The story of Balkan Sufism begins in the mid-thirteenth century with a peripatetic figure called Sari Saltik. His legend, told in cultures ranging from Albania to Persia, is worthy of A Thousand and One Nights. Sari means ‘yellow’: he was said to have a blond beard. Saltik was a disciple and companion of Hadj Bektash, founder of Bektashism, the first Sufi movement. Like many holy figures of the East, Saltik appeared with a halo, and transcended time and space. He first travelled from Uzbekistan to Cape Kaliakra on the Black Sea in Bulgaria with a hundred Turkic families. Some see their arrival as the beginning of Turkic migration into Europe, but by then, other Turkic peoples had already settled by the Black Sea and beyond: Bulgars, Pechenegs and Tatars.
Saltik’s gift of ubiquity meant that he was seen all over the Balkans, sometimes simultaneously in two places, and posthumously: from Kaliakra to Corfu, from Durrës to Ohrid. And everywhere he passed, his legacy of ‘turning evil into good’ was perpetuated. In an echo of Balkan folkloric tropes about supernatural heroes like Krali Marko who stride over valleys, his ‘footsteps’ are found in sacred sites and by curative springs. When death approached, Saltik requested that seven coffins be prepared for him, and so he has seven known resting places where he has been worshipped as both a Muslim and a Christian saint ever since. One of his resting places is St Naum Monastery, where for centuries he has been conflated with Naum himself.
Saltik was a persuasive proselytiser of Bektashism, which differed radically from mainstream Sunni Islam. Subsequent Sufi orders, both Shia and Sunni, followed the Bektashi principle: they incorporated aspects of Eastern Christianity, Tibetan Buddhism, Cabbalism, Gnosticism and Asian shamanism. It was these generously eclectic qualities that were key to the spread and endurance of Sufi Islam in the Balkans. Furthermore, Sufism – its philosophy, aesthetics and architecture – shaped the towns of the Ottoman Balkans.
Ohrid once had half a dozen dervish lodges belonging to different orders. Slavche and her surviving son were keepers of the last tekke. It is laid out in the harmonious Islamic tradition: a circle of handsome houses built around an internal courtyard which contains the mosque, a rose garden and a small cemetery. This blend of public and private reflects the traditional function of the tekke. The homely mosque was built in 1590, long before the tekke itself was founded in 1720 by a dervish named Mehmed. Mehmed belonged to the Khalvati tariqa, or order, of dervishes. Tariqa means ‘road’ in Arabic – the road of the seeker – and there are twelve Sufi ‘roads’. The Khalvati road had three branches, and this one is indigenous to the western Balkans.
‘Anyway, twelve is a magic number in Sufism,’ Slavche said. ‘Twelve imams, twelve letters in the declaration of faith, twelve lines of poems.’
And she recited: ‘Swaying between joy and sorrow, you are the prey of the transient’, from a poem by Jalal ad-Din Balkhi-Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian mystic after whom the Mevlevi order with its ecstatic whirling prayer was named. Mevlevi meant ‘my master’.
Several centuries after Rumi, Mehmed and his party had travelled a long road to Ohrid. He and his wife and two daughters, and other dervishes, set off from Khorasan – literally, ‘where the sun rises’ – in Persia. It is not known how many years they spent on the road, but they arrived in Macedonia in 1667. Mehmed set up other Khalvati tekkes in the region and Khalvatism became the most widespread Sufi order in Kosovo, Macedonia and Bosnia. He died and is buried right here.
‘We don’t know where his khalvet is, though,’ said Erol. Erol was Slavche’s surviving son and had joined us at the table. He was a middle-aged man in a crisp pink shirt and with a hollowed-out posture, as if suffering from a chest condition. He had his mother’s delicate build.
‘Khalvet is a space for prayer,’ Erol explained. Khalva meant ‘retreat’ in Arabic. ‘Which is the basis of Khalvatism. Meditation, self-scrutiny and fasting. It’s more introspective than other orders.’
‘Somewhere along Mehmed’s road from Khorasan to Ohrid,’ Slavche said, ‘there is a dedicated Chinar, or plane tree. That’s his khalvet. Like our Chinar here, planted by another holy man.’ She pointed to Clement’s tree.
