The grey-haired man in the Panorama bar sips from a glass of red wine, and gazes south across the bay to Turkey. “Where we sit now,” he says, “was once Turkey, but now it is Bulgaria.” He smiles, looking down towards the river that tumbles out of the woods onto the beach below.

On the face of it the River Rezovo is no different from any other river in this part of the Balkans. It runs through oak and beech forests, on through rich meadows and over bubbling rapids until it reaches the Black Sea. The coast here is one with plentiful capes and bays. Each bay is a perfect arc of sand, each intervening headland a panoply of coloured rocks shaped by centuries of erosion. Sporadic speculative developments are creeping down the coast from the north, but still they have not reached Rezovo, the tiny village that lies on the north bank of the river as it decants into the Black Sea.

Rezovo is an unkempt kind of spot. A mixture of concrete and wooden buildings, a nice line in perfectly curved red roof tiles and a few geraniums still struggling to hold their flowers despite a chill east wind coaxing in some December showers from the Black Sea.