Now and Then

Quintus Curtius Rufus, a Roman historian (1^st c. AD) wrote on Alexander the Great and his troubled, at least initially, founding of the city of Alexandria in Egypt: ‘There is a report, that after the king had completed the Macedonian custom of marking out the circular boundary for the future city-walls with barley-meal, flocks of birds flew down and fed on the barley’. Driving through the Republic of Macedonia this summer I wondered if the road builders of the recently-fledged country followed in the great man’s footsteps. Because the long stretches along the ‘Aleksandar Makedonski’ motorway are completely unmarked: no lines of any kind or colour. Have the birds gobbled up the barley?

Driving along the ‘motorway’, dotted with bumps and holes of all shape and size, can be a pretty scary experience, especially at night, the road being unlit save for your car’s headlights and, if lucky, moonlight. That was on the way to Greece, north-south direction. On the way back some nine days later, south-to-north, we knew better and drove in broad daylight. But the persistence of bumps and holes proved too much and eventually steered us off the main highway and onto the local ‘E-roads’, which proved to be – surprise, surprise – in no better state. Only when we got on the very local, virtually vehicle-less 125a, leading through beautiful landscapes along the Pčinja river, only then did we finally open all four windows and let in the warm summer air, scented by sundry wild flowers.

On the Macedonia-Serbian border crossing we were the only customers. Which must be why it took ages both for the Macedonian and the Serbian boys in blue to let us through after giving our passports some seriously close scrutiny. The Pelince border crossing must be one of the most romantic (if that is a suitable word for a border crossing): right in the gully, surrounded by lush forests and so, so quiet, only birdsong and the humming of river is heard.

A ten-minute drive past the border takes you to the St Prohor Pčinjski Orthodox monastery, it being the real clincher behind our original detour. The monastic complex is beautifully arranged, comprised of the St Prohor Church and the magnificent konak, the imposing residential building, sporting a unique architectural style. The place was abuzz with workers, busy with all sorts of repairs and adjustments – you could see something positive was taking place. A further proof for the care and concern for its surroundings was this wooden notice board (see if you can figure out what all the symbols stand for). Click to enlarge.

St Prohor’s life story is a story of a devout and a dedicated anchorite. According to the apparently extensive and well-preserved hagiography, Prohor was born in the first half of the 11^th century, into a wealthy and educated family. One day, elated upon hearing Matthew’s ‘He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me’, Prohor abandoned what remaining shreds of secularity were still fettering him, and left for the high hills, never to return. The next thirty two years (some sources say much longer) he spent living in a small cave with the mountain beasts, sleeping on the bare rock, feeding on wild fruits and grass, drinking water from the mountain spring, never setting eyes on a living human soul.

Well, almost never. The legend goes that one day a hunter hard on the heels of an injured doe, which has just found a shelter with Prohor, comes across the old man, is immediately startled and starts backing off. Prohor calls out to him and the two begin conversing. The hunter turns out to be a Byzantine military aristocrat Diogenes (which Prohor somehow already knew) and eventually Prohor prophesies Diogenes is to become the future emperor of Byzantium. Prohor also pledges Diogenes that once he becomes a king, he should duly remember the old hermit’s prophesy.

 

Decades later, Romanos IV Diogenes (1068-1071) has a dream in which the old prophet admonishes him with words: ‘Why, great Diogenes, have you forgotten your old garb and me the old hermit? Make an effort and build me at least a small temple where I could pray to God until my final days’. The Emperor, frightened, immediately sets off to the north Macedonian mountains to try and find Prohor. After many days of fruitless search, Prohor reappears in Diogenes’ dream and tells him to go to Mount Kozjak and look for a cave above which a white eagle soars, after which Diogenes finally finds the cave and in it the old man’s remains, lying intact and quite unspoiled. On the spot Diogenes builds a small church dedicated to St Luke and further down, at the Pčinja riverbank, another, a more imposing one, where St Prohor’s relics remain to this day.

