If I were forced to choose a word to describe the Serbs I've met, it would be proud. Or maybe tall. No, definitely proud. But they are also all really tall. It's like being in Brobdingnag...
I've had an extraordinary time in Serbia. The kind of experience that makes me thank the Lord for couchsurfing and all the good people in this World. I'd struggled to find a place to stay in Belgrade and so it was with real gratitude that I finally found an kind and accommodating host. I'd heard good things about Belgrade: famous for its arts and music, its brave journalists (especially its radio), its bohemian edge and its nightlife, all during dark times for Eastern European arts and free thought and press. So I was looking forward to experiencing it all, meeting young Serbs and finding out what it was like to live here. Seeing a slice of real Belgrade.
What I didn't expect was that the slice of real Belgrade I would see was the infamous* force of nature that is the Balkan Granny.
My host had planned to have me stay with him and his family, but in the end it wasn't possible and he arranged for me to stay with his Grandmother. I couldn't have been more delighted. Go looking for reality and it finds you - in the most unexpected ways. My host's Grandmother was 82 and came up to my waist when she stretched. She spoke not a word of English and on meeting me refused to believe I was really from the UK, believing instead that I was one of those unfortunate souls whose parents had emigrated and neglected to teach me my Mother tongue.
She insisted that I sleep in her bed, while she took the couch. I struggled at first with the suggestion that I should be the one to turf an 82 year old woman out of her bed, but after a moment's reflection conceded (though I could no more have resisted the flow of an oncoming glacier). Firstly she was right that I would be less disturbed in her room (there were two rooms and the bathroom in her cottage) as she got up at 5am everyday. Secondly it occurred to me that she had, in her 82 years, been through more hardship than I could imagine or would want to. She'd lived through the Second World War and its aftermath, through communism and through another war, barely 15 years old, during which she and her family had been forced to leave their home in Dalmatia (in what is now Croatia) and resettle in Serbia, ethnically cleansed with so many others (on all sides). A night on the couch would likely do her less harm than it would me.
My days there followed the same pattern. I got up about four or five hours after my host, who'd got up at dawn, and as I showered she put on some Serbian coffee (which is or isn't, depending whom you ask, very much like Turkish coffee). In her case she didn't believe in small portions (this is another Serbian trait: they eat enormous amounts - I was permanently stuffed) and I started the day with the largest mug of sweet black coffee I've ever seen. Along with the coffee she gave me a shot of Rakia to whet my appetite. Rakia is a strong, often home-brewed, spirit, found throughout the Balkans, and even in Turkey, in various guises: Raki, Rakia, Rakija etc. It tends to be drunk by older generations and is known to be the cure for all manner of ills. Especially if drunk every monrning. The variants are all pretty much the same and all sufficiently strong (usually 45 to 50 %) to burn all the way down. The title of this blog is taken from a Balkan play on the Nokia slogan and the effects of Rakia.
And so my days started half drunk and wild-eyed from the coffee, listening to a tape of Dalmatian folk music that my host played at every opportunity. She first put it on the evening I arrived and as I sat there in her small cottage, nodding and smiling at a four foot Serbian woman in her headscarf and with her hens pecking outside and the smell of freshly spread muck pervading the neighbourhood, I couldn't help but inwardly smile. An ethnomusicologist's wetdream, the music initially sounded like someone trying to play the bagpipes and the harmonica at the same time, but as I heard it more and more I began to distinguish more subtlety in it than I'd first imagined. It was in simple time, with what I guessed was only one instrument, playing a droning note on the beat and a melody that was more rhythm than tune, a sort of Dalmatian funk. A bar-long phrase would be repeated five or six times and then a slight variation would be introduced and that phrase repeated, the whole thing four or five minutes long.
