Sometimes it takes an outsider to get you to do what you always intended. I had originally sought a blog so that I could vent my various feelings about the former Yugoslavia, but as one can see, I've done nothing of the sort.
In any case, looking on B92, the sound-as-a-pound news network in Serbia, I found a blog from Rosemary Bailey Brown (an American living in Sombor), and realised that somebody had beaten me to the blog. Actually, she is far more deserving of this, since she has taken the ultimate step of actually moving to Serbia with her Serbian husband. A few Emails later, and a prompting from her, and here I am.
So, erm... where to begin? I think there is a certain legacy at the begining of such a thing - old memories and stories, etc. - that must be dealt with first. So perhaps over the coming weeks, while I am at least a few weeks away from my next Serbian experience (a visit from the in-laws - don't get me started), I can try to do just this.
Probably I need to explain myself first. I'm from Canada, but I've lived in Europe since 1990, ten years in England, and the last seven in Germany. I'm a scientist - molecular biology actually if that means anything - and the reason I'm interested in the former Yugoslavia is deeply personal. The love of my life comes from Novi Sad, which is the capital of the former province of Vojvodina, in the northern part of what is now Serbia. Vojvodina is a bit like Kosovo in the sense that it lost its autonomy by becoming effectively part of Serbia, but in truth it is far more Serbian than Kosovo. Having said that Vojvodinians rather pride themselves on a certain ethnic diversity. Serbs are clearly the majority, but there are tens of thousands of Hungarians, Romanians, Slovakians, Roma/Sinti, and Ruthenians. Indeed, G. is part Hungarian herself (her father is half Hungarian from Bečej in the north of the province) and she spoke it until she was six at school. With all this diversity, Vojvodina isn't such a bad place to speak Serbian as a learner, since many people also speak it imperfectly and you are just as likely to be taken as some odd minority as an actual outsider. (And while we are on the subject, as a gigantic Canadian with blue eyes, Vojvodina is the only European place where nobody seems to be able to tell at a glance that I'm an outsider)
Anyway, I digress, but I tell you all of this for a reason. My perspective will necessarily by rather biased towards a more Serbian one, but not so baised as I think I would be if she had come from (say) some proud, pure Serbian village 100km south of Belgrade. I should also say that we have bought a house in Croatia, mostly as she spent so many happy childhood summers there, and because we both love the country. I have never been to Bosnia (though I want to go, and indeed love Kemal Monteno i Sarajevo Ljubavi Moooojaaaaaa), Montenegro, Kosovo or Macedonia, and have spent only brief stints in Slovenia on my way to Croatia or Serbia (but like what I've seen so far).
The overall thing about the former Yugoslavia is that any foreigner who really experiences it as I have simultaneously falls in love with it, and feels an enormous sense of sadness about what has happened there. So necessarily this blog will fill with stories of both kinds. Two things that my significant other said to me in the early days of our relationship - when visits to Serbia/Croatia would be in a kind of fog of half-caught snippits that is typical of anybody learning such a moon-man language - illustrate this point exactly.
Before my first ever visit to Novi Sad, when everything had been booked, including a complex series of flights from Edmonton (Canada) via Frankfurt to Belgrade, she started to question whether I should come at all, commenting that "It is very sad here". I couldn't really understand, since I was all ready for anything - I expected a town something like Torrelavega (a grubby industrial town in Northern Spain) or Runcorn (ditto in Northern England), but was very pleasantly surprised. But I know now that she was expressing a feeling that things were so much worse than they were. She had seen her town disintegrate from one of the loveliest places in southern Europe into a mess of broken buildings, bad roads, rubbish on the streets, homeless people, and nothing really to sing about.
A few months later during our first visit to Belgrade proper, we were in a book shop (looking for a copy of Ivo Andric's books in English) when we found an old promotional book for Yugoslavia, complete with pictures of Lake Ohrid and the Croatian coast, and she pointed without showing a lot of emotion at these panoramic pictures of breathtaking beauty and said "this is my country". Again, the quixotic nature of her comments are all to typical of the way people in the former Yugoslavia think. She was expressing the complex feeling that comes about when a country you once loved in its entirety had torn itself to pieces, leaving nothing but old books collecting dust in a Belgrade bookstore.
Equally, I am always taken aback by how friendly everybody is in these new countries. It baffles me that a few politicians managed to ruin everything, and that we in the west never did more to teach what is, after all, a group of pretty similar people in terms of behavior and appearance, to live peacefully together. But whatever, and what is done is done.
Anyway, I think I'll post a more sensible story next time. But perhaps I can leave this one with probably the most relevant quotation about the former Yugoslavia that I have ever come across.
"How is it possible.... for this country to become stable and orderly and adopt at least as great a degree of civilization as its closest neighbors, if its people are divided as nowhere else in Europe? Four faiths live in this... land. Each of them is exclusive and from the same soil, but the centre of the spiritual life of each of these four groups is far away, in a foreign land, in Rome, Moscow, Istanbul, Mecca, Jerusalem, and God alone knows where, but at any rate not here where the people are born and die. And each group considers that its well-being is conditioned by the disadvantage of each of the other three faiths, and that they can make progress only at their cost. Each of them has made intolerance the greatest virtue. And each one of them is expecting salvation from somewhere outside, each from the opposite direction."
-- Ivo Andric, The Days of the Consuls
Dovidjena for now.
