Bitola's walking street

Macedonia

Macedonia.  A fightin’ word…

This post from Macedonia includes observations about two cities: Skopje, the capital city of  FYROM [Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia], and Thessalonica, Greece’s second largest city and the capital of Greece’s northern province, Macedonia. Provocatively, I include them both in “Macedonia,” not only for the historical reason they both occupy territory once called Macedonia before Balkan Wars (1912-13) broke it up among Yugoslavia, Greece and Bulgaria, but also for the much more interesting reason that both cities make a very big fuss about the ancient Macedons, Philip II and his boy Alexander, as ancestors.

Actually, they have been doing this for some time, and the Thessalonians with some justification: the royal seat of the House of Macedon was located in Pella, near Thessalonica; the magnificent Macedonian golden hoard from important gravesites (such as that of the above-mentioned Phillip) was excavated at Vergina, 80 km from Thessalonica; and the city of Thessalonica itself may not improbably be said to have been founded and named for Alexander’s half-sister. However, it is much more contentious to claim that today’s Greeks in Macedonia are in a direct line of descent from the Macedons of yore, given the mish-mash of peoples crisscrossing these terrains for generations or even to claim that the Macedons of yore were Hellenes. (Aristotle, himself born in Macedonia and who tutored the young Alexander, didn’t think they were.)

In any event, I suppose that today’s Thessalonians wouldn’t be nearly so exercised about this identity if it weren’t for parallel and competing claims by their ex-Yugoslav neighbours to the north in Skopje who have also got it into their heads (the heads of ultra-nationalists, that is) that they too are descendants of the Macedons. In order for this to be even a remote possibility, the modern FYROM Macedonians would have to be indigenous to the territory they live in and not descendants of a much later people (much later, as in 1000 years later), namely the Slavs who entered the Balkans in the 6th century. Which is what every sane person knows to be the case.

(An aside here for a mention of Bulgaria, of its important city, Plovdiv, originally known as Philippopolis because it was founded by Philip II of Macedon – him again – and to whom the Plovdivians have erected a statue in the middle of the semi-excavated Roman stadium: sensibly, the Plovdivians do not claim to be Macedonians.)

I have known of these issues for some time but nothing prepared me for the sight of Skopje’s central square, Macedonia Square, since I last saw it 3 years ago. In the centre now rears an 8-storey-high equestrian statue of Himself (Alexander the Great, coyly named only as The Warrior in official circles), at the base of which roar several lions who also serve as spouts for water sprays in a fountain that has proved very popular with citizens.)

 At one end of the square has also been erected a monumental statue of Justinian – “The holy and right-believing Emperor Justinian I (483 565)” -  said to have been a Slav and born in a village near the Roman town of Scupi, today’s Skopje. So far so historical. But at the other end of the square, equally monumentally, sits Tsar Samuil, claimed by today’s Macedonians but historically known as a Bulgarian Tsar and who indeed lost a terrible battle in 1014 to the Byzantine Emperor Basil II, forever after known by the sobriquet, The Bulgar-Slayer.  So far so Bulgarian. But Samuil also once resided in Ohrid, in present-day FYROM, and so presto! he becomes a Macedonian Tsar. Just off the Square the finishing touches are being put to a massive (in the style of a)Triumphal Arch. “What triumph?” my friend, a retired literature professor, Ljubica snorts. “We don’t have triumphs, we are always being crushed by our neighbours.”

Among other reasons, this fantastical historiography is why some of my friends in Skopje refuse to go downtown: they are embarrassed, even humiliated. Equally egregious is the current program of building a series of public buildings along the Vardar River (the same river that flows down to Thessalonica where it is known as the Axios). By their imperial scale they rival – I swear – Imperial Rome’s not to mention Imperial Constantinople’s – but the effect, in this small, economically-struggling, hapless republic, is to reduce it to the downright puny.

But there is a third reason to loathe this bombastic self-display of the current government: when I asked my friends where on earth the money is coming from to build such extravaganzas, they would shrug and say “from us.” meaning from the schools and universities, the hospitals, the culture ministry, not to mention from the next generation and the one after that…. “And they call us old socialists ‘komuni,’” said one old friend, bitterly. In this charged nationalist environment – the bombast directed as much at the resident Albanian, Moslem minority as at the neighbouring Greeks – the generation whose patriotism was linked with the achievements of socialist Yugoslavia are now derisively dismissed as Commie pinko finks.

While walking along the river promenade, I take a good look at a piece of Soviet-era public art, a monument commemorating the liberation of Skopje in 1944. The style is pure Socialist kitsch, but not quite Realist: its figures are just too muscle-bound and their faces depersonalized.  And yet, however idealized these fighters are, you can still see in the group something intensely lived – the young soldier slumped in the arms of a comrade, the half-naked dying man , the barefoot peasants wielding weapons from earlier wars, the grim-faced leader launching a grenade, the big-shouldered woman for once not holding a baby or sheaf of wheat but her own rifle. They, or people like them, lived and died in s such actions right here, but Philip and Alexander?

What is happening to Skopje? It’s always been an unlovely city, or at least since an earthquake in 1963 devastated most of it and, rebuilt, it entered the modern age of Brutalist Socialist architecture, even for its Orthodox Cathedral.  But these examples were still not quite overwhelming of the public space, there was still that other city left over from the quake, ramshackle perhaps but still proportionate and mindful of Macedonia’s historical mixture of Slavs and Vlachs, Greeks, Jews, and Albanians, Bulgarians and Armenians…or am I being romantic in the face of a capitalism that is eating its own young?

Of a Sunday, summoned to Divine Liturgy by the peals of the bells of the church dedicated to St Demetrius, I crossed the river on the lovely Ottoman stone bridge (the leaders of the Karposh rebellion had been executed here back in 1689)  into the old part of town once occupied by the Turkish bazaar. (In fact, it is still the market area, with its winding and twisting cobble-stoned pedestrian streets.) The church was full, and this being an Old World Orthodox church there were no pews. People shifted their feet every couple of minutes or, in the case of the men, left the church periodically to go outside into the little courtyard for a sit-down and a smoke. As with my church in Edmonton, a choir of enthusiastic amateurs warbled from the loft at the back while the priest and deacon officiated in the sanctuary, the rest of us having very little to do except light slender beeswax tapers and make the sign of the cross at every mention of “The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” I deduced that  the language of the Liturgy was Old Slavonic not Macedonian, as the words I recognized had case endings [nominative, genitive, dative, accusative etc  etc) whereas modern Macedonian has none.

