Lavender? My father’s shaved cheeks of half a century ago. That was my first reaction when colleagues from France 2 recently asked me what I associated lavender with and did I want to help their team on site – they wanted to come to Bulgaria for a shoot about lavender. Bulgaria is world leader in the production of lavender and lavender oil – they were soon to see why. Here are the brief answers of the members of the team: Lorraine Gublin and her cameraman Yann Moine on the subject of Bulgarian lavender, myths and legends:

“I had no preconceptions, no particular expectations,” admits Lorraine. “But I didn’t think the lavender fields would be so scattered and that we would have to travel quite a bit from one to the other.”

What can you do – the Valley of Roses where the shoot mostly took place cannot compare to the vast spaces of Dobroudja, the starting point of the heavy duty trucks transporting lavender to the distilleries we visited. A lot has been said about the yields, in inverse proportion to the quality of the lavender oil obtained, but the representatives of a French company that recently opened a branch near Kazanluk seem to disagree with this myth:

“No lavender oil is better than other oil, never mind the quality,” Konstantin Georgiev says. “Often the people who create perfume want a component that is only to be found in Bulgarian or Turkish or French essential oils. That is why it is so important to have a little of each – for our own production or for a given client. Any difference in quality is there in the spectrum of a given product.”

But can a journalist arriving only for a brief while to work on site form an opinion of the country by communicating with people, in this case the people who have made lavender their profession? Hardly, without any risk of a mistake:

“We spent two and a half days here we traveled a great deal but I don’t think we could get any definite idea of what people are like. We met a woman who was watering the plants in her front garden. At first glance, I said to myself she was a farmer, but then it turned out she had graduated agronomy abroad. Stopping for five minutes in front of somebody’s house is not enough to say you have got to know him or the way he lives. We met people who have a lot of business contacts abroad but that is not to say all people, are like them. But yes, in lavender people work mostly for export.”

For cameraman Yann Moine, the most memorable moment was at one of he leading distilleries in the village of Zelenikovo:

“The picture was really authentic, almost like in the Bertolucci film 1900. Everything was very human, people did their work as they have done for centuries and that is a good thing for a shoot – so much better than if everything had been sterile. The picking too – there was so much beauty in it. It is things such as these that create the unique beauty of the moment. Like old buildings and light – they make for a good picture.”

But what proved most difficult was finding lavender in bloom, lilac fields stretching as far as the eye can see. The ripe lavender had faded, the colour was pale green and only the unmistakable fragrance had remained. And so we face the biggest stumbling block – how to convey a fragrance:

“We wished so much that the camera could convey the idea of the fragrance, that we could conjure up some trick, outside my comments, but I couldn’t put my finger on it, maybe I just don’t have the imagination.”

To my question, how she would describe the sensation of lavender to her sister, for example, Lorraine admits:

“The first picture that came to mind when I entered the distillery was my grandmother taking a cherry cake out of the oven. When you get near the cauldrons it is not the smell, the vapour, it is the entire body reacting to the lavender.”

We never met anyone who remembered lavender spirits as the forerunner of aftershave. The receptionist said lavender put her in mind of aromatherapy, the waitress – of the sprigs of lavender in her closet, the old lady in the town square – of the small pouches of lavender blossom next to her pillow that induced sleep. Or as one of the biggest lavender oil producers in Bulgaria, Nikolay Nenkov put it – lavender is for calming people and easing nervous tension. That is something that is certainly no myth or legend.

English version: Milena Daynova

Photos: Lyudmil Fotev