I was born in the industrial mining town of Pernik in Bulgaria, but I grew up in the foothills of the Rila mountain, where my family has lived for generations. My parents always encouraged me to explore, with them or on my own, and gave me the freedom to roam. At sixteen I spent my high school summers as a guide at Rila Monastery, telling strangers about a place I thought I knew and only now begin to understand. A few years later I crossed the ocean. That was nearly thirty years ago, and I have made my home in the beautiful coastal town of Naples, Florida. But I never cut my connection with the Old World, in many ways, and with Rila most of all. I never imagined I would become a writer. My love for wine, and for the history of the places it comes from, is what taught me. One book followed the Dutch engineers who drained the marshes of the Médoc in the 1600s and turned a swamp into Bordeaux. Another was for people who love wine but have been made to feel they need permission to enjoy it. Rila's Tale came from a different place. A vineyard, a piece of forgotten history, and the suspicion that while people and archives remember, the ground keeps its own secrets, small and large. Only this time the ground was my family's own. And I walked every road and visited every place before I wrote a word — the monastery, the villages, the high passes and the low meadows, the saint's cave and the king's road. I believe something beyond easy explanation chose me to write this book. Too many small things lined up. Men, roads and destinies crossed each other. Along the way I learned stories that seemed to have been waiting for the book I was already writing. Something between the spirit of the Rila mountain, the presence of Saint John of Rila everywhere in my life, and whatever else is up there guiding me — something wanted this written, and I was just holding the pen. I carried this story for years before I wrote it down. I wrote it first for myself, then for my parents, for my son, and for grandchildren I haven't met yet. They may not know this mountain the way we do, but I am sure the roots in Rila's ground cannot be cut, no matter how far we wander.
Momtchil Dimitrov