In any case, looking on B92, the sound-as-a-pound news network in Serbia, I found a blog from Rosemary Bailey Brown (an American living in Sombor), and realised that somebody had beaten me to the blog. Actually, she is far more deserving of this, since she has taken the ultimate step of actually moving to Serbia with her Serbian husband. A few Emails later, and a prompting from her, and here I am.
So, erm... where to begin? I think there is a certain legacy at the begining of such a thing - old memories and stories, etc. - that must be dealt with first. So perhaps over the coming weeks, while I am at least a few weeks away from my next Serbian experience (a visit from the in-laws - don't get me started), I can try to do just this.
Probably I need to explain myself first. I'm from Canada, but I've lived in Europe since 1990, ten years in England, and the last seven in Germany. I'm a scientist - molecular biology actually if that means anything - and the reason I'm interested in the former Yugoslavia is deeply personal. The love of my life comes from Novi Sad, which is the capital of the former province of Vojvodina, in the northern part of what is now Serbia. Vojvodina is a bit like Kosovo in the sense that it lost its autonomy by becoming effectively part of Serbia, but in truth it is far more Serbian than Kosovo. Having said that Vojvodinians rather pride themselves on a certain ethnic diversity. Serbs are clearly the majority, but there are tens of thousands of Hungarians, Romanians, Slovakians, Roma/Sinti, and Ruthenians. Indeed, G. is part Hungarian herself (her father is half Hungarian from Bečej in the north of the province) and she spoke it until she was six at school. With all this diversity, Vojvodina isn't such a bad place to speak Serbian as a learner, since many people also speak it imperfectly and you are just as likely to be taken as some odd minority as an actual outsider. (And while we are on the subject, as a gigantic Canadian with blue eyes, Vojvodina is the only European place where nobody seems to be able to tell at a glance that I'm an outsider)
Anyway, I digress, but I tell you all of this for a reason. My perspective will necessarily by rather biased towards a more Serbian one, but not so baised as I think I would be if she had come from (say) some proud, pure Serbian village 100km south of Belgrade. I should also say that we have bought a house in Croatia, mostly as she spent so many happy childhood summers there, and because we both love the country. I have never been to Bosnia (though I want to go, and indeed love Kemal Monteno i Sarajevo Ljubavi Moooojaaaaaa), Montenegro, Kosovo or Macedonia, and have spent only brief stints in Slovenia on my way to Croatia or Serbia (but like what I've seen so far).
The overall thing about the former Yugoslavia is that any foreigner who really experiences it as I have simultaneously falls in love with it, and feels an enormous sense of sadness about what has happened there. So necessarily this blog will fill with stories of both kinds. Two things that my significant other said to me in the early days of our relationship - when visits to Serbia/Croatia would be in a kind of fog of half-caught snippits that is typical of anybody learning such a moon-man language - illustrate this point exactly.
Before my first ever visit to Novi Sad, when everything had been booked, including a complex series of flights from Edmonton (Canada) via Frankfurt to Belgrade, she started to question whether I should come at all, commenting that "It is very sad here". I couldn't really understand, since I was all ready for anything - I expected a town something like Torrelavega (a grubby industrial town in Northern Spain) or Runcorn (ditto in Northern England), but was very pleasantly surprised. But I know now that she was expressing a feeling that things were so much worse than they were. She had seen her town disintegrate from one of the loveliest places in southern Europe into a mess of broken buildings, bad roads, rubbish on the streets, homeless people, and nothing really to sing about.
A few months later during our first visit to Belgrade proper, we were in a book shop (looking for a copy of Ivo Andric's books in English) when we found an old promotional book for Yugoslavia, complete with pictures of Lake Ohrid and the Croatian coast, and she pointed without showing a lot of emotion at these panoramic pictures of breathtaking beauty and said "this is my country". Again, the quixotic nature of her comments are all to typical of the way people in the former Yugoslavia think. She was expressing the complex feeling that comes about when a country you once loved in its entirety had torn itself to pieces, leaving nothing but old books collecting dust in a Belgrade bookstore.
Equally, I am always taken aback by how friendly everybody is in these new countries. It baffles me that a few politicians managed to ruin everything, and that we in the west never did more to teach what is, after all, a group of pretty similar people in terms of behavior and appearance, to live peacefully together. But whatever, and what is done is done.
Anyway, I think I'll post a more sensible story next time. But perhaps I can leave this one with probably the most relevant quotation about the former Yugoslavia that I have ever come across.
"How is it possible.... for this country to become stable and orderly and adopt at least as great a degree of civilization as its closest neighbors, if its people are divided as nowhere else in Europe? Four faiths live in this... land. Each of them is exclusive and from the same soil, but the centre of the spiritual life of each of these four groups is far away, in a foreign land, in Rome, Moscow, Istanbul, Mecca, Jerusalem, and God alone knows where, but at any rate not here where the people are born and die. And each group considers that its well-being is conditioned by the disadvantage of each of the other three faiths, and that they can make progress only at their cost. Each of them has made intolerance the greatest virtue. And each one of them is expecting salvation from somewhere outside, each from the opposite direction."
-- Ivo Andric, The Days of the Consuls
Dovidjena for now.
1 comment:
With this I concluded reading your blog for past 3 hrs ;) I am glad you are enjoying ex-Yugo lands and Serbia. In one of your blogs where you went your frustration regarding Serbia/Serbian, I saw my husband (who is a non-Serb) and my usual "well, in Serbia we blah blah blah" to nearly any statement :). Keep up the blog, it is cute and interesting. Viel gruess von ein anderen molekular biologierin (my small attempt in a rusty german :)
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