The service  was homely (even the clerical vestments seemed homemade) and it was a deep pleasure after to stroll into the market area and seat myself under the vast branches of a chestnut tree in full, luscious foliage, next to a chortling fountain and to be served a cappuccino by an elegant Albanian man in a suit and lavender shirt with whom I exchanged pleasantries in French.

As with all substantial towns in the Ottoman era throughout the Balkans the market or bazaar had once been enormous, with shops in the thousands, but even in its reduced state it still presents an impressive topography of narrow streets twisting every which way, with shop windows displaying idiosyncratic collections of wares, whether bolts of ornate (synthetic) fabrics, gold  bangles, antique Turkish coffee sets, shoes or sinister-looking machine parts, with the proprietor sitting in a stool in the door frame, his small cup of coffee on a box before him, not visibly concerned whether anyone was buying. A few women in hijab walked together arm in arm and I saw a few old men in round white skull caps but if there is a majority Albanian or Turkish Moslem presence in the market area I could not see it. There are still Ottoman monuments – some working mosques and disused hamams and hans – and my friend Slavica, an instructor in the Faculty of Fine Arts, is lucky to work in a renovated han or inn called the Suli-An, a graceful structure from the 15^th century: Monday morning we sat in the sunny courtyard with tiny cups of Turkish coffee and admired the harmony of the arcade.

Then back I drifted across the Stone Bridge, remembering how a decade ago it was lined with Albanian and Roma men, women and children selling little piles of cheap goods – socks, alarm clocks, plastic toys they wound up and demonstrated how they jumped around – but now the bridge has been swept clean, as it were, the better to appreciate the looming proportions of the Warrior straight ahead. By the sixth or seventh encounter with Himself, I had to admit my resistance was weakening: here on a Sunday afternoon le tout Skopje was out in the enormous square, licking ice creams cones, taking pictures of the roaring lions and the dancing waters of the fountain, and posing for the friends back home as they pointed up, way up, to the noble head of the ultra Macedon.  (Judge for yourself from this CNN clip: When my friend the poet, Alexander “Sashko” Prokopiev, suggested we meet “by the lions” for a coffee date, it began to seem unsporting to keep on complaining about them. Nevertheless, when we were shortly joined by a senior poet (b. 1933 so he’s seen it all), I felt vindicated when he asserted unambiguously that the historical panorama on the Square was “inauthentic,” a word he kept repeating, while Sashko added that there had been citizens’ protests against the “development” to no avail. He was particularly incensed by the erection of the new Court House, a building of such stupefying proportions that its only rational purpose is to remind the sniveling citizen that, summoned there, s/he will be shortly crushed. To lighten the mood, Zvonko, the Senior Poet, kissed my hand then ordered large pieces of cake to celebrate his grandson’s birthday – the young man is studying clinical psychology in New York and wants to stay there. Mnohaia lita!

Sashko’s daughter lives in Barcelona where she edits a bilingual Spanish-English magazine. She is unlikely to return to Macedonia.

But what of these younger ones we see as we leave the Square? Into the Sunday afternoon hubbub have erupted hundreds of exuberant teenagers (mostly girls) dancing a choreographed routine set to the explosive music coming from a stage set up at one side of the Square. Sashko explains that the song is about the need for young people to respect each other; no surprise, then, to learn that the kids are part of a UNICEF project (Sashko introduces me to the co-ordinator) aimed at the eradication of “violence in education.” That’s what their big, colourful banner says: Young People Against Violence in Schools. They come from various Macedonian cities and include a couple of Albanians (most Albanian school kids now go to separate Albanian-language schools) and the main point they want to make is “for tolerance.” I cannot get a direct answer whether this refers to bullying or racism or sexual harassment or…? Perhaps all of these. Inspired by a Dutch project, One Minute Videos, school kids are being supplied with video cameras and invited to compete for a place with their own one minute videos. I am mesmerized by the dancing, by the youthfulness of bodies and souls that have no memory of a Macedonia that belonged to any other world. They are gloriously lovely.

Speaking of other worlds, I have heard nothing of Canada through the usual media – CNN and BBC World News on hotel televisions – and there are no foreign language newspapers for sale in Serbia, Bulgaria or Macedonia, at least not the places I frequent. Canadian headlines pop up when I open up Yahoo or Telus home pages so I know that women now are premiers of Alberta, and PEI and Newfoundland. I know that the NDP has been returned to power for the fourth straight time in Manitoba and friends in Athens are bringing me up to speed about the Wall Street Movement and the call for similar actions around the world on October 17 (including at the Toronto Stock Exchange). I’m missing everything! On October 17 I will be in Istanbul and will keep my ears open for any action there. So, for me no hockey scores (no loss there) but instead, a tv interview with Michael Moore. (Clearly, I am not reading Canadian papers on line, mainly because internet cafes supplied with computers are so hard to come by that when I do find one, I catch up with mail and plug away at a blog post.)

When I decide to spend a day outside of Skopje; several people advise me to visit Bitola, known to the Ottoman Turks as Manastir, in the deep  south almost on the Greek border.  and redolent of Balkan history to the nth degree.  The bus passes through Veles and Prilep so that by the time I return to Skopje that evening I feel I have been on a whirlwind tour of Macedonian geography, history, architecture, and linguistics. (Speaking of linguistics, I have been depending on my Berlitz Bulgarian phrase book to get by in Macedonia, but each of these languages has its peculiarities: why is it that in Macedonia you do not get on the bus at a “sektor ”(bus bay) as you do in Bulgaria but at a “peron,” as in Serbia? ) As I watched the landscape roll by – rolling hills staggered against each other, stretching out in dry, red plains before plunging into the clefts of river gorges – I could imagine the partisans and troops and militias and guerrillas of all descriptions who have negotiated this coveted terrain, leaving the graves of slain comrades and the ashy tumuli of scorched villages in their wake.

