Nana Ana’s husband was something of a quasi-divine figure in Tuja. Legend had it that sometime in the sixties, the village well was running dry and there was worry that the community would have to be uprooted. Her husband was blind, a point that she emphasized several times while recounting this story for me with the aid of Ana’s translation. Apparently one night her husband, who was blind and in his late forties at the time, had a dream — a vision, one might say — in which he saw the remains of an ancient ruin on the mountainside. It was a real ruin he recognized, about a day’s journey from the town. In his dream he saw himself strike the mountain near this ruin and from out of the rock flowed clear, clean water. The next morning, upon waking, he set out on his donkey into the mountains. When he finally arrived at the ruin, he worked for several hours clearing away brush and removing boulders from the mountainside until he uncovered a natural aquifer. Nana Ana related this next part of the story with great gravity: her husband filled his cupped hands with the spouting water, drank it (several times, it seems, based on her hand gestures), and then, as if by a miracle, regained his eyesight. Partial eyesight, she clarified, perhaps so as not to strain credibility. The village declared it a divine act, and the aquifer, which became the site of the new well, was blessed by the local imam and the archdiocese of Sofia.

This was the well that Chico Dimo drove us to every second morning in his decommissioned Soviet military truck, to fill large plastic jugs with drinking water. As he drove the serpentine mountain route, he often rested his arm on the passenger-side headrest and turned to talk to Ana and me in the back seat, careening precariously close to the cliff’s edge as he did. The well, which was now a rather unimpressive utilitarian faucet affixed to a cement wall on the mountainside, was still believed to possess sacred properties. Above the tap was a small ledge clustered with icons, prayer beads, and the puddled remains of candles.

Nana Ana explained that her husband later disappeared in the mountains. One of her children (she didn’t specify which one) had left the gate of the courtyard open one morning and the donkey wandered off. Her husband set off to find it, following its tracks up the perilous cliff road. He never did come back. She said she thought his soul wandered there still. Then one morning, a week to the day after his funeral, Nana Ana looked out her kitchen window into the courtyard and saw the donkey standing in his enclosure once more.