                             From left to right: Diogenes IV, St Prohor, King Milutin (click to enlarge)

 

Incidentally, Diogenes’ own fate as an emperor turned out to be a sort of royal martyrdom in its own right. This from Wikipedia:

During his reign [Diogenes] was determined to halt the decline of the Byzantine military and stop Turkish incursions into the Byzantine Empire, but in 1071 he was captured and his army routed at the Battle of Manzikert, lead by the Sultan Alp Arslan.

[…] According to a number of Byzantine historians… Arslan at first had difficulty believing the dusty and tattered warrior brought before him was the Roman Emperor. He then stepped down from his seat and placed his foot on Romanos' neck. But after this sign of ritual humiliation, Arslan raised Romanos from the ground, and ordered him to be treated like a king. From then on he treated him with extreme kindness, never saying a cruel word to him in the Emperor's eight-day stay in his camp, and then released him in exchange for a treaty and the promise of a hefty ransom.

[…]In the meantime, the opposition faction scheming against Romanos IV decided to exploit the situation. While still captive [Romanos] was overthrown in a palace coup, and when released he was quickly defeated by the army led by one Andronikos Doukas. Pursued by Andronikos, [Romanos IV] was eventually forced to surrender by the garrison at Adana upon receiving assurances of his personal safety. Before leaving the fortress, he collected all the money he could lay his hands on and sent it to the Sultan as proof of his good faith, along with a message: "As emperor, I promised you a ransom of a million and a half. Dethroned, and about to become dependent upon others, I send you all I possess as proof of my gratitude".

Andronikos stipulated that Diogenes’ life would be spared if he resigned the purple and retired into a monastery. Romanos agreed, and this agreement was ratified at Constantinople. However, John Doukas reneged on the agreement, and sent men to have Romanos cruelly blinded on June 29, 1072, before sending him into exile to Prote in the Sea of Marmara. Without medical assistance, his wound became infected, and he soon endured a painfully lingering death. The final insult was given a few days before his death, when Romanos received a letter from Michael Psellos, congratulating him on the loss of his eyes. He finally died, praying for the forgiveness of his sins, and his wife Eudokia was permitted to honour his remains with a magnificent funeral.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanos_IV_Diogenes

Now, all these machinations have a familiar ring to it. Have the successive governments on the Balkan peninsula in recent history not been their own worst enemies? Have they not been vying for power under any excuse and at any price? Have they not been pursuing their own fat interests instead of ensuring the prosperity of their own citizens? Has this blatant disregard not led many Balkan countries to an economic as well as spiritual cesspit?

As for the spirituality and the church, well, look at Prohor’s shining example and then look at the Orthodox elite in Greece, Serbia, Russia today. In Russia, the Church has acted as Putin’s bodyguard, to paraphrase Hitchens. The highly privileged orders of Greek and Serbian monks are exempt from tax, drive expensive cars, talk on mobiles, and bicker over property and funds. One recent example:

The around 2,600 monks residing at the Vatopaidi monastery in Mount Athos defied the Greek Ministry of Finance last year when it required the so-called autonomous territory pay property taxes on its commercial property.

Mount Athos, a 300 km2 peninsula in Greece, is off limits to women and is exempt from paying VAT. Its mandate prohibits “heterodox or schismatics to live on the Holy Mountain” and states its elected Abbot “must not have been convicted of malversation of monastic property.”

Its chief operator, Abbot Ephraim, is charged with money laundering and embezzlement in a land swap that saw valuable state land traded for less valuable property held by Vatopaidi.

The Hellenic court handed him a six-month suspended sentence in February 2012.

Another monk also took the blame, as well as a former judge from the area in northern Greece where the land swaps took place.

Ephraim, who posted €300,000 bail, was released after four months of detention in Korydallos prison. The former abbot is now residing at the monastery and is not allowed to leave Mount Athos.