As with all such landscapes, this one too has been normalized, so that what we see now are fields of late summer red peppers, grape vines, corn, cabbages and tobacco, the stuff of the Saturday farmers’ market in Bitola. I watch one exhausted woman with her strings of dried peppers, her jars of preserves, her plastic bottles of I don’t know what, I watch her try to entice customers to her offerings but really they are neither more nor less attractive than all the others on view, and I ache for her: how will she make her living if we don’t stop and buy her apples? Or what about the elderly man with a single small sack of walnuts, the elderly woman with a single bunch of withering flowers from her garden going to seed? 

As with all the Balkan cities I have visited, Bitola provides the single most civilized amenity of Balkan urbanism, the pedestrian street. I approach it through a large city park (another such amenity) its walkway flanked by busts of young men and women who all died in 1942, in their twenties, as “national heroes.” What happened in Bitola in 1942? Perhaps a sacrifice to the Communist state that was being born, for here is the pedestrian street, named for Marshall Tito, a hero that Bitola is not ashamed of, and here is his well-tended bronze-headed bust. The street opens into a square where, against the frame of a large and handsome mosque, an equestrian statue of Philip II, Bitola’s founder, is a gathering point. All roads eventually lead to the market place or bazaar, which first opened for business in 1389 when the Turks became Bitola’s new landlords. Wholesalers from Bitola – Turks, Vlachs, Jews – traded with Venice, Trieste, Vienna, Leipzig and east to Constantinople and south to Alexandria from their 2500 shops and enterprises, a reminder of just how “globalized” earlier empires were.The mosque property alone included 11 shops, 18 tailors, 7 gunpowder magazines, a bakery and a tambourine shop, among others, and its income supported fountains, a dervish residence, the kindergarten, and primary and high schools until 1920.

On to Thessalonica, my first visit in ten years to the city where  I began  the “Demetrius Project” in 2000, the city of the Demetrian cult from where it spread out into the Slavic Orthodox world eventually getting to the Ukrainians too. And ten years ago, the first thing I did once I had unpacked my bags in the small hotel a few steps away from the Basilica of St Demetrius was to rush over to the church and down into its crypt for a Vespers service. But this time I first make my way down to a bookstore in the city centre down by the Old Port. I have been invited by Despina,  a friend of a friend in Belgrade, to her book launch. But this is not a literary event. The book is the product of a human rights project organized with representatives of Thessalonica’s migrant (immigrant) communities who are having a very hard time of it as the economic and political crisis deepens in Greece. (It’s difficult for them at the best of times, and how the Chinese migrants with their trays of knickknacks and household gadgets for sale make a go of it, or the young African men with their handfuls of pirated DVDs, or the Philippino teenagers with their blankets spread out to display orderly and colourful rows of sneakers, how they all make a go of it is beyond me.)

As the book launch event, with a panel of speakers, is going to be conducted in Greek, I do not linger longer than to arrange to meet Despina the next day, in the café of the new Photography Museum in the Old Port. (It is characteristic of Despina and her politics that she chooses this café with its view onto the cranes of the new port where workers are working, rather than the chic café bar that faces the other direction from the other side of the wharf, onto the picturesque scene of Thessalonica’s seaside promenade. Despina once lived in South Africa,  “in struggle.”) I learn that the book launch the night before had been disrupted by an “industrial action,” a crowd of shouting protestors outside the store. Their “action” was ostensibly linked with the on-going national protests against the austerity measures imposed by the government during the economic crisis here but in fact, says Despina, they were friends of a disgruntled employee of the store who claimed he was owed vacation pay. She is incensed that this protest took place without any thought or care being given to the fact that the public inside the store were supporting a human rights initiative.

She is incensed again a couple of nights later when, at the official opening of the Youth Art Biennale in the forecourt of the new city hall, a very loud and persistent group of protestors attempts to disrupt the proceedings. The protestors are municipal employees, afraid for their jobs (reasonably enough) who are misdirecting their wrath, Despina feels, at this hopeful and co-operative event, the Biennale, at which young artists from around Europe are gathering in solidarity with each other if not with their governments.

As an outsider to all this, I find it difficult to judge the efficacy or even the purpose of the public agitation and indignation in the streets of Greece as the Greeks I have talked with are agreed that the cause is lost, that the European Union and its banks are already imposing “solutions” on the Greek economy, and that Greeks will just have to “suck it up” until the economy is put on a sound footing.  (In the meantime, a retired professor has had his pension reduced by 1000 Euros a month  and a young waiter has had his hours reduced to part-time, even though the cafes, bars and tavernas all seem to be doing a roaring business. This will all change, he says, when the weather changes. And when even these middle class patrons will be feeling the pinch on their wallets.) Even those very sympathetic to the protests, especially to the young whose “actions” have been peaceful, are disgusted by the general passivity to the pervasive and profound corruption at all social and political levels that is being exposed  My friend Stephie, a Greek-Canadian who has been living in Greece for twenty years, describes her encounters with the driving instructor who demanded a bribe to pass her driving exam and the land titles officer who declared  that her file was “missing” an important page which would cost her 3000 Euros to replace but that he could expedite matters if she gave him 500 Euros. The building in which she owns her apartment seems neither to have any elected council nor to come under any formal regulation such as a Condominium Act.  People with grand lifestyles apparently have no taxable income. It goes on and on. Stephie has been photocopying a year-old article from Vanity Fair which says it all, she feels. Read it and weep.

For a very readable account of the economic crisis and the options open to the Greek government, read John Lanchester in the London Review of Books.

