A couple of years ago I was asked by a Bulgarian friend, who was selling his village home and needed a translator present, to attend the house inspection. The prospective buyers were an English couple — a solicitor and her retired husband from Manchester. The house was located in a village close to Talpa (where I have carried out the vast majority of my research since the mid-1980s) and some forty kilometres from the attractive provincial capital of Veliko Turnovo in north-central Bulgaria. I was intrigued as to what the prospective British buyers were intending to do in the village. With its declining and elderly population, a large percentage of empty houses, and run-down public infrastructure and facilities, the village, and the region more generally, has become in the last decade or so a rural ‘backwater’.

When the Manchester couple arrived to view the property, they walked through the home commenting, as one might expect, on the presentation of the rooms, their size and so on. But for me the memorable moment came when they reached the first floor. The man walked onto the small terrace and said, ‘This must be the balcony.’ And then he looked out across the landscape and added, ‘It's a nice view.’ ‘There's a view?’ I thought as I stepped out after him to look for myself. I had been familiar with the landscape for twenty years, yet it had never occurred to me that there was a ‘view’.