in transition. This country, which memorializes its fight against the "Turkish Yoke" with statues and memorials and museums everywhere across the land, also is replacing the old term "Turkish Yoke" with the much more benign "Turkish Presence."

This despite the fact Bulgaria still has a city where 10,000 people was massacred by the Ottomans in the late 1880s, who left behind piles of limbs and skulls. These are all a part of a memorial.

The flip side is that some of the country's best trained classical musicians, for instance, got their educations in nearby Istanbul, which also happened to be the home of one of the first Symphony orchestras in the world, nearly 400 years ago.

And much of its cheap clothes and shoes and such in Bulgaria come not from China but Turkey. There's a thriving commerce between Istanbul and Varna, for example. The popular music that you listen to in discos in Varna comes from Turkey, and even the country's most serious musicians graduated from schools in Istanbul.

But that is all ephemeral politics. When I next go to Bulgaria, it will be to wrestle the secrets of Orpheus onto paper that lurk everywhere in this strange and beautiful place. Boryana, meanwhile, looks forward to returning again as well. For the moment, she is over the worst of her homesickness.
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Lionel Rolfe is the author of "Literary L.A." and "The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin and Willa Cather," among others.

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