But I came to Thessalonica to deliver copies of my book to two scholars whose assistance at the beginning of my journey proved to be very enlightening.  Prof. Anthony-Emile Tachiaos, whose work has focused on Slav-Byzantine relations, and  Prof Aris Mentzos who is a historian of Byzantine archaeology: it was he who had guided me through the ruins of the Roman Agora and around the splendid interior of the Basilica of St Demetrius which dates back to the 7^th century (those parts of it that have survived earthquake and fire, that is). Mentzos gave me copies of work of his own, including a monograph that established that a celebrated mosaic in the basilica, so long mis-identified as St Demetrius or St Sergius, is actually St George. Here he is and he is beautiful:. A Saint by any other name…

Blog from Sofia, Bulgaria

When I travelled in the 1980s through eastern/south-eastern Europe – this would result in the book Bloodlines in 1993 -  I did not go to Bulgaria, quite deliberately. Among other things at the time, I was trying to situate my Slavic origins in Slavic histories in Europe, especially in those places as in Ukraine that were Orthodox and used the Cyrillic alphabet. Bulgaria should have been an obvious destination – Cyrillic and Orthodox with a vengeance, although this wasn’t so obvious during the Communist period – but I didn’t go because, in my mind, Bulgarians weren’t Slavs. I’m not sure what I thought they were – Bulgars, I suppose, and hailing from Central Asia in the 8^th century.

 Well, I have since stood corrected. Bulgarians speak a Slavic language, so culturally that includes them with the Macedonians, Serbs, etc. But as for their racial/ethnic origins, the account changes with the political winds. During the socialist years, their Slavic identity was promoted, linking them with that Great Brother People, the Russians. Nationalists have since downplayed Slavic for Thracian identity (it helps their cause that stupendous hoards of Thracian artefacts of gold have been unearthed in great burial mounds in the Thracian Plains: I saw some of these in Sofia’s Archaeological Museum, some predating the Egyptian dynasties, and I can appreciate why today’s Bulgarians would want to lay claim to such illustrious ancestors. (I noticed the preponderance, almost fetishistic, of a figure called the Thracian Horseman, whose iconography almost exactly prefigures that of the great Byzantine warrior saints, George, Theodore and Demetrius: seated militaristically on a horse with his cape blowing in a stiff wind.  More scientifically-inclined nationalists suggested that proto-Bulgarian was an acceptable source of the Bulgarian identity. And nowadays, I have been told, DNA evidence suggests that the Bulgarians have never had anything to do with Central Asian steppes and Turkic peoples but are rather descendents of Iranians, making them Aryans.

Whatever. Today Bulgaria is in the European Union and the distinctive blue flag with the circle of gold stars of the EU flies alongside the national flag. I arrived in Sofia September 21 just in time for a 3-day national holiday, one of several liberally distributed through the year that commemorate Bulgaria’s protracted and bloody liberation from what is called the Turkish Yoke. All of Sofia seemed either to be sleeping in late or hanging out day and night at the cafes or taking the air in the countryside. This tranquility during days of a late summer heat, the light filtered through the still-lush greenery of the many city parks, fountains splashing and old men playing chess, made Sofia even more attractive than usual.

As in Serbia, my purpose for revisiting Bulgaria was to meet again people who were terribly important as informants while I was pursuing St Demetrius in old Byzantine lands (I started eleven years ago!) and to give them a copy of my book, Prodigal Daughter: A Journey to Byzantium.  For example, Dr Ivan Biliarsky, a youthful Byzantinist when I first met him and picked his brains about the cult of St Demetrius and Byzantine spirituality. We set off on a slow stroll through the centre of Sofia which, besides being quiet for the holiday was also marking the European Day of No Traffic. We were able to walk in the middle of streets without fear of being slaughtered (Sofia drivers stop for no man or woman).

This being a national day of celebration, there were folk dancers in one of the main squares, and I made a bee-line for them. All male, they were splendid in tight white pants and embroidered shirts. It became clear that they were professional dancers – by the way they pointed their feet – and that they were acting out an insurgency: they shot pistols in the air and unsheathed their knives, flashing them around in sinister swerves, and paid a kind of obeisance to an older man who then led them in a very sexy kolo, or round dance. But Ivan found the whole thing distasteful. He said they were representing Macedonian insurgents; and Bulgaria had once had claims on what is now the Republic of Macedonia as Bulgarian land (so did the Greeks and Serbians in what are called the Balkan Wars before WW I: all this is in my book, if you are having trouble following this). Ivan is content to “let Macedonia be Macedonia now: their self-identity, their language and literature are now recognized as Macedonian, not Bulgarian, even though it is a ‘constructed; language – but aren’t they all?” (Another friend reminded me that Bulgaria was the first country to acknowledge the independent republic of Macedonia when it finally and somewhat reluctantly declared itself independent of Yugoslavia, and this in spite of the fact that a ‘constructed’ Macedonian history has appropriated a medieval Tsar the rest of the world knows as a Bulgarian, Samuel, he whose army was decisively overwhelmed by the Byzantine emperor Basil, known then and to us as the Bulgar-Slayer.) 

Ivan and I settled into a terrace cafe called the Mausoleum – not as morbid as it sounds. In fact it’s a political joke, being laid out right alongside what is left (a cement pad) of the enormous gravesite or Mausoleum of Communist Bulgaria’s first leader, Georgi Dimitrov. A decade ago, the tomb was already gone, to be replaced by a mighty replica of a box of Johnny Walker Red. This too is now gone, thank heavens. On the other hand, one can now patronize Starbuck’s, KFC, Subway and – the latest shopping sensation – Ikea.

Ten years ago, when I thought my Demetrius Project was solely about the sufficiently exciting topics of Byzantine and Balkan history, I was bemused by the number of scholars I was meeting and interviewing who were Orthodox believers and unabashed to say so. Ivan was one of them. Now that I’ve made my own way back to the Orthodox Church, he and I talk as fellow adherents – and confess our respective frustrations about Orthodoxy. Ivan is disgusted by the recent decision of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church to canonize some souls murdered in one of the many atrocities (on all sides) in the aforementioned Balkan Wars: villagers of Batak, who took sanctuary in their church from the assault of Turkish soldiers (and some Bulgarian accomplices, in another version) and were burned to death there. Victims they certainly were – but saints? Ivan accuses the Church of exploiting a purely national/political agenda while it does very little of what it’s supposed to do: act as the Body of Christ. He does admit, though, that even this corrupted version of an Orthodox Church has not dared to canonize one of the truly revered, and doomed, revolutionary heroes, Vasil Levski, who was guilty of murdering a boy on grounds of “treachery,” although I haven’t been able to find this story via Google.

