Dancing Bears

by Witold Szablowski

  They were united by their partisan past and their foul tongues.

  “Some people are going around saying our power is shaky. A ram’s balls are shaky too, but they’re not going to fall off!” Zhivkov is supposed to have said at a factory opening.

  “Our women have been sending letters to the party in which they complain of having too much work. In my view, if that were the case, they wouldn’t have time to write letters,” said Kubadinski on Women’s Day.

  “Zhivkov was in power for all that time because he was good at finding a common language with whoever was in power in Moscow,” says Hristov. “It was totally absurd when Mikhail Gorbachev took over in the USSR, and from one day to the next Zhivkov began to preach the need for . . . perestroika, glasnost, and democratization! I suspect that if Communism hadn’t collapsed, Zhivkov would have crawled up Gorbachev’s ass and continued to run the country.”

  But the transformations in the Communist bloc had already gone much further. In June 1989, the first free elections were held in Poland. A few months later, the Germans demolished the Berlin Wall, and the Romanians shot Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife.

  Although the entire region was in turmoil, in Bulgaria the only people who openly protested were the Turks, persecuted by the Communists. Not until early November did the newly convened Bulgarian section of the Helsinki Committee organize the first legal demonstration to be held in Sofia. And although barely eight thousand people took part in it, the days of Communist Bulgaria were then numbered.

  “Communism collapsed in Bulgaria largely thanks to Kubadinski,” says Hristov. “His voice prevailed in 1989 when the reformers under the leadership of Petar Mladenov demanded the removal of Zhivkov from power. When it came to the most crucial vote among the top officials, Pencho voted against Zhivkov. And to his own detriment in the process.”

  The ram’s balls finally fell off on November 10, 1989, officially in view of Zhivkov’s “advanced age and exhaustion from overworking.”

  “In 1990 the authorities and the opposition parties held roundtable talks, and straight after that the democratic changes began,” says Hristov. But the Bulgarians only remember Kubadinski for two things. First, he was fanatically fond of hunting and honorary chairman of every imaginable field sports organization. Second, he had the first (and for many years the only) off-road vehicle in Bulgaria, a Toyota.

  3.

  Kubadinski’s wartime experiences were the inspiration for the makers of a television series called Every Kilometer, the best Bulgarian serial of all time. In one episode, the hero, who is also a Communist partisan, falls into a trap set by Bulgarian soldiers. He receives a secret message from some bear keepers to say help is on its way. A beautiful Gypsy girl distracts the soldiers by dancing while her pal talks to the imprisoned Communist.

  “The bear keepers probably did help the Bulgarian resistance in many other situations,” says journalist Krasimir Krumov. “They delivered reports and provided information about troop movements, just as they had during the fight for liberation from the Turkish occupation. The bear keepers’ songs were a key element—multiverse epics that told stories so gripping that nobody was capable of walking away without hearing them through to the end. They had the same effect as a TV soap opera—you absolutely had to know what would happen next. The songs often had a patriotic tone, telling tales of skirmishes fought by Bulgarian insurgents, of the black-eyed beauties they loved, and of wicked Turks.”

  Gyorgy Marinov, the bear keeper from Dryanovets, told us the plot of a song he used to sing, as had his father and grandfather before him.

  A handsome, rich young man is getting married, and so his family invites all the notables in the district to his wedding. They’ve invited the priest, and the headman, and almost everyone in the locality, but unfortunately they’ve forgotten about the Turk, a neighbor known for his nasty character.

  The wedding is a great success, a vast amount of rakia is drunk, and everyone admires the beauty of the bride and her husband’s riches. But their failure to invite the Turk is like a splinter in the heart of the family. On the one hand, he’s an invader and known to be spiteful. But on the other, he’s a neighbor, and tradition says that whatever your neighbor may be like, he deserves respect.

  The family spends a long time wondering how they should act in this situation. Finally, the bridegroom and his brothers go to see the Turk and offer him various sweetmeats.

  They offer him halva—but the Turk refuses.

  They press candy on him—but the Turk refuses.

  They bring pastry—but the Turk turns his back in disgust.

  The bridegroom’s family spends several days debating how to act in this situation. Eventually, they go and see the Turk again and offer to organize a special feast, just for him, where he will be the guest of honor, seated right next to the young couple.