‘Movement was a way of life for dervishes,’ Erol said. ‘Wandering was a way of attaining knowledge beyond the material world.’ A precept of dervishism is renouncing possessions, surrendering to the Road.
‘There were gatherings along the way, adventures, wondrous encounters, and symbolic manifestations. That’s Sufism, it’s dynamic. Or was,’ Slavche said, interrupting her son, who raised his eyes in irritation.
‘One of the duties of the tekke was to shelter travellers,’ he said, and she started drumming with her fingers on the table.
They were like a married couple. They’d never lived apart. He rose from the table abruptly and went to fetch something. Slavche sighed.
‘He should come back,’ she said. ‘My memory is not what it was.’
But her memory was excellent. Slavche was raised in a family of Vlachs, or Aromanians, who had come from Albania as traders. In the troubled 1930s her mother’s sisters emigrated to Romania, and missed Ohrid all their lives.
‘Ohrid, Ohrid, gentle, wise, lost to me like paradise,’ she sang. ‘You know the song?’
When Slavche met her future husband Kadri, she was still at high school. An attraction developed, but there was a catch: he was a Muslim; and not only that, he was the sheik, the head dervish of the tekke.
‘It was a scandal. We were pitted against the town. To defy convention in Ohrid – can you imagine? My family severed relations with me for six years. But they got over it. Because nothing could break my bond with Kadri. I adopted Islam as my own faith.’
Her Islamic name was Hidaet, meaning One Who Gives. ‘But it was Kadri who was the giving one,’ she said.
My aunts confirmed that Sheik Abdul-Kadri, the last initiated head dervish of the tekke in an uninterrupted line since the 1660s, was a progressive, well-read man with a fine sense of humour, much loved by the town. He had died twenty years ago. In this land of heterodox couplings of all kinds, mixed marriages weren’t uncommon, and neither were religious conversions. Interfaith relations only began to deteriorate in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the rise of national movements and the revolutionary komita bands. The complicated politics at the end of empire brought a climate of conspiracy and mistrust. Mixed couples and Muslim communities became a target for persecution and murder by the komiti; these atrocities have been whitewashed from official history. A culture of paranoia took root. This is why it was a scandal when Slavche married Kadri in Socialist Yugoslavia.
Once committed to the relationship, Slavche-Hidaet had to learn not only the tenets of Islam, not only the intricacies of this particular Road, but also the Turkish language. She and Erol spoke a mixture of Turkish and Macedonian. But the Turkish spoken here had lots of Macedonian words in it already, just as Macedonian is heavily infused with Turkish words. The Turkish spoken by locals is frozen in time; Erol told me that he understood Turkish speakers in Azerbaijan better than those in modern Turkey.
‘Turlu-tava,’ Slavche said. Turlu is ‘mixed’, and tava is ‘tray’. ‘You know that dish?’
No, I said, I know imam bayaldi.
‘Turlu-tava is like imam bayaldi, but even more mixed,’ Slavche said.
While we sat talking through the afternoon, locals stepped into the restaurant to greet Slavche and Erol. The only way I could tell Muslims from non-Muslims was the Turkish phrases used by the Muslims.
What became of the position of head dervish after Kadri? I asked her.
‘I’ll tell you what. Various wannabes presented themselves. Two of them who assumed tekke duties died. One right inside the tekke, he just keeled over. And the current one,’ she said with cool relish, ‘I said to him, You know, it’s your turn now.’
Erol had returned from the tekke.
‘My generation was born under Communism,’ he said. ‘We are disadvantaged in matters of spirituality. And Sufism is abou
t spirituality, not dogma.’
He was next in line to be head dervish.
‘I’m teaching myself Ottoman Turkish. I feel duty-bound,’ Erol said.
The tekke contained archives four hundred years old, and hundreds of untranslated books, many in Ottoman Turkish, a language nobody understands except Ottomanists.
I asked if a woman could join a dervish order today.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There are women dervishes in Struga. But they don’t assume public duties.’
Why not?
Erol took off his glasses. ‘Because women are privileged. Their power is private.’
His mother didn’t disagree, but I couldn’t tell whether she agreed.