The Greek edition of the International Herald Tribune reported that Ephraim called his conditional release "a miracle of the Virgin."

 http://euobserver.com/economic/116962

 Talk about dignity and sainthood.

Eurotrip p.1

My First Massage Outside of Asia: Lake Palić, March 2012

Normally I’d sigh and grunt like a sow once a deft hand finds the right spot – of which there must be thousands from the frontal bone to my big toe. This time round there is none of it.

Instead I have to concentrate on the small talk, both of us intent on squeezing out a firsthand info from the other. Me, I ask about the life of ordinary folks in the northernmost part of Serbia as he probes into a life of an expat earning his breadcrumbs in the Far East.

I learn electricity bills are the local top vexation, so much so that even a pair of wealthy returnees living in a pretentious villa near Palić, keep only one room heated in winter. I learn my masseur juggles two other jobs, a nighttime watchman and a security guard in a primary school. I learn how one of his clients was a Japanese man light as a feather, who was to marry a local Hungarian girl the following day; how a certain German prick asked him to work on his left foot for an entire hour and left him no tip; how he massaged some famous people none of whom talked much. I tell him that Serbs in Japan are as rare as hen’s teeth, that I’d sometimes kill for a hearty Pannonian dish, that I miss the hugs and the open bitterness and how I wish I could chew the cud with my Chinese masseuse sometimes, who charges me five times he does. Which in itself calls for a hearty tip.

                                                                The sun sets at lake Palic

Back in the Day

Back in the day they built scores of Socio-Realistic, khaki-grey, blocks in Belgrade. One such, dubbed televizor, for its windows the shape of a TV screen, stood out as an aesthetic curio. The four-storey block our family lived in was of yellow-grey tint, flanked by trees and us kids playing footy in communal parks.

Back in the day people tended to keep their front door unlocked. A neighbour would knock and step in for chitchat, followed by Turkish coffee cup reading. If a doorbell buzzed, it was either a/ a postman b/ a Gypsy asking for alms or c/ a neighbour returning a hairdryer. Crime was as rare as quail eggs. Instead there were graffiti upon the walls normally in black or creamy white, commemorating love or spite: M. LOVES H.; M. IS MORON.

In padlocked cellars we kept fishing rods, sledges, muckboots, sauerkraut barrels — why padlocked was anyone’s guess. All slept behind wooden bars, like captives forgotten most of the year.

In our block’s cellar this green powdery stuff sat in one corner, a note above it read: ‘Rat Poison, Keep Away’. Tanya once told me she’d seen the little beasts. But I think she made it up just to keep the conversation alive. We would sometimes sit and chat, Tanya and me, at the building entry on the chilly flight of stairs. Our bums were constantly cold. The hall lights would switch off automatically: once they did, we’d switch to a whisper, hoping the light wouldn’t come back on to break our tall enamoured shadows. After Tanya and I bade goodnight I’d leap three steps at a time in pitch dark up to the second floor, knock excitedly. Mum would squint as I stepped into the light.

Let's All Slow Down a Bit

Ever felt like abandoning, yes abandoning, your pointless stressful little jobs, bidding ‘goodbye to all that’, and shooting off to the white mountains, or getting yourself one of them canal boats, or perhaps settling down on a remote island, and spending the rest of your days dangerously close to nature, fighting the elements, the procrastination, the ennui? Thoughts like these are far from illegitimate for your average middle-aged gaijin teacher in Japan. As a friend of mine recently put it, ‘I've turned into a gaijin gypsy roaming from campus to campus with piles of paper and books no one is interested in’. A recent, and what seemed at first a surprising, departure of another friend to South America, coupled with my own visit to Okinawa few weeks ago, prompted me to seriously reconsider own current state of affairs. It’s not that I am in deep shit or any particular predicament at the moment. It’s all to do with ‘mid-life’ existential crisis and the usual thoughts and moods that accompany it — come to think of it I’ve always been attracted to all things existential, particularly in my formative years.

