--Sunday, 02 July 00-- Continued
I had based most of my perceptions of Kosovo on the writing of Rebecca West, who in 1938 had toured Yugoslavia, and who in 1940 had published one of the great travelogues of the 20th century, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Her description of the mausoleum was much less than flattering. Of it she wrote (p. 905-6 of the Penguin edition):
"A track led from the road across the opaque and lusterless pastureland characteristic of this place, to what looked like a deserted farmhouse. As we came to the gate in the farm paddock it was as it had been at the tomb of Gazi Mestan: the bare countryside exhaled people. They came to meet us at the gate, they whipped round the corners of the paddock, men in Western clothes who had the look of Leicester Square or Place Pigalle touts, not that they knew much or perhaps anything of infamy. The resemblance lay in their terrible desire to make piteous claims on the possession of special knowledge, the power to perform unusual services. Their bare feet, treading on rag-bound leather sandals, pattered before us, beside us, behind us, as we followed a stone path across a grassy quadrangle. A house looked down on us, its broken windows stuffed with newspaper, its wall eczematous where the plaster lacked.
"Through another gateway we came on a poor and dusty garden where the mausoleum stood. A fountain splashed from a wall, and there was nothing else pleasant there. The door of the mausoleum was peculiarly hideous; it was of coarse wood, painted chocolate-colour, and panes of cheap glass, all the wrong shape. Public libraries and halls in small provincial towns in England sometimes have such doors. Beyond was a rough lawn, cropped by a few miserable sheep, which was edged with some flowers and set with two or three Moslem graves which were of the handsome sort, having a slab as well as a column at the top and bottom, but were riven across by time and neglect. . . .
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"We drew near to the hideous door of the mausoleum, and it was opened
by an old man whom we knew to be an imam, a priest, only from the twist
of white cloth about his fez; not in his manner was there any sign of
sacred authority. He greeted us blearily and without pride, and we followed
him, our touts padding behind us, into the presence of the Sultan Murad.
The walls of his last lodging were distempered in drab and ornamented
with abstract designs in chocolate, gray, and bottle-green, such as Western
plumbers and decorators loved to create in the latter half of the last
century, and its windows were curtained with the intensely vulgar dark
green printed velvet used in wagons-lits. In a sloping gabled coffin such
as sheltered Gazi Mestan, but covered with velvet and votive offerings
of stuff by some halfpence costlier, lay Murad. His Turban hung from a
wooden pole at the head of the coffin, a dusty wisp. The priest turned
blindish eyes on Constantine and told him something; after the telling
his fishlike mouth forgot to close. "This old one is relating that
only the Sultan's entrails are here," said Constantine, the rest
of him was taken away to Broussa in Turkey, but I do not know when."
Even the most rational person might have expected that the priest would
have shown some slight regret that his shrine held the entrails of the
Sultan and not his heart or his head. But in the pale luminousness of
his eyes and the void of his open mouth there was seated a most perfect
indifference.
". . . Therefore it was painful to see these Turks to whom two full
meals in succession were more remote objects of lust than the most fantastic
luxuries had been to their forefathers, to whom rags and a dusty compound
represented a unique refreshment. . . .
". . . As I spoke I noticed that my husband was no longer walking
beside me, and, as wives do, I looked round to see what the creature might
be doing. . . ." (It is revealing, I think, that in all the 1,150
pages of the book, she never once gives a first or last name for "the
creature.")
If you compare the above description with the picture I above you will
wonder about whether she was describing the same place. I don't know for
sure but I am prepared to grant that sometime in the last 60 years the
mausoleum got a major overhaul so discrepancies like the lack of glass
(whether "all the wrong shape" or not) in the door might be
explained by a renovation. What I am not prepared to grant is the unrelenting
negativity Ms. West displays to all things non-Serbian. A quick selection
of words and phrases from the above passage: lusterless, Place Pigalle
touts, infamy, piteous, rag-bound, eczematous, hideous, miserable, blearily,
distempered, intensely vulgar, a dusty wisp -- and on and on.
What became clear to me is that Ms. West despises anything that is not
Serb or Serb created. Take the remark about the Sultan's turban (by tradition
left on a wooden pole at the head of his coffin): "a dusty wisp."
The "dusty wisp" was almost 550 years old when she viewed it.
Ms. West should give her readers a break -- the former Yugoslavia is not
as one-sided as she describes it. For reasons of space I won't quote how
she rhapsodizes when she visits Serbian monasteries and views the murals
and icons. She ascends to such unreal realms of ecstasy that you wonder
if she took drugs.
Ms West is completely blind to Kosovars. She calls them Turks to emphasize
her belief that they are not native to the region (although she would
admit they had been there for over 500 years). Nothing about her "Turks"
is attractive, their poverty repels her, their behavior disgusts her.
Everything Serbian is good is everything good is Serbian.
This is not to say that Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is not a great book,
superbly written. It is to say that it needs to be read with care lest
the reader end up with Ms. West's very biased picture of the relative
roles and histories of the peoples of the former Yugoslavia. For a much
more balanced history I recommend "Kosovo : A Short History"
by Noel Malcolm (Paperback - July 1999).
Joe
A Virtual Tour of Kosovo |
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