This theme of the “corrupted” Bulgarian Orthodox Church comes up again, vehemently, with a friend in Plovdiv, Br. Simeon, who is still in a rage about the Church’s decision a decade ago to withdraw from the World Council of Churches, to withdraw in fact from any kind of conversation with other faiths (“I’m all right, Jack!”) or even to “witness” to the many social and economic injustices that have befallen their flock of the faithful (mainly women, it must be said) who nevertheless in the gravest sincerity still come to church, light candles, kiss the icons and drop their meager coins into the collection boxes…

Caveat lector: my current visit to Bulgaria has had an awful lot of church content, which you may choose to skip for the next several paragraphs. But it was inevitable that this was a big theme of my conversations and wanderings: not only because I was “winding up” the Demetrius project but also because Bulgaria is the site of some of the earliest Christian events in the Roman Empire – persecutions of Christian martyrs in Plovdiv in 304, for instance, the same year as the martyrdom of St Demetrius in Thessalonica, and the building of a baptistery in the 4^th century Rotunda of St George in Sofia – my favourite church –  when the city was known by its Roman name Serdica, described  as “my Rome” by none other than Constantine the Great himself.

I arrived at St George in time for Vespers, an hour-long version (preceding Sunday Mass) with all the Tropars, Kondaks and Irmoi [hymns] intact, apparently. Five cantors took turns at singing, including two young women whose voices considerably alleviated the intense Byzantine drone of the chants, while above us flew the faint 12^th-century outlines of angels circling the base of the dome.

After the Bulgars settled these lands and became Christians via Constantinople, they built a great many more churches and filled them with the distinctive iconography of Byzantium and the peculiar calligraphy of  Old Slavonic letters known as the Cyrillic, so I had to (re)visit all these churches too. They are hard to miss, seemingly around every corner in downtown Sofia; or occupying an entire square to itself in the case of  the massive Byzantine-style Cathedral Church of St Alexander Nevsky (built in honour of the Russian soldiers who died during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, as a result of which Bulgaria was liberated from Ottoman rule). On my way one afternoon to hear Vespers in this church, I sat straight down on a cement wall to listen, heart-pounding, to the great peals of the Cathedral bells rolling out under the heavens. (It is to be noted that in Plovdiv, there are pious complaints about the muezzin calling the Muslim faithful to prayer on Fridays at the lovely 14th-century mosque in the heart of the city, just as there are atheists in the West who complain about their Sunday mornings being disturbed by the church bells plaintively calling the neighbourhood to worship.)

The Church of the Sedmochislenitsi, dedicated to Cyril and Methodius and their five disciples who brought Christianity to the Slavs, is described in my book as a dark and damp interior I took shelter in during a winter rain storm back in 2001. Now it is a glorious late summer morning and the church is a cheerful place to stop for a few minutes, light some candles for family and friends, and study the frescoes. A placard outside tells visitors that here once stood the Kodja Mehmed Dervis Djami called the Black Mosque because of its minaret strikingly tiled in black. It was built on a design of the genius architect Sinan Pasha in 1528 on the initiative of Mehmed Pasha, great Vizier of Suleiman the Magnificent. The caravanserai attached to it later served as a prison in liberated Bulgaria until the new state got around to building is own (every self-respecting nation state has to have its own prisons…) Speaking of the Ottomans, the proud new democratic states of eastern Europe may well regret the enthusiastic fervour  with which the nineteenth-century anti-Turkish liberators destroyed the Ottoman architectural legacy on these lands, leaving very little for the unaware visitor to appreciate of a 500-year-long Empire. Even Bulgarians flock to Istanbul to breathe in the atmosphere of a very particular Muslim civilization.

In conversation with my friend Ivan, I sincerely wanted to know if there have been intellectual currents to stir up Orthodoxy’s pot in the last, say one hundred, years? He mentioned the sainted Seraphim Sobolev, and I quote from an article online from Orthodox Russia Nos. 21 and 22, 1994 : “The spiritual founder of the Bulgarian Old-Calendarist Orthodox Church was Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev)-the well-known theologian, profound expert on the works of the Holy Fathers, the fiery defender of holy Orthodoxy. People who knew well his struggle for the purity of the Orthodox faith called him ‘the conscience of Orthodoxy.’ Archbishop Seraphim lived in Bulgaria for thirty years.  By his righteous life, filled with deprivations, calamities and persecutions from the dark powers of evil, from the powers of this world, he drew to himself spiritual children. Seraphim began to nurture them in the strict Orthodox spirit. For example, he was able to introduce Confession before Holy Communion again into the life of the Bulgarian Church.  At that time, the Mystery of Confession was almost completely forgotten in Bulgaria.”

Well, not exactly what I had in mind as an “intellectual” current, but Ivan then whisked me off to visit Seraphim’s tomb, a place of great popular veneration in Sofia, in a little chapel in the gorgeous Baroque-style Russian Orthodox Church reached from a side door. In the antechamber, visitors – mostly women – sat writing prayer-petitions on the paper provided, while others stepped one by one into the chamber holding the sarcophagus to say their prayer. It was a homely scene and at least far removed from the dispiriting reputation of the official Church.

On Day Two of the national holiday  I met my friend Eta Mousakova, librarian in the National Library and a specialist in ancient documents (she’s in my book too, and the only person I know who can read Glagolitic). We met in front of the Library, named for the great saints Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica (we’re talking 9th century here) who devised the Glagolitic for the newly-Christianised Slavs of Moravia, a lost cause as it turned out, when the Moravian prince switched to the Catholic Church. But Cyril and Methodius’s disciples would carry on, this time coming up with the Cyrillic script (in their mentors’ honour) for the Bulgarians, also newly-Christianized, and who remain eternally grateful, to judge by the many representations of this event – religion and alphabet delivered together – in public and sacred frescoes.

