Erma River by the Town of Tran

Tran sits in Bulgaria's far west, a small town on the Erma, a river so tied to the frontier that it crosses the Serbian border twice on its way. Petrov came out here in 1910 to paint a calm stretch of it, geese on the near bank, a line of trees on the far shore, the flat grey light he liked over the water. Nothing in the scene suggests a frontier at all. Within three years, though, Bulgaria and Serbia were at war along this western border, in the second of the Balkan wars. The picture kept its quiet. The young National Museum in Sofia bought it in 1913, that same restless year, and it has been in the national collection ever since.