There is a Swedish proverb: ‘Those who wish to sing, always find a song’. I take this to stand as a broader metaphor, applicable to songs of various operative moods — ‘existentialist’ in this case. Well I ran into this short docu-video on the Guardian online last month, which introduced us to one Ante Vukušić, a meteorologist who has lived and worked on the mount Velebit, Croatia, for the past 37 years. In the 5-minute video we get a glimpse of this fascinating mountain range of extreme weather patterns, of the astonishing richness of wildlife (there are, for instance, over 2000 plant species — the whole of UK has 1180!), a place where you can meet a bear, a wolf, a lynx, a fox or a marten, a place where you could be snowbound for weeks on end, a mountain range where each peak has a unique view. And so, for the purely existential reasons this largely ignored clip (so far only about 70 hits on youtube) made quite an impression on me, even to the point of finding myself writing an inspired poem. Then an unexpected association crossed my mind, as I somehow remembered Auggie Wren, a character from the movie Smoke (1995), played by Harvey Keitel. The movie has to be one of my all-time favourites. Anyway, for me the link between the two men was instantly obvious and rather fascinating (despite Ante’s ‘I can’t grasp the idea of living in a city’), and so I challenge you to find it, and let me know the results — post a comment/email. First, here is the Velebit national park clip:

And here is that amazing photo album scene with Keitel and William Hurt, as the latter is perusing Keitel’s ‘life’s work’ with Auggie’s precious ‘you’ll never get it if you don’t slow down my friend’.

Happy Old New Year

As it is called in the Orthodox Christian circles, namely Russian (‘Старый Новый год’). In Serbia they call it a Serbian New Year (‘Srpska Nova Godina’), and yes, you guessed it, it’s the new year celebration according to the old Julian Calendar, and which corresponds to January 13/14^th of the modern Gregorian Calendar (in 20^th and 21^st centuries, that is). As Wikipedia reads

A large part of the population celebrates Serbian New Year in a similar way as the New Year on January 1. This time, usually one concert is organized in front of either City Hall or the National Parliament in Belgrade, while fireworks are prepared by the Serbian Orthodox Church and fired from the Church Cathedral of Saint Sava, where people also gather. Restaurants, clubs, cafe's and hotels are usually full-booked and organize New Year's celebrations with food and live music.

A traditional folk name for this holiday as part of Twelve Days of Christmas is Little Christmas (Мали Божић/Mali Božić). Some families continue with the procedures of Serbian Christmas traditions.

Being born and having spent my formative years in Belgrade in the 70’s and 80’s in the politically and economically highly experimental, and ultimately disastrous, style of Self-Governing Socialism, I look upon these festivities with a hint of nostalgia, but mainly as a outside onlooker, someone who has been out of the country way too long to be able to identify with its reawakened and ever-burgeoning religious rites, embraced thus by the population after 50-odd years of Church repression by Tito’s regime. It must be said, however, that repression was rather mild and half-hearted, and the Christmas and other religious traditions in the various regions of the former Yugoslavia were very much kept alive. I remember that even in those days people would greet each other during the Twelve Days of Christmas (January 7 – January 18), with ‘Hristos se rodi’ (‘Christ is Born’), to which a proper reply would be ‘Vaistinu se rodi’ (‘Truly He is Born’).

I recall wonderful, homely traditions such as the baking of a Christmas loaf česnica (roughly pronounced ‘chess-ni-tza’) inside which a coin would be inserted while it is kneaded. Once baked, the family members would break the loaf and whoever winds up with the coin is considered one lucky sod (the elders would often make sure the coin(s) end up in children’s hands). Here is a česnica I remember – sweet and crunchy – as it is made in Banat, northern Serbia where my folks come from:

