• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1270 0

reason I also drew back from repeating the famous account of impalement in Andrić’s Bridge over the Drina. There is scarcely a nation in the world that does not have a black past, but there is something special about the way history has been used in the Balkans. The Greeks can legitimately claim to possess the longest and most impressive heritage, but each of the Balkan nations has constructed a clear memory of its own heroic eras: Byzantine, Bulgarian, Serb, Croat, and Bosnian periods of imperial glory have all been carefully recorded. In virtually every case, and often by playing fast and loose with chronology, the idyllic Christian past was deemed to have been brought to a shuddering halt by the Turks. Everything could be blamed on their presence.

In the Balkans, because of the “Turkish yoke,” folklore had a powerfully political meaning. Stories of ancient victories and killings, as in Njegoš’s Mountain Wreath, had a direct symbolic relevance:

The Serbian name has perished everywhere.

Mighty lions have become meek peasants.

Rash and greedy converted to Islam—

may their Serb milk make them all sick with plague!

Those who escaped before the Turkish sword,

those who did not blaspheme at the True Faith,

those who refused to be thrown into chains,

took refuge here in these lofty mountains

to shed their blood together and to die,

heroically to keep the sacred

oath, their lovely name, and their holy freedom.

Our heads withstood the hard test in battles!

Our brave lads have shone like the radiant stars.

Those who were born in these lofty mountains

fell day by day in the past’s bloody wars

and gave their life for honour, name, and freedom.

All of our tears were always wiped away

by the deft sounds of the lovely gusle.

Sacrifices have not been made in vain

since our hard land has now truly become

of Turkish might the insatiable tomb.51

This relevance to the present is missing in the tales recorded by the brothers Grimm, and in English ballads. Only in English-ruled Ireland did the folkloric past provide the language and models for contemporary political action. A stanza of one ancient poem reprinted by Constanza, Lady Wilde, read:

When the Fenian wrath was kindled,

And the heroes in thousands rode to war.52

Irish revolutionaries proudly described themselves as “Fenians” waging war on their English oppressors. In Ireland as in the Balkans, the scholarly work of recording and disseminating the nation’s past provided a coded message against oppression.

Memories of oppression are probably inexplicable to anyone who has not been brought up with them from infancy. These feelings and prejudices are not genetic. They have to be learned. For more than a century the source of most stories has not just been an oral tradition handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation, but also the medium of the printed word and the visual image. In many old homes, I guess, there is the equivalent of that back room in my grandfather’s house. Now we can also learn how to hate in new ways: through film, the television screen, and the Internet. Yet the process remains the same. Malediction is mobile: it can shift its target, but it still carries with it all the weight of past opprobrium. In the Balkans after 1922 there were Ottomans no more. They had departed. They had been the enemy in the Slav national epics, and now they were no longer present. But the Muslim Albanians and, to a lesser degree, the Bosnian Muslims took their place as the alien antagonist. For a considerable time the Albanians had acted as the enforcers for the Ottoman authorities in distant Constantinople. The last autocratic sultan, Abdul Hamid II, used Albanians as guards within his fortified palace at Yildiz, trusting his life only to them. When the Balkan Wars ended in 1913, the Turks even insisted that the Albanians should be granted their own state; however, as noted earlier, many were already settled outside its new boundaries.

The Albanians in Kosovo became an object of particular hatred for the government of Serbia. For ultranationalists,