Over supper in a garden restaurant serving standard Bulgarian fare (roasted red peppers, grilled chicken, and pretty decent Merlot) Eta brings me up to date about her work, namely that the National Library like every other public institution is struggling to fund itself. Eta’s boss came up with the fund-raising idea of “adopt-a-book,” meant to raise funds for the restoration of old books and manuscripts, and dumped the file on Eta’s desk. As the filthy rich in this town are only interested in donating money to splashy popular projects like sports, Eta has so far managed to raise only 200 levas ($160) for adopt-a-book, all of it from one high school outside Sofia, enough to restore one small 17^th century Polish school primer.

Plovdiv was founded as Philippopolis by Philip of Macedon whose triumphant statue has been newly-raised in the middle of the partially-excavated ruins of the Roman stadium, the rest being irretrievably covered by a pedestrian street full of shops and cafes. Br Simeon sarcastically points out that Philip was yet another conqueror of an indigenous people, in the case of Plovdiv, the Thracians. But the Hellenes and then the Romans stayed a very long time, and one of the most exquisite museums I’ve seen in this region is to be found in a pedestrian underpass at the level of a semi-excavated mosaic floor from a Roman villa, later an Episcopal palace. Along with the floor, many small objects of extraordinary craftsmanship in glass were uncovered and are now on display, their intense and unclouded colours and forms restored to something like their original beauty.

An ugly side of modern Plovdiv was on view the two days that I spent there: bawling mobs a thousand-strong of mainly very young men surging up and down the main pedestrian street waving flags and bellowing “Death to the Gypsies! Death to the Turks,” finally rallying at the mosque and setting off blasts of firecrackers, where they were finally pushed back by the police banging thunderously on their shields. 

Emotions had been inflamed against the local Roma because of an incident a few days earlier in a neighbouring village: two young men, one Roma and one Bulgarian, got into an altercation, which ended in the death of the Bulgarian, run over (accidentally-on-purpose?) by the van of the Roma boy, who has been arrested. An angry crowd then set fire to several Roma homes. (I saw some of this on morning tv, including images of young people holding up their cellphones and taking pictures of the fire.) Br Simeon told me that about half of the Roma women who work sweeping the streets of Plovdiv were too frightened to show up for work the next day. Indeed, aside from Br Simeon there was not a Bulgarian I spoke to who is in sympathy with the Roma Bulgarians (there follows a depressingly familiar list of grievances against them) but even the Roma can be their own worst enemies, as in the story Br Simeon told me of the luckless efforts of a young Roma man intent on cleaning up the votes-for-hire political culture of his community: he was assaulted by goons on behalf of the local Gypsy King (as he’s known) who feared the loss of a lucrative source of illegal lucre.

At the invitation of the Secretary of the Plovdiv Writers Association, I met with a group of high-school writers (mostly girls and mostly writing poetry) whom she has organized into a kind of creative writing club. We gathered in a room at the back of one of Plovdiv’s most famous old houses, the one in which the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine stayed a few days on his way to Constantinople in 1833, the guest of the Greek merchant Georgi Mavridi and which is mentioned in all the tourist guides as a must-see example of the urban architecture of this 19-th century Old Town linked with ideas of the Enlightenment. Even then-President Francois Mitterand of France had visited and left his signature in the visitors’ book (in 1989, to give local democrats a boost, presumably). Impressed by all these connotations, before I met with the students I rehearsed until I was mellifluous the few verses I remembered from high school French of Lamartine: Sois sage o ma douleur, et tiens-toi plus tranquille. Un atmosphere obscure enveloppe la ville, il descend, le voici, aux uns portant la paix, aux autres, le souci. It was all in vain: they had never heard of Lamartine.

But we had a lively talk together about Byzantium and martyrs, Bulgarians and Canadians and empires, about Cyrillic letters and cellphone publishing. And by the end of the evening the instructor had even come up with a Bulgarian equivalent for “creative nonfiction”:  beyond-fiction literature. I like it.

Bohemian quarter of Belgrade

September 2011: my umpteenth visit to Belgrade since 1982. That first one, launched from Greece where I was spending the winter, was focussed on getting to know the boyfriend, and his family, of a Yugoslav-Canadian friend back in Edmonton. Our lingua franca in Belgrade was French – the boyfriend and his sister had elected to study it and not English. With those in Belgrade who spoke neither French nor English, I cobbled together – and still do – a Slavonic mishmash, hoping for the best. Eventually, I would catch on to the particularities of Serbian – for example, the word for “head” which in Ukrainian is holova becomes glava in Serbian. Change the “h” sound to the “g” sound and drop half the vowels, and voila! You too can speak Serbian.

Back in 1982, the language was called Serbo-Croatian. That’s what my 20-year-old pocket dictionary calls it (and it is represented on the cover by the Yugoslav flag) but all that was before the blood-letting, and the rhetorical hysteria which preceded it, tore Yugoslavia apart in the vicious wars of the 1990s. Now, it appears, there are 4 languages where once there was one: Serbian, Croatian, Bosniak and (the latest entrant), Montenegrin. According to an informant in Belgrade, the Montenegrin government secured two linguists who, after due diligence, discovered that the language spoken in their part of ex-Yugoslavia has two additional letters not included in any other language-previously-called-Serbo-Croatian. “Of course,” said my informant, a writer and publisher, “no one knows how to pronounce these letters: they seem to have appeared by some sort of Divine Revelation.”

 In March 1982, a mild season as I recall, Miki the boyfriend in Belgrade took me on my first stroll through the great urban park, Kalemegdan, which now surrounds the Turkish-era fortress on top of the promontory overlooking the confluence of the Sava and Danube Rivers. (Not so long ago, ruined bridges bombed by NATO in 1999 cluttered up the waterways but all that is now removed along with any mention of it – no hard feelings? Or just political pragmatism? – and a beautiful new bridge suspended from a web of steel filaments soars in a graceful arc over the Sava.)  From one of the peddlers in the park Miki bought me a red heart on a string, fashioned from dough (I still have it). At the end of my visit in Belgrade he asked me to take back to Edmonton an engagement ring for his girlfriend, Nena. And that is how I came to be deeply entwined within their two families to this day.(Much of my subsequent travel in the Balkans and east central Europe is narrated in my books, Bloodlines: A Journey to Eastern Europe, The Doomed Bridegroom: A Memoir and Prodigal Daughter: A Journey to Byzantium.)

