Sofia Letter: We climbed the rough mountain path that led from Rila monastery up through the tall pines to the grave. It stands there on its own, perched on a small uneven patch of flat ground. Enough for the 50 of us to gather around as the Irish Ambassador stepped forward with a green, white and orange wreath.
Piercing the thick canopy of trees, a narrow shaft of sunlight lit him and the flat tombstone. Pure theatre. Two other wreaths were also laid by the inscription, which reads simply in Cyrillic type "James Bourchier 1850-1920" .
On an official sign beside the grave there are a few more words about the Angliski jurnalist who became best friend, journalistic champion and diplomatic advocate of Bulgaria, and who was honoured in death with the resting place he desired most, a couple off hundred metres from the country's most holy and beautiful spot.
The fortress monastery that was founded in 1335 (but magnificently rebuilt after a fire in the 19th century) is located high up a forested valley that perfectly frames the snow-capped Rhodope mountains at its eastern end.
It has been a spiritual centre of the Orthodox church for centuries and is a place of pilgrimage to hundreds of thousands every year. Inside its martial walls a wide flagged courtyard is surrounded by tiers of delicately arched balconies which house the monastic cells. In its centre, a fine church comes down with brilliantly rich frescos - little wonder that what is now a Unesco world heritage centre is a must to those tourists who are willing to forsake the Black Sea for just a while.
The Bourchier sign will be changed, the monastery's Abbot Evlogi has promised. People were not really conscious of his Irish birth. It will be put right and a few Irish and Bulgarian friends will make their own secular pilgrimage annually to the grave, lay flowers and perhaps say a few words.
In Sofia on Friday 12th, the day before, a seminar had explored the life of a man who is well known in these parts but forgotten at home. But that he would be remembered here is certainly what Bourchier would have wanted most, says Michael Foley, a former colleague and now lecturer in journalism at Dublin Institute of Technology who is researching this strange product of Ireland.
A road in the capital is named after Bourchier and the Hotel Bulgaria, where he spent his last days, has a plaque.
When he died in the hotel, his biographer, one Lady Grogan, wrote in 1926, crowds gathered to express their sorrow.
"The Bulgarian people left nothing undone to show in what high honour they held their friend," she wrote. "His body lay in state in the cathedral, with the face, according to the custom of the Orthodox Church, exposed to view, and long lines of people, from the humblest to the highest, passed before his coffin to take their last look on his familiar features. The funeral service was celebrated with great pomp, and the people stood many deep in the streets of Sofia as the procession passed through the city on its way to Rila."
What brought this son of an Anglo-Irish home to the turbulent Balkans in the late 19th and early 20th century and then to espouse the cause of Bulgarian nationalism was a strange political trajectory that defies stereotypes. A sympathy with the underdog, with small nations, or perhaps just a sense of adventure?
But it's certainly a long way from Baggottstown, Bruff, Co Limerick, where Bourchier was born on December 18th 1850, the fourth son of local man John Bourchier JP and Sarah (née Aher) from Castlecomer, Co Kilkenny. The young Bourchier graduated from Trinity in classics and headed off to England, where for 10 years he taught at Eton.
Teaching became increasingly difficult with his growing deafness and so - the way you would - he set off in 1888 for Romania and Bulgaria, where he became the Times's Balkan correspondent.
By all accounts he was a natural. Companionable, with an ear - what was left of it - for languages and a love of music, Bourchier got to know everyone, princes and politicians alike, and mixed easily with "ordinary" people.
Later, one of his prize possessions, hung in pride of place in his room in the Bulgaria, would be a picture of himself in peasant dress (it was also featured in a series of stamps produced to honour him).
Bourchier increasingly mixed his engaged journalism with semi-official diplomacy, sometimes on behalf of rebellious Cretans, more often on behalf of Bulgaria. In 1919 he unofficially represented the latter on the fringes of the peace conference in Versailles, at which Bulgaria's aspirations fell foul of the reality that it had sided with Austria- Hungary and Germany in 1915.
Not surprisingly, Bourchier's failure to predict that alliance, which, admittedly, he disapproved of, had not endeared him to the Times, from which he retired in 1918 after reporting from St Petersburg on the early stages of the Russian revolution.
Bourchier died in his beloved Bulgaria of a heart attack two years later, unmarried, but by no means unloved.
Patrick Smyth is The Irish Times Foreign Editor
