Le Corbusier: Journey to the East
Turnovo*
Everywhere Bulgaria is like a garden. Along the railroad track is a wild border of hollyhocks, yellow buds, and azure hemp and chicory, red poppies, and scabiosa. The big thistles make a wine-colored layer in
the white flower beds and among the tufts in bloom. The wheat comes right to the edge of the track. In the distance runs a line of evenly spaced fruit trees, yellow lakes swept by the hot west wind. But once the train reached the high plateaus, everything became harsh again.
At sunset I climbed the huge rock on which the town is built—a tumultuous moraine of houses crimped by paths. The wind was blowing, marking the bounds of the high plateau that the train crossed at a right angle to the Danube; mountains rose up suddenly, formed of foundations of narrow stones submerged in immense sand banks. A deep cleft, almost a canyon, crenelated by rocks in horizontal layers, lets the yellow river flow through. From these dry heights where only camomile blooms and sends out its fragrance, in the opening of the great portal whose rocky feet drop straight down, we see the plain. The sun has set right there, and all the way down it bleeds into a great horizontal line: it must be the Danube over there. On the other side, in a semicircle, the Balkans froth and swell at this hour so exquisitely blue. A frieze of light cobalt marks this highest mountain where the Shipka winds its way, the gateway to Turkey which we shall enter on horseback in a few days.* At the foot of this mountain where I am lying, the yellow ribbon of the river encloses the town, following the nervous path of a figure eight. Here the stream spreads out to form little islands of sand; there, drawn together again, rapids disturb it. Droves of huge oxen are immersed in the river. The oxen are gray, With almost white stomachs and black spines gently modulating into the color of their flanks. Their eyes have the softness and beauty of gazelles' eyes, and their horns crown them with a majesty in the manner of Egyptian bas-reliefs. By noon, we had seen hundreds of black buffaloes lying in the muddy ooze of the river. They were sleeping, immersed in the muddy water, offering us an unexpected sight. Their heads always stretch out horizontally and their white eyes seem to be contemplating lugubrious thoughts under their dark foreheads. For such a tremendous size, they have a startling color, somber as a funeral veil, opaque as tainted ink, and it is frightening to see them approaching with their horns turned back and their snouts full of froth. I understand why these tragic animals were harnessed to the Chariot of Death, the Chariot of Vanity, and the Chariot of Vice by the fifteenth-century painter of those famous panels in the Academy of Sienna which we looked at with fascination.* At that time we believed them to be the pure invention of an inspired painter.
At the bottom of the canyon, the herdsmen have entered the water to drive before them the oxen overcome by the heat. Through the huge rocky door, my eyes wander for the last time along this dark horizon which marks Europe, and I again climb down these slopes where a cascade of houses tumbles down.
What an extraordinary town of which no one has ever spoken, lost far from the major lines of communication! Auguste says it is as fine as Avila in Spain. It was the medieval residence of the czars of Bulgaria. Turnovo is no village. It is made of thousands of houses; they are fastened onto the ridges of precipitous rocks and then piled up, rising one over the other all the way to the top of this towerlike mountain. The walls are white and their frames black, and the roofing is like the bark of a tree. Seen from afar it is an arid stratification, some larger white spots signal the churches, not Byzantine but Baroque, and related to the exquisite architecture of the Bavarian and Tyrolese mountains. We spent a long time wandering through the streets of Turnovo, whose exceedingly picturesque character remains attractive because of their perfect cleanliness. There is nothing I detest so much as the village that attracts the "literalism" and the sentimentalism of so many painters just because dung invades the alleys and mud has splattered as high as the roofs. Such filth always betrays a base negligence, and one can be certain that the inhabitants who allow themselves to vegetate in such a place are poor and do not cultivate any art.* When the blood is young and the mind healthy, normal sensuality asserts itself. Men work less and search for well-being. They take care of their dwellings with a solicitude that, to us, would appear exaggerated. They want them to be clean, gay, and comfortable: they adorn them with flowers. They dress in embroidered clothing whose flamboyant colors tell of their joy of life. Their dishware is florid and artistic, and rugs, woven by the women following age-old tradition, cover floors that are scrupulously maintained. And each spring, the house that one loves receives its new coat: sparkling white, it smiles the whole summer through foliage and flowers that owe to it their dazzle.
