When Iva Pocock visited Bulgaria it was to take part in a tribute to an ancestor whose altruism rescued local children from conflict and poverty.
Retracing the history of one's family is certain to yield surprises, but I never thought it would involve being driven at breakneck speed along a winding Bulgarian mountain road near the Turkish border by the former deputy head of Bulgarian intelligence.
I grit my teeth and hope that Gen Todor Boyadjiev, who is now an MP for the region of Thrace, knows the roads as well as he does the region's political history, which he recounts with passion as we hare around each bend.
When we arrive at last in the south-eastern village of Malko Turnovo we are ushered into the community hall by the town's mayor, so that the
reception can begin to mark the naming
of a local street after my great-great-grandfather Pierce O'Mahony.
He is being honoured for his role in giving 14 local boys a home, in St Patrick's orphanage, when they were left destitute after brutal clashes between Bulgarian rebels and the ruling Ottoman empire. Pierce and his second wife, Alice, founded St Patrick's in Sofia in 1904.
It's the third event in his honour this year. The first was the naming of a square in Sofia, Plostad Pierce O'Mahony; a street in the city, Ulitza Pierce O'Mahony, had already been named after him.
The second event commemorated the centenary of the founding of the orphanage, bringing together the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of boys who lived in St Patrick's.
The story of O'Mahony's involvement in Bulgaria has come to light again over the past five years after the curiosity of Seamus Shortall, a Dubliner, was sparked by inquiries from a Bulgarian friend and journalist, Maria Spassova. She had read about O'Mahony in a local newspaper. The pair have since written a limited-edition bilingual book about him.
A land commissioner and Parnellite Irish Party MP for six years until 1892, O'Mahony was sufficiently moved by journalistic accounts of the 1903 Bulgarian crisis to spend the substantial fortune he inherited in 1900 on supporting young Bulgarians in St Patrick's orphanage. Before setting it up he sought support from the Bulgarian Orthodox church, to which he converted from the Church of Ireland, although he died a Roman Catholic in 1930.
For a decade, until Bulgaria sided with Germany in the second World War, the orphanage housed 30 boys from the ages of seven upwards. Remarkably, some of the orphans took the name O'Mahony.
Atanas Mahony is a young theatre director and grandson of a St Patrick's boy; we meet and shake hands above the ancient amphitheatre in Plovdiv, one of Bulgaria's national treasures. And in Malko Turnovo I am presented with a painting by Todor Petkovo Mahony, whose grandfather, also a painter, had lived in St Patrick's.
The most endearing part of this story is the bringing together of descendants of two of the boys O'Mahony adopted and brought back to Ireland, Eftim Ivanoff and Atanas Bagoev. Neither took the O'Mahony name, but Ivanoff, at least, became more "Irish than the Irish himself", according to his son Ivan. After working as Pierce O'Mahony's farm manager at his house in Coolballintaggart, near Aughrim, in Co Wicklow, Eftim bought land near Arklow, where his family, including Ivan, still farms.
The Ivanoffs were cautious about visiting Bulgaria during communist times, but Ivan and his nephew, Henry Hurley, are now on their 11th holiday to Eftim's homeland. "I've found parts of those trips very emotional, because of meeting with lost parts of our family," Hurley says. "The biggest thing was discovering that the house where he [Eftim Ivanoff\] was born is still standing."
Six hundred kilometres west, in the Pirin mountains near the Macedonian border, Zhivka Blagoeva, great-niece of Atanas Blagoev, tends her garden in an effort to make ends meet. A senior vet who works in food safety, she earns just €120 a month. Blagoeva has fond memories of her great-uncle, who qualified as a doctor at Trinity College in Dublin under O'Mahony's sponsorship. She has the only surviving manuscript of Blagoev's life story, which led him from Ireland to England, Kenya and Cyprus.
Driving back to Sofia, through oak and beech forests, we spot an eagle flying overhead, a tortoise crossing the road and ponies pulling carts piled high with loose hay, and I know that, like my great-great-grandfather, I have also succumbed to the charm of this land.
