The village of Skalishte is about ten kilometers from Kardzhali. Nearly every second person there claims to have encountered ghosts. What’s surprising is that the stories of the locals oddly coincide with the discoveries made by archaeologists. No one has yet dared to explain what is happening in the village, but the story is more than intriguing.
“It was 1971. I was working as a shepherd in the collective farm,” recalls 60-year-old Arif Sharif. “Around 11 p.m. I brought the sheep back from pasture and was about to leave. Suddenly, I heard music—zurnas, drums, and kavals playing. I looked and saw many people coming from Shaitan Kaya (the Devil’s Rock) toward the village. As they got closer, I realized it was a wedding. They were leading the bride on a horse. They were playing, dancing—there were so many people. I sat down between the feed troughs and watched them. There was a full moon; it was bright. They passed by me and continued toward the village, but when they reached the first houses, they suddenly disappeared. When I got home, my mother asked why I was so late. I told her I had seen a wedding coming toward the village, and she said, ‘It’s good you weren’t afraid—other people have seen it too.’”
The Devil's Wedding
Arif Sharif is not the only one from the village of Skalishte who has seen the ghostly wedding. The eyewitness accounts are strikingly similar. The procession begins shortly before midnight from the area of Shaitan Kaya, near the ruins of an old watermill. The locals claim the place is cursed and that spirits often linger there. They either take the form of people dressed in strange clothes or appear as large black cats. They frighten the villagers but never cause them harm.
“In 1959, electricity was brought to the village. My father went to the market in Kardzhali to buy cables, sockets, and light bulbs,” continues Arif Sharif. “He was delayed, and it was already getting dark. Right at Shaitan Kaya, two figures suddenly appeared. They started following him. When he walked faster, they walked faster. When he stopped, they stopped—just stood there staring at him. When he reached the village, they disappeared. There was a field boundary there, as if they didn’t want to cross it. My father came home terrified. He told only my mother what had happened,” recalls Arif Sharif.
The story of the strange spirits and the ghostly wedding can be heard in every house in the village. What happens in Skalishte may be seen as a local superstition, but the archaeologists’ discoveries bring a real surprise. Beneath the surface of the “cursed place” lies a medieval village.
“The area around Skalishte was studied by my colleague Ivan Balkanski,” says Daniela Kodzhamanova, curator at the Historical Museum. “Right across from the remains of the watermill, on the left bank of the river, a medieval settlement was identified. Excavations revealed a church from the 12th–14th centuries and a necropolis around it. The village is connected to the nearby fortress of Mneakos, which is the largest medieval fortress in the Rhodopes. From Byzantine sources, we know that it housed the main garrison of the Ahridos region. Near Skalishte, the settlement has been localized—there are traces of buildings and a large amount of medieval pottery.”
It reached its peak after the beginning of the 13th century, when the medieval theme (province) of Ahridos was established as an independent administrative unit,” says Daniela Kodzhamanova.
The remains of the village are currently not visible, the walls of the church are hidden by blackberries, and the people of Skalishte have not even heard of the archaeological excavations of Shaitan Kaya. But they continue to say that strange ghosts still appear there.
The woman with the bloody sword
“It was around 4 a.m. My grandmother, Djamile, went to the fountain to fetch water. She was from the lower neighborhood, near Shaitan Kaya,” recalls Shazie Redzhebova. “At the fountain, my grandmother saw a young woman. Her hair was blonde and reached all the way to the ground. She was leading a white horse. This woman was like a saint—she fought for justice,” explains Shazie, struggling to find the right words in Bulgarian. “The woman was holding a sword, and blood was dripping from it. She was returning from war. My grandmother was very frightened, but in vain—the woman didn’t harm her. She led the horse and disappeared into a grave. Right there, at that spot,” says Shazie, pointing.
At the site, there is an old mulberry tree. Next to it, the remains of a fountain can still be seen, and about four or five meters away, there once stood a türbe (tomb). It was a small mound surrounded by a stone wall, with a stone-lined grave at its top. According to legend, the maiden with the white horse was buried there. Many residents of Skalishte claim to have seen her spirit wandering around the mound or galloping with her horse toward Shaitan Kaya. The eyewitness descriptions sound as if told by one person—they all speak of a white horse, long blonde hair, and a sword dripping with blood. In Skalishte, the ghost of the woman is revered, and until recently, there was even an old man who took care to prevent her grave from being desecrated. Now, the mound is barely distinguishable, and the stones from its wall are scattered around. People still tend to avoid walking over the grave. Milen Kamarev, an archaeologist from the Kardzhali Museum, inspected the site and believes it is, in fact, a Thracian burial mound.
The Cemetery of the Damned
“It was the year 2007. Right across from the ghostly watermill, the road to the village makes a turn. At that spot, there were five or six accidents—cars literally flew off the road. No one was killed, but people were already afraid of that place, and with these accidents, it became unbearable,” says the village mayor, Apti Halil. He managed to gather some funds and decided to widen the road. The excavator began digging, and just a few minutes later, human bones and skulls started appearing from the ground. The excavator operator ran away in fear, and the mayor immediately called the police. It was later revealed that this was a medieval cemetery—one of the strangest ever found in the Rhodopes.
“We examined more than 20 graves. There were anti-vampire rituals—some of the skeletons were nailed to the ground with iron spikes. Others had been dismembered. One had its feet cut off. Another had its head severed and placed in the grave, surrounded by stones. There was a girl about 20 years old. Her hands and feet were tied with rope, her body thrown into the grave and covered with stones. The most interesting thing is that this necropolis is separate from the cemetery of the medieval settlement. That one is located directly across, on the left bank of the river, while this one seems to have been made as if the dead were not supposed to be connected with the others. Some of the buried individuals had congenital anomalies. In the Middle Ages, such people were believed to possess magical powers,” says Milen Kamarev. He managed to study only part of the strange cemetery, which lies precisely in the area from where the ghosts of Skalishte are said to emerge.
The Vicious Circle
People are not afraid of ghosts. There is a border around the village. It protects the living and none of the dead can cross it, they explain in Skalishte. Archaeologists confirm again: there has been a practice since Ancient Rome, when a village or city is founded, to plow a furrow around it. It protects the people of the settlement and this tradition is connected with the magical powers of the circle. There are descriptions that even in the 19th century in the Eastern Rhodopes there was a custom during a plague epidemic to harness oxen and plow a furrow around the village with a plow, so that the disease could not enter it, says archaeologist Daniela Kodzhamanova.
Source: Pressa newspaper