At Turnovo the rooms are whitewashed, and the white is so beautiful that I was very impressed. Already last year I had become enthused over the decorative power that people and things take on when seen against the white of peasant rooms. Serbia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Constantinople, and Athos, from which I have just returned, have once again confirmed this impression.* At Turnovo they whitewash each room before Easter and Christmas, and in that way the house is always bright.
Each house has its main room; a very large window, wider than it is tall and checkered with windowpanes, opens out on the trees and flowers of the garden, and because of the unique location of this town, the bold and brutal profile of the mountain and a yellow stream are framed in the geometry of the fenestration. These rooms are so small that the window takes up the entire wall, and a balcony is always hung, overlooking the avalanche of houses; this balcony is of fine woodwork, and the contours of the pillars and of the glaze brings to mind the exquisite niches of Islamic interiors. In this charming small space, the men squat on sofas and quietly smoke. They look like a Persian painting in a Moorish setting. The garden door is pink and green; the enclosure is no larger than a room, and a trellis covers it all. There are roses and tulips, and then many lilies of a perfidious fragrance, carnations, and hyacinths. Slabs of white stone pave the ground wherever the flowers have not invaded. I have already said that the walls are white, and sometimes blue, like the deepest part of the sea.*
Toward evening we entered one of the small churches preceded by a light blue porch. On the iconostasis shone twenty-nine icons from their golden heavens and the halos of their saints, each set in a golden niche that a Hindu or a Chinese could have sculpted. They were of the most beautiful style, more Italian than Byzantine, and would serve as a good transition between Cimabue and Duccio.* One feels quite moved before such an ensemble, in the dim of a sanctuary at such a beneficent moment. I was as intoxicated here as I have so often been in the little gallery of the Italian primitives in the Louvre, where the Great Madonna is an object of faith and where, after having preached to the birds and the little animals of the forest, Saint Francis, thunderstruck with ecstasy, receives the stigmata.
The next day we had a great delight: in a village at the foot of the blood-colored Shipka, we were able to buy from a poor priest a few old icons on which golden halos glitter against fiery skies. Afterward the Balkans disappointed us by being green and blue, leafy, and covered with forests, when we had wanted them to be red and pitiless, red like an earth that has drunk so much blood, as red as is necessary for an attack by bandits to have any pictorial quality. Alas! There weren’t even any bandits! In the night, holding our horses by their bridles, we climbed down rough slopes, and we collapsed at the only inn around, where dreadfully filthy men were already asleep on every bench. And because strangers almost never wander onto these remote roads, they were very ill at ease when receiving us. To tell the truth, though, this uneasiness did not last. We were pushed unceremoniously into a room occupied by only two beds-two split straw mattresses covered with a disgusting sheet on which dozens of bedbugs cried out in famine. After two hours, I was completely eaten up; I jumped out the window and climbed the mountain because dogs were howling in the distance. I stopped under a tree and fell into a deep sleep-right in the middle of the Balkans! What would my mother have said had she known?
I am writing these lines from a desert island where a stupid quarantine is detaining us with some fellow sufferers for a few days. I've reached the point where I no longer count the nights spent under the stars, on the hard decks of the ships that brought us this far, or on the sands of this island made white-hot in the terrible sun which, just a few kilometers from here, also caresses the exquisite marbles of the Parthenon that I have yet to see!
Le Corbusier, Journey to the East; edited and annotated by Ivan Žaknić; translated by Ivan Žaknić with John Gery and Nicole Pertuiset. Rev. ed., 2007 MIT Press, Cambridge, p. 57–65. Originally published by Force Vives (Paris) in 1966 under the title Le Voyage d’Orient.