I was amazed to discover that there were entire Bektashi sisterhoods in the early days of Sufism. In fact, a woman became the first direct successor of Hadj Bektashi. Kadandjak Ana lived in Cappadocia as an ascetic and exhibited supernatural abilities – turning herself into a bird, becoming invisible, and appearing in her future parents’ dreams. In the world of Sufi mystics, time is not linear, all is symbol.
‘To become a dervish,’ Erol went on, ‘you have to earn spiritual credit through prayer and contemplation. You practise for three or four years under a qualified dervish until you have a dream.’
Your teacher must dream of you at the same time. And to become a sheik, you must have special powers – prophecy, dream work, the ability to heal. These powers are developed through devotion to the inner life, and prayer – not the customary five times a day, but six. You must pray that extra sixth time, pronounce the ninety-nine names of Allah (Sari Saltik lived for ninety-nine years, allegedly). That’s why worry-bead strings traditionally have ninety-nine beads, Erol said.
The practice of whirling, or ‘prayer on your feet’, for which dervishes are known in the West, was solely a peculiarity of the Mevlevi order – the spontaneous creation of Rumi. Walking through a market one day, he heard music, and in the melody he heard la elaha ella’llah – there is one God and Allah is his name – and in a state of exaltation he started whirling. In a separate episode, while listening to his teacher playing the reed flute, he was seized with a desire to whirl. Sufi devotional music, and the Mevlevi tradition in particular, have two key instruments: the flute and the lute. The Mevlevi dervishes could dance only when the flute was played – a shamanistic practice similar to fire-walking to the sound of drums and to other meditative altered states accompanied by music.
What strikes me here is that the reed flute was seen in Sufism as the instrument of the soul and also of deracination – for it sings forever of the native reedbed whence it was cut. The reed flute, kaval or kawali in Persian, features in the last line of the poem ‘Longing for the South’, and in many other Balkan songs and poems – for it was the instrument of the mountain shepherds, and the mountains and their rivers and lakes are where much of Balkan folklore originates. For the shepherds, poets and mystics of the East, the kaval has been the chosen instrument of the soul.
There [by the lake] I’d sit, I’d play my kaval a while.
The sun would set, I’d sweetly die.
‘The last prophet of this dervish line was Sheik Zekiriya, our great-grandfather,’ Slavche said. When you are born into a tekke, you have a moral obligation: you must never abandon the house.
‘Sheik Zekiriya warned his brothers against selling their share of the tekke,’ she went on. Erol had gone off again. He was a restless man. ‘But it fell on deaf ears. One brother emigrated to Turkey, suffered total loss and died in poverty.’
The other brother moved to Turkey too, and his wife and children were to follow. Sheik Zekiriya dreamt of turbulent waters and warned them not to travel by sea, only by land, but they boarded a ship at Salonica, the ship sank before reaching the Bosphorus, and the family didn’t survive. That brother went mad with grief and spent his last years in a Turkish asylum.
‘One of the duties of the tekke was towards the mentally ill,’ Erol said – he was back – and began to unfurl a long scroll, intricately inscribed in Ottoman Turkish with coloured calligraphic inks. It looked like a genealogy with thousands of branches.
‘Nine metres long,’ he said. ‘The original was brought by Pir Mehmed.’
Mehmed had carried a ferman, or authorisation, from the sultan, allowing him to spread the teaching of Khalvatism in the Balkans; and here it was, followed by the compiled records of successive administrations. The process by which the tekkes were perpetuated was impressively democratic: each ferman was issued only after a number of citizens of high standing from the multi-denominational community had written in its support. It detailed the activities of the tekke as they were at the time of each ferman: distributing ashure (barley pudding) to the poor; teaching boys in its madrasa; hatip, or charitable donations; sheltering travellers, and the ‘insane and melancholy’ until they were recovered. The sheik was expected to have a special quality called baraka, a spiritual mana associated with wise men: by being in his presence, you felt better.
‘He listened to people’s problems without judgement. The tekke was a refuge from worldly worries,’ Slavche said.
She had baraka.
‘Christians visited the tekkes and Muslims the monasteries. At festivals, we still exchange gifts of food,’ Erol added, trying hard not to interrupt his mother.