So, my umpteenth trip. I’ve seen the Belgrade of late-flowering Titoism, of nascent Serbian nationalism and its attendant cultural, moral and spiritual cruelties, of the wars, of the end of the wars and of Milosevic, of the resistance of civil society, and now of Belgrade the European aspirant with its subcultures of corruption, the black market, sex trafficking and Porsches parked outside Giorgio Armani shops while the percentage who are unemployed or living in poverty or eking out their old age on a small pension keeps growing.

But this is also the Belgrade of the Belgrade Fund for Political Excellence (which is hosting a Balkan Security Forum this week), of bookshops stuffed with books including an impressive number of translated titles, of chamber concerts in the basement of one of the oldest houses in the city’s oldest street, of the active 16^th century mosque in Stari Grad, “Old City,” of experimental theatre and galleries of modern art, and of cafes where coffee still means Turkish coffee….

Belgrade in September is the venue of the International PEN Congress (under the presidency of John Ralston Saul), which is why I’m here, not as a delegate but as a participant in the parallel literary festival (paid my own way). Festivities opened with a launch of the Serbian translation of Saul’s The Collapse of Globalism: And the Reinvention of the World, and Saul’s feisty lecture to a packed crowd in the auditorium of the downtown Cultural Centre: his verbal assault on “management” was received with particular enthusiasm.

Two nights later it was my turn – I shared the bill with three other writers, from Slovenia, Croatia and Denmark – in the reputedly hot, new cultural venue known as GRAD (“city”) which is located , I was told by way of directions, under a bridge. It took me some time to find it in the dubious neighbourhood of rail tracks, emptied-out warehouses and erotic shops all lit murkily in the deepening dusk but there it was, indeed under a bridge not a stone’s throw from where the Sava was slapping quietly in the dark. I arrived 15 minutes late but I had missed nothing. Not counting the people who had to be there – Mladen from the Ministry of Culture who was MCing, Olgica from the Canadian Embassy, two young PEN volunteers and we four writer-readers – there were two audience members.

Except for my reading – an excerpt from Prodigal Daughter – and the poems of the Slovenian poet, the entire evening proceeded in Serbian. (Even the Danish writer, a linguist, has had a book translated into Serbian and could read from it herself, something about the matriarchal cultural context of the figure of Artemis at Ephesus.) So I am at a loss what to tell you about what was being said and read.

The next night I was in Novi Sad, a charming, multicultural city (Serbian, Hungarian and German) an hour north of Belgrade on the Danube (and a NATO target too in 1999, for its bridges and oil refineries). I was on the stage with 17 other PEN writers (only two of us were women and the youngest writer was perhaps in his 50s: where are the women and the young?) Three were Egyptian, three were Greek, the Slovene and the Croatian were there again, as were an Israeli, a Kosovar, a Bangladeshi, and the venerable and enfeebled Gyorgy Konrad, veteran Hungarian writer and conscience of dissent. There was a full house in attendance (it helped that there were two busloads of us from Belgrade), and I received an appreciative chuckle or two in response to my reading (I chose an amusing anecdote from a conversation with a Serbian Orthodox priest-theologian) so I knew there were some English-speakers out there but the untranslated readings in Hungarian and Albanian remained unfortunately completely obscure.

One afternoon I invited fellow Canadian scribbler Charlie Foran (recently-installed president of the PEN Canada Centre) to wander around “my” Belgrade with me as I revisited places and streets that I find evocative. We began at the head of the “walking street,” ulica Kneza Mihaila (Prince Michael Street), a superbly-successful because enormously-popular and beautifully-restored street lined with shops, cafes and galleries; but what I pointed out was the second-floor windows of the old Press Club restaurant in the City of Belgrade’s Cultural Centre, where I had stood in 1984.

I was at lunch with a professor involved in the teaching of Canadian Literature (the now-retired Dr Ileana Cura, still reading Alice Munro) when suddenly a great blast of siren from the street interrupted our conversation. “Go to the window and have a look out,” she said. What I saw was a streetscape of Belgradians stopped frozen in their tracks. It had happened this way every year since 1980, the year of Tito’s death, and at the exact day and time of his death, 4 May, 3:05 pm: the great blast of siren, the frozen gait, the minute of silence. Within a few years as Yugoslavia was disintegrating, all mention, representation and commemoration of Marshal Josip Broz Tito, “father” of Yugoslavia,  disappeared in Belgrade– his photographs from offices, his name from streets, his birthday, uncelebrated – to be replaced in public awareness by the names of kings, queens, princes and princesses, patriarchs of the Orthodox Church and now that perennial favorite of the depoliticized public space, the scientist Nicola Tesla.

However, in the Belgrade City Gift Shop on the ground floor under the Press Club – as I showed Charlie – one can now buy Tito’s Cookbook, souvenir photographs of Tito and a glass paper weight with his image inscribed. And just outside on the street, at kiosks selling postcards, newspapers and cigarettes, I have seen buttons for sale brandishing his image alongside those of Che Guevara and Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Serbia who died while on trial as a war criminal at The Hague.

Next stop: Dom Omladine, or House of Youth, by its very title a leftover of socialist Yugoslavism but unashamed of it. In 1988 it had still been the epicentre of youthful counterculture – commemorating the heady days of protest in June 1968 known as The June Days when students accused Tito and the Party of having become a “Red bourgeoisie” – and in 1991 it had been the collection point for European youth activists descending from their “peace buses” in support of local anti-war actions. (By 1995 these had included Women in Black, lesbian groups, some media, intellectual circles in the universities, the artists at the Centre for Cultural Decontamination, Open Society supported by the Soros Foundation, among others.) In 2001 Dom Omladine had retooled itself again, described in Prodigal Daughter as a café bar with sleek furniture and track lights with a billiard club up the stairs. Now, as Charlie and I stood in its front lobby, these too have disappeared to be replaced by a bank of computers and a banner announcing this as a Europe Information Centre.