This particular tradition has been extended to public events, i.e. česnica consumption on a large scale, which all fits in nicely with our age of austerity and empty purses. One such newly-cherished tradition is the breaking of a 50-kg česnica (the salty version) at Terazije Square in Belgrade. This year it took place last Friday, January 7th, on Christmas Day. The huge loaf was baked and delivered with three golden ducats hiding inside, the first of which found its way into the hands of a local pensioner, to everyone’s delight. Here are some pics from the event: from the all-smiles down to the last crumbs (courtesy of Beta agency)

Speaking of austerity and crumbs, this morning while browsing the B92 online (the famous Serbian media service) I come across this article about the findings of the organization called Gallup International who have been conducting global polls at the end of each year since 2000. This survey, according to their website, ‘is released around the world on the 1st of January, [asking] people whether they think the new year will be better or worse than the last one, both for themselves and for their country; whether they feel economic and employment prospects will be better or worse and whether the coming year will be peaceful or troubled’ [http://www.gallup-international.com/]. This year’s poll questioned 64.000 people in 53 countries. The citizens of Serbia are the greatest world pessimists when it comes to the overall expectations for 2011 (last year they were 3^rd –placed on the pessimism scale). They are closely followed by Romanians, French and Icelanders. The biggest optimists are – would you believe it – Nigerians, followed by Brazilians, Vietnamese, Chinese and Ghanians. However, if you look at the BBC news page reporting on the same story [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12056250], you will find that it is actually UK citizens who are the most pessimistic about the economic prospects: 'The survey, conducted by leading pollsters associated with Gallup International, suggests the most downhearted country is the UK.' The article continues:

The UK was particularly downbeat in four key questions.

• Will 2011 be a year of prosperity? UK - 8% Yes; World average 30%
• Will unemployment rise? UK 37% Yes; World average 17%
• Will you find a job quickly if you become unemployed? UK 17% Yes; World average 31%
• Will 2011 be better than 2010? UK 23% Yes; World average 42%

Gallup says its findings suggest: "While wealth is still concentrated in Europe and North America, there is a shift in power and prosperity from the West of the 20th Century to the East".

To corroborate the above, here is the ‘employment fear’ chart from the Gallup’s Barometer of Hope and Despair 2011 (click to enlarge):

 

Interestingly, Serbia falls under ‘the countries less than 30% fearful of rising unemployment’ (24% to be exact). But this is more likely to do with the fact that the unemployment rate in Serbia is already at about 20% and it can hardly get worse than that now can it?! Dear me. The two countries I spent most of my life in, both with such rosy prospects. Would be interesting to see at the end of the year how right or wrong the respondents were.

Happy Old New Year

I Was a Conscript Once

THE BATHROOM SINGER

In my small white tiled chamber

I tend to have a go at Italian arias

always overambitiously

flirting with falsetto.

My fanatic, therefore laughable,

rendition of Che gelida manina

evokes Sarajevo’s opera house

one winter evening in ’89.

A snowy weekday, a sorry turnout.

You know it's sorry when the cast 
outnumbers the audience

of music teachers in corduroy,

elderly aficionados in furs,

(long pearls tickling their navels)

a young man in a paint-stained coat,

an oil-haired geezer chatting up

cloakroom girls, and most shockingly,

two JNA conscripts in dress uniform –

you and me that is.

In the virtually empty house

we sprawled over the burgundy seats

and watched the show so mesmerising

the arias had us cease chewing our gums

or whatever it was we were chewing

till we choked on our saliva.

Our gaunt tenor wasn’t quite a Pavarotti

yet probably bolder than most,

singing his heart out

to vacant rows, unwarmed galleries.

They were saving on heating

so when Rodolfo held Mimi’s hand

it was gelid for real, unlike

the unreal snow in the background.

If only, for special effect,

they could’ve split the roof open

(like they do at Wimbledon these days)

to let the echt Bosnian snowdrops

infest that Quartier latin garret.

Hard times those were.

Who would have thought then

much harder were to follow

able to split up the city.

The city as gracious

as any city could wish for.

The mountain-walled city

keeps echoing 

in my small white tiled chamber.

click to hear Che Gelida Manina (Pavarotti version)