Laudator Temporis Acti

Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos, edd. Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper (New York: New York Review Books, 2013), pp. 36-37 (footnote omitted):

In the back of my notebook Nadejda filled about three pages with phrases in Bulgarian that might come in useful on my travels, printing them in neat Cyrillic capitals which, unlike the cabbalistic tangle of the common script, I could decipher by now. The list began with 'Sir, I am an Englishman and I am walking on foot from London to Constantinople': 'Gospodine, az sum Anglitchanin i az hodya pesha ot London za Tzarigrad.' Tzarigrad? Yes, Nadejda said, that's what Constantinople was called in Bulgarian, the City of the Czars, the Byzantine emperors: Caesartown, in fact. Kolko ban? How much money? Mnogo losho, very bad; tchudesno, marvellous; Cherno Moré, the Black Sea; 'How much does that melon weigh?’ 'My bed's full of insects, you scoundrel!', and so on. I read them slowly out loud and she corrected the pronunciation. They ended up with some splendidly extravagant compliments. 'You never know when they'll come in handy,' she said: 'Your eyes shine like stars!' 'Your hair and your eyes make me weak at the knees.' 'You are the most beautiful girl in the world' and 'Fly with me!'