Tran is a small town located at the Bulgarian—Serbian border that blends a certain pride of its ‘urban’ status and past with ‘rural’ appearances and ways of life. Its border location has impacted hugely on its development and the mentality of its inhabitants, giving it an almost iconic ‘peripheral’ place in the Bulgarian national imaginary, unsuitable as a site for a ‘representative’ Bulgarian ethnography. Nevertheless, since the early 1990s. Tran has enjoyed increased ethnographic interest because of its growing reputation as a dynamic place, due to the numerous opportunities offered by transborder petty trade and smuggling. Around 1995, petrol stations mushroomed in all the villages located on the road from Tran to the border checkpoint Strezimirovtsi, while rumours spread about the emergence of local ‘millionaires’ who had become rich from smuggling petrol to Serbia, a country that was under international embargo at the time. Tran made headlines in the Bulgarian media, first because of the joint Bulgarian—US military exercise Cornerstone in the summer of 1998, and then for the blind bombs falling on Bulgarian territory during the 1999 bombing of Serbia. These events put Tran on the map, as well as on the map of an emerging global ethnography in which locality (or neighbourhood as ‘the actually existing social form of locality’, see Appadurai 1996, 178—9), relational and contextual as it is, has become an autonomous unit in a network of global flows, unmediated by the state, and transcending national borders (187).