As I sat outside in the shade of the garden on my first morning, I reflected on the music. I'd tried to ask if it was from Dalmatia and when she in turn tried to explain it brought tears to her eyes. I first heard the music as something I could easily categorise - this was "real" folk music - not the kind you buy in the airport or watch at shows in your hotel restaurant, but a tape of real live musicians who'd really played this music in a remote village in Dalmatia. Listening to it felt exactly like the authentic experience I was looking for on my travels. And that made me smile. But as I sat there in the sunshine and thought how real this experience was and how great it was to stumble across this slice of real Serbia and experience it all, soak it up, I realised how shallow an initial response that was. I found myself listening to the music, not understanding it, almost looking down on it or looking in from the outside. It was as if rather than really experience it meaningfully, my search for the authentic had lead me to feel everything at one stage removed. I could see myself turning it about in my head as an abstract thing, not inside the very here and now, with all its attendant emotions and impressions, but outside.
I heard anew the music, trying to understand what it meant to the old woman sitting next to me. I tried to imagine what it was like for this, a single tape played over and over again, to be the only link to my home. I imagined all the pain of living a new life, losing life as you know it, being transplanted into a new country, a new town, and living there alone, far from home. And in this light the music became intolerably sad, the rhythmic tune reflecting the endless thoughts of what once was. So it became real folk music, music of heritage and memory and loss and finally I began to understand what I was looking for and what I'd found...
I said that if I'd been forced to choose one word to describe the Serbs I'd met it would be proud, and that's true. It's almost impossible to imagine asking the question "Are you proud of your country, are you proud to be where you're from?" and receiving the negative answer I found in Romania, where many I spoke to seemed to be sick of being in Romania and being Romanian. After Serbia, the difference was striking. The Serbs I chatted with saw corruption as a problem (it is a truth universally acknowledged that the curse of the Balkans is corruption), though none could have imagined a better country to herald from and none seemed to move abroad.
Pride is close, but it isn't quite right. It would in fact be inat. But this is a Serbian word, apparently untranslatable, but, for many Serbs, summing up their national spirit exactly. The closest English expression that I can make it out to be is something like Fighting Spirit. They could only translate it via examples, such as "if someone tells you you can't do something, then you do it, just to prove you can." Or "if someone knocks you down then you get up to prove that you can, that you're not beaten".
The Serbs I met were certainly full of inat. Perhaps because I stayed in a community of Serbs exiled from Dalmatia and Krajina (now Croatia), but I got the impression they believed most, if not all, Serbs were similar. I can't vouch for that, but somehow I wouldn't be surprised. The pride I saw was muscular, almost pugnacious. As the Serbs saw it, Serbia had once been great and had had its heart ripped out. Worse still, it had had its heart ripped out and the World didn't just stand by and watch, but had participated, and still the West's media portrayed the Serbs as wrongdoers. From the Serbs point of view the injustice could not have been greater.
It was from my friend Goran that I learnt of how most Serbs felt about Kosovo. Goran, the proud singer of proud Serbian songs, an entertainer known throughout the local community (a suburb on the edge of Belgrade) for his guitar and ready banter and his songs of home. We got on well, introduced by my host on the first night while he worked in his parent's cafe. (His parents were as kind as his Grandmother, welcoming me into their home and even going so far as to give me a t-shirt from their cafe 'Zaljubiska', which, I am told means 'In love'. In fact all the Serbs I met were incredibly kind and welcoming.) We sat in the carpark of the high school, watching the world go by, drinking cheap beer from a plastic bottle as he sang Serbian songs in the warm night's air. And there, from Goran the proud Serb, I learnt just a little more about another side of the Balkans, one that we don't see too often in the West, or perhaps rather, a side that I haven't seen too often in the West. It's not an easy or comfortable side, I personally don't find it easy to empathise with - perhaps you do, but it's there nonetheless. As I've said in a previous blog, I never want to be accused of seeing the world in black and white. The Balkans couldn't be less black and white. I've heard the clouds over the Balkans have two sides, but I'm not sure there's a silver lining. In fact, to steal a song, I would say I've looked at clouds from both sides now, but still I really dont know clouds at all.
*Ok, so I'm not sure they're really infamous, but they should be.
staying with a Serbian Grandmother who didn't speak a word of English.
