he is geg

On the afternoon of August 10th, 1995 I was riding a bus in Sophia, Bulgaria when I saw something that surprised me a lot: an upside down photograph of Jerry Garcia.

This photo appeared in a newspaper that one of the locals was reading. The photo, of course, was not printed upside down - it just appeared that way from my point of view. Nevertheless it was surprising to see a picture of Jerry Garcia in a Bulgarian newspaper, and my first reaction was to think "funny - that upside down bearded slavic guy looks rather like Jerry Garcia."

I tilted my head to get an upright view of the photo and saw that it was indeed Jerry Garcia. Then I used my rudimentary cyrillic to decipher the two first words of of the three-word headline: "Jerry Garcia" (more or less). The other word, I did not understand. It looked like "geg".

I asked my Bulgarian companion what it meant. "He is dead."