Exploring the ritual & reality of the Kazanlak Rose Festival Bulgaria

In The Illiad’, Homer writes of Aphrodite anointing Hector’s lifeless body with ‘ambrosial oil of roses, so Achilles could not rip the prince’s skin as he dragged him back and forth’. If rose oil, since antiquity, has signified heroic spectacle, divine connection or aristocratic indulgence, in Bulgarian culture it implies the reality of its concomitant labour.