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Page 1 of 2 Musеum of facts and traces
 Order a book THE PARCHMENT MAZE (2009) is a historical novel in which each scene is based on actual historical fact and an extant artifact. The book was announced to be the bestseller for Bulgaria for 2009. The movie option rights are sold to Prosperitas Entertaiment,Inc, Miami. The New York Times recently published sensational new discoveries about an ancient Balkan culture that mysteriously disappeared. The Times got a few things wrong, however, when it reported that no one knows what these people called themselves or why they vanished. The best-selling Bulgarian novelist Ludmila Filipova has a name for them – the Meandrites – and an intriguing theory about their disappearance. Her 105,000-word arcane thriller The Parchment Maze (Ciela 2009) weaves real archeological evidence together with a healthy jolt of fantasy in the story of a young scholar who digs through the Balkans’ archeological and mythological past, discovering links between Jesus, Orpheus and the Meandrites – who aren’t quite as “vanished” as academics may think. Vera Kandilova stumbles across perplexing symbols tied to a prehistoric Balkan civilization that mysteriously disappeared 5,000 years ago. What begins as a purely academic scavenger hunt across Switzerland, Russia, Italy and Bulgaria leads her to frescoes in the Roman catacombs, a medieval amulet, engraved golden tablets, prehistoric clay vessels and ultimately to a cryptic manuscript called “The Parchment Maze.” The intellectual puzzle quickly gets visceral – after a series of murders, thefts of valuable artifacts and a kidnapping, Vera becomes convinced that either she is going crazy or that descendents of the prehistoric culture have been hiding underground for millennia, jealously guarding their powerful knowledge from humanity and granting insight only to enlightened individuals such as Jesus and Orpheus. Literary gumshoes eager to follow the clues on their own can visit the novel’s website containing thousands photographs from Moscow, Bulgaria, Burma, the Vatican, Berlin, Greece, Rome and Thrace collected by the author in her three years of research: www.mastileniat-labirint.com, password: meander. (Note that Ludmila Filipova’s website of traces was created and launched in January 2009, well before Dan Brown’s similar site for The Lost Symbol) Each chapter in The Parchment Maze opens with an excerpt from a mysterious manuscript’s missing final pages; the eclectic mix of academic evidence, esoteric ideas and lyrical fragments hints at the links between an ancient solar god, Orpheus and Christ and throws into question what we think we know about history, religion and philosophy.
This is Ludmila Filipova’s forth novel. The researching on its topics took mote than three years and traveling the territory over of seven countries. The idea for the novel had been born under the ground, at the lowest point on the Balkan Peninsula that a human could reach to.
A highly advanced Thracian civilization disappeared from the earth 5500 years ago, as if it had been swallowed up by the Apocalypse. The Apocalypse as described in the Revelations of St. John – the most enigmatic and complex book in the Bible – may already have happened. It may indeed have sent the first people to the darkness of the bowels of Underworld. And what would be the consequences for the New World if that really had happened? Is it possible that Jesus Christ was not the first God’s son? And that we all know his twin brother?
Thousands of years later, a young woman, Vera Kandilova, following the faint traces of the Thracian Orpheus, descends into the deepest cave in the Balkans, called the Devil’s Throat. Centuries’ old legends and papers tell of how the Rhodope singer, Orpheus, descended into the Underworld and on his return, endowed with unrecorded wisdom and strength, he left for Egypt. Even Ovid described how the wise man returned to the Upper ground by a declivitous path from the earth. Since then the river to the cave has taken thousands of tons of trees, rubbish, people and animals, but nothing has ever come out of it again, as if it has no bottom. Vera is the only person who will learn its secret.
The story begins at the end of the Second World War in Berlin. The Red Army has entered the German city and occupied Hitler’s third bunker containing many hidden and priceless exhibits from the Berlin Museum. That same night a fire takes hold in the control tower and the building burns down. The skeletally thin figure of a young boy jumps from his place of concealment in the wall and runs to the nearby river. A Russian officer shoots at him takes from his hand a small amulet bearing the figure of a crucified man. Above the cross there are 7 stars, below there is an inscription with the name, Orpheus. The army left for Moscow.
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