Another peculiarity of the tekke, shared with monasteries and other Christian and pagan holy sites, was to do with what Erol called a very old tradition. He showed me inside. The tekke was decorated with ink drawings of the ninety-nine names of Allah, and lined with sheep and goat skins, like some tents of the steppes. Here, people of any faith or none could leave a piece of clothing overnight. If they collected it and washed it the next day, they would be cured of their affliction.
This creative integration of shamanism, in addition to drinking alcohol, allowing women in, believing that music, poetry and even erotic ecstasy were direct channels to God, is what puritanical mainstream Islam objected to. Then and now.
Erol showed me accessories left behind by dervishes over the generations: a seal ring, a collection of exquisite wizard-like wands and staffs with carved heads whose jaws had secret compartments – in a way, a dervish was a wizard – and silver cigarette holders inscribed in French, an ink-stamp bearing the Ottoman coat-of-arms, a long silk shawl. The colourful Khalvati flag of the tekke was the original one brought from Persia. Wandering dervishes carried three symbolic objects wherever they went: a bag, a flag and a carved staff. Such dervishes were known as fakirs, from the Arabic for ‘poor’, but the figure of the fakir came to be associated above all with magic.
Slavche rose from the table; she was retiring for the afternoon. But before she went, she gave me an envelope, to open later. She put her long hand on mine:
‘It’s a fine thing that you’ve returned to the Lake. Because no matter where one goes in one’s wanderings, you and I know: the Balkans are the heart and soul of this funny old world.’
And she added, quoting Rumi: ‘Love’s infinite garden holds other fruit besides laughter and tears.’
Erol and his family lived in the sheik’s house behind the restaurant, but Slavche had retreated to a corner of the complex, where she had a small studio. These were not the lodgings of a queen, but she liked her independence, had her own bookshelves, a single bed and, as she put it, peace.
After his mother had gone, Erol and I carried on talking.
‘There is a saying in dervishism, which keeps us grounded, so we don’t take ourselves too seriously,’ he said. ‘While there’s enough space on earth, there’s no need to glorify anybody to the heavens. This is the core of dervishism. It is earth-bound and encourages individual thought and expression, rather than group-think and blind devotion. But—’
He took his glasses off. His eyelids were inflamed.
‘It guts me to watch the decline of values. Religion has become about money and party politics. How can you call yourself faithful, when you’re driving a new
car but your neighbour is hungry? How can you boast about going to Mecca three times when your friend is freezing? True Islam is humane.’
Rumi speaks of the ego as the greatest enemy on the Road.
‘Where there is ego, there is no God. We live in a world of ego.’ Erol’s voice was catching with emotion.
This is what was eating him up.
The madman of the charshia came and went with his radio, bouncing along with his shirt open to reveal his black hairy chest. By now, I saw him as quite sane. He was performing a public service – every day at an appointed hour he became mad, so that the rest of Ohrid didn’t have to. The wandering dervishes had once performed this role of holy madmen – with their shirts open at the chest, their large-buckled belts and sceptres topped with carved animal heads, they often appeared unhinged. But they were conduits for collective energies, archetypes who enacted what was taboo. Travellers write of seeing dervishes throughout the Balkans perform uncanny feats: standing immobile at cemeteries for weeks like living statues, going into trances, appearing and disappearing at unlikely speed, and curing incurable ailments with herbal potions and numerological and Quranic incantations. Just like the anchorite monks and the yogis of Asia.
It was time to go. I had consumed juicy meatballs, salads and coffees for which Erol didn’t let me pay.
‘You do realise,’ Erol said as a parting shot, ‘that Europe wants us to be slaves?’
Oh, no, I thought. Here comes a rant I’ve heard before.
‘That we have lived here peacefully for centuries and survived all manner of upheavals, thanks to the lake. Thanks to the lake, the world comes to us and keeps us worldly,’ he went on, passionately. ‘But Europe wants us to be poor, divided and ignorant. That’s why we’ve had nothing but bad governance. It’s all orchestrated by the great powers.’
In his late years as an unwilling Yugoslav, my great-grandfather Kosta hummed a sad song. He had given up the struggle, only the lament remained. My mother remembers the song:
From the top of Pirin Mountain
To the Lake Page 13