The Seven Rila Lakes are a staircase of glacial tarns in the Rila mountains of southwest Bulgaria, stepping down a single cirque between 2,100 and 2,500 metres, each named for its shape, the Tear, the Eye, the Kidney, the Twin, the Trefoil, the Fish and the Lower, and they are seen all at once from a ridge above them. The lakes stay out of sight until you haul up the steep path toward the peak of Haramiyata and crest the ridge, and then the whole chain lies below, one above the next, the Eye almost perfectly round, the Kidney bent, the Tear the highest and clearest. A chairlift from the Pionerska hut cuts the climb, and the loop between the lakes crosses gentle alpine meadow on the valley floor, grazed in places and laced with purple, yellow and white flowers in high summer, under the sharp rock walls of Haramiyata and the peaks ringing the basin. The tarns run so clear that at the shoreline the water barely seems to be there; the Fish Lake, at barely 2.5 metres the shallowest, lets you watch its trout cruise the bottom.
The lakes are also a place of gathering. Every August thousands of followers of the Bulgarian spiritual teacher Peter Deunov, who died in 1944, camp by the Kidney lake and dance the Paneurhythmy at sunrise, a set of gentle circular movements set to music, sometimes called a Bulgarian tai chi, meant to bring the dancers into harmony with the mountain, in white clothes in a ring on the grass. The Rila range is the highest in the Balkans, and its monastery, the largest in Bulgaria, lies on the far side of the mountains; the lakes are walked from June to October, and in winter they freeze under deep snow. The loop is a day from Sofia. The Seven Rila Lakes are a set of shapes the ice left on a mountain, and once a year people dance beside them.