Upstairs in this building the alternative radio station B-92, which had never not once slackened in its in-your-face cultural and political programming during the era of yawping nationalism and grievous war, has been bought by a Greek media company and moved to chic headquarters across the river in New Belgrade, its programming  under redesign as we speak.

 Next stop: 7 Francuzska Street, home of the venerable Serbian Writers Association from which dissident writers had split in the 1990s, leaving – according to one account – only an aging coterie of writers who feel nostalgic for the good old days, by which they mean the days of Yugoslavia, conveniently maintaining a silence about their own role in aiding and abetting the Serbain nationalism of politicans that led directly to war. Three years ago, the back garden of the building was under reconstruction; now Charlie and I stopped for ice coffee under an enormous umbrella in the shade of plane trees – very elegant, and an enterprise of some private company that pays the Writers Association to lease the space.

 We walked one street over into Skadarlije, the curvy and cobble-stoned street that leads through a vintage neighobourhood still associated with the bohemians who used to be its denizens – artists, writers, actors, musicans-  and turned into Gospodar Jevremova Street where we came across the 19^th-century home of the celebrated Pavlovic family and a City of Belgrade cultural monument. The current Pavlovic – 7^th generation – opened the gate and in we walked into a lovely garden with fig and quince trees and a fountain, into the world of privilege unbuffeted by war, strife and want but also a world of accomplishment in diplomacy, visual art and literature. As Charlie commented, the main message from our host seemed to be: “We also are Europeans, we who have picked up the ropes of civilization broken by Communism and nationalism, and kept the faith with the West.” Well, good luck to them, who live up the street from the mosque where a group of young men sat in its forecourt and eyed us suspiciously.

 Finally, we walked past leafy and elegant Student Square which had been occupied by protestors in June 1968 who had spilled out from the Faculty of Philosophy across the street, and into Plato Bookstore, once a chaos of books, journals and office supplies but now nicely rearranged a la Ikea.

Monument to miners killed in Hillcrest mine explosion 1914Hillcrest monument

August 25, 2011

On my way to Fernie BC last month (I was an instructor in the terrific week-long Fernie Writers Conference along with fellow scribes  Andreas Schroeder and Marina Endicott), I drove the scenic and historical route through the Crows Nest Pass via Highway 3 which took me through the old coal mining towns of Bellevue, Hillcrest, Blairmore and Coleman. Why was I doing this? As a combination of homage to and research into the mind, heart and spirit of a man I barely knew: my maternal grandfather, Andrew Maksymiuk.

Although he lived a long life, dying in Edmonton sixty-some years after immigrating to Canada from Galicia (present-day western Ukraine), he was to me mainly inscrutable. My parents, sister and I made regular Sunday visits to his and Baba’s home in the working-class, East European Edmonton neighbourhood of my own childhood (my parents were teachers and we eventually moved “up” and out to a new suburb in the 1960s) but I understood little Ukrainian and spoke less, and my grandfather, Dido, spoke almost no English. But, while the grown-ups chatted and held forth and argued in Ukrainian, I took a great interest in the smudgy-coloured magazines strewn around the little living room, magazines from Soviet Ukraine. Eventually I would adopt a sneering attitude to these publications – mocking the smiling, the euphoric, tractor drivers and milkmaids of the collective farms and the pulsating cement workers and coal miners of the mammoth industrial projects of the post-War Soviet Union – but in my childhood they fascinated me, like heroic figures in an exaggerated landscape that nevertheless bore some resemblance to the world I was beginning to pay attention to.

Dido was a socialist, never a Communist although he passionately defended the achievements of the Soviet Union made in the name of the working class. He never homesteaded; he was a day labourer in Edmonton, when he could get work, literally a ditch-digger, while Baba worked ceaselessly selling milk and cream and eggs (you could keep domestic animals within the city limits in those days) and taking in laundry. As for his life before coming to Canada, I know almost nothing except that he worked in Belgian coal mines alongside his older brother, Nikolai.

Bingo. Coal mines + Socialism + Galicians = Crows Nest Pass. As I drove slowly round each community, I looked for signs of the society that had once embraced these elements. The abandoned coke ovens and collapsed collieries, the museum photographs of once-bustling main streets, the Blairmore street sign Tim Buck Boulevard (now in a museum) that had renamed Victoria Avenue while the local Communists held brief sway as mayor and councillors in the 1930s, a Workers Hall, a union hall….and of course the mass grave in Hillcrest, the coal town where on June 19, 1914, Canada’s most lethal mining disaster took 189 lives. I spent a long time in the cemetery, imagining the final hours of horror of men dying under the horrid weight of the very mineral they had been sent down to shovel out for the profit of mining companies, I imagined the despair of those gasping at the last thin streams of air before the black damp took them, and I imagined the grief of the women and children on the surface as each scorched, broken, maimed and mutilated body was brought up from the deep. And, thanks to the small plaques fastened on the low rail of the fence encircling the mass grave, I could also imagine these young Italians, Croatians, Slovaks, Irish, Galicians, in the ultimate brotherhood of workers: as the memorial says, As they had worked, so were they laid..

a rather Byzantine version of Benedict, the 6th century Italian saint and monastic

St Peter’s Abbey near Muenster, Saskatchewan, is a community of  Benedictine Brothers on whose grounds the Saskatchewan Writers Guild holds a writing retreat every summer. I have been coming for years – it is now a kind of ritual for me because the beginning of my journey with my last book, Prodigal Daughter: Journey to Byzantium is partly rooted here – for nothing gives me more peace in the midst of a writing life’s frazzles (email account being hacked into a couple of weeks ago for instance) than to live awhile in farming country while monks go about their daily round of work and prayer and we writers on a round of our own in what had once been a  convent house named for Benedict’s sister, St Scholastica. Perfect name. I came here to get two things done: to revise a conference paper for publication, about the obsessive use of the figure of the Doomed Bridegroom in my literary nonfiction; and, speaking of Doomed Bridegrooms, to make one more revision of my playscript, The Gallows Is Also a Tree, about the tragic Cree war chief, Wandering Spirit, and his 16-year-old Mixed-blood hostage,, Eliza McLean. Done.