  Once again the Turk refuses—but adds that he’ll only stop being angry if the bride sits on his knees.

  For the Bulgarian family, this is a slap in the face. No decent young woman or wife is going to sit on the knees of a strange man, and certainly not on the knees of a Turkish invader. So the young husband goes to see the Turk again and whacks him on the head with an ax. The Turk dies, and the husband has to hide in fear of revenge from other Turks. The message of the song is clear: The Turk is your enemy. Let’s not give them too many liberties.

  “That sort of song worked in several ways,” says Krumov. “It supported the fight against the occupiers. It raised the spirits. And on top of that the bear keepers used to pass on information in their songs, hidden signals for the resistance. Unfortunately, nobody ever wrote it all down properly, so this fascinating world will disappear along with the last bear keepers.”

  4.

  A beautiful young girl lets down her hair and tries in desperation to throw herself into the river, to put an end to her life.

  Although she has never lain with any man, although she is a virgin, her growing belly is a clear sign that she’s pregnant. In rural Balkan society an unmarried young woman who’s with child brings shame and a curse on her family. Suicide seems the best solution.

  But something very strange happens. As soon as the girl approaches the water, the river pulls away from her. She takes another step to try to reach it, but it pulls even farther away, until a man emerges from it and says: “Young woman, do not rashly deprive yourself of life! For you have been chosen to give birth to a bear who will work like a man.”

  The girl goes back to her village, and a few months later she does indeed give birth to a bear.*

  This is the legend told for years by bear keepers in the Balkans about the origins of their profession.

  The history of bear keeping has been researched by Pelin Tünaydın from Sabancı University in Istanbul, who is writing her doctoral thesis on bear keepers. “I remember the dancing bears from my childhood, in Istanbul,” she tells me at a café on the Bosporus. “For a child, it was an incredible sight—a wild animal who stands on his hind legs and dances. The Gypsies used to leave them for the night in a small park near Taksim Square, tied to the trees. But one morning they came back to find the bears gone. Overnight the state had introduced a ban on training bears to dance. So the police had come in the night and confiscated them. The keepers had nowhere to take their complaints. They did some swaggering, and some grumbling, and went off home. It must have made a major impression on me, because years later I had no doubt that I wanted to write my doctoral thesis on this very topic.”

  The oldest evidence of people trying to domesticate bears is—as Tünaydın writes in one of her articles*—a bear’s jaw found in what is now France. From the way it’s deformed, it’s possible to tell that the animal lived in captivity. Scientists have estimated that the skull dates from the sixth millennium BC.

  But this was not a dancing bear. Dancing bears came with the Gypsies, from another direction: from India.
So claim the experts—first, because they were encountered along the entire route of this journey, and they can still be seen in Pakistan to this day. Bear dancing was banned in India only a few years ago. Second, because the Indian bear keepers trained their animals in exactly the same way as bear keepers in Poland or Bulgaria. They too stuck a metal ring through the bear’s nose, just as Gyorgy Marinov did to his Vela.

  There were once major centers for training bears to dance in the Balkans, Russia, and Poland. The most famous was in Poland, the happiest barrack in the bear-keeping camp. Here, at a place called Smorgonie (nowadays Smarhon’ in Belarus), the eighteenth-century prince Karol Radziwiłł gave the Gypsies a piece of land on which to build an academy for dancing bears. Anyone who had a bear and wanted it to learn tricks sent the animal off to Smorgonie to be educated. There it would spend several seasons with the best bear keepers, who would teach it to dance and do funny things.

  What sort of funny things?

  For example, the Gypsy would say, “Now, Bruin, show us how the peasants go off to their serfdom.” And the bear would stoop, groan, and grab at its head.

  Then the Gypsy would say, “And now, Bruin, show us how the peasants come home from their serfdom.” Then the bear would straighten up, be full of energy, and stride along vigorously.

  Or the Gypsy would say, “Now, Bruin, show us Kościuszko returning to Poland.” And the bear would salute and march like a soldier.

  Jerzy Ficowski, the eminent expert on Gypsies, wrote about the Smorgonie academy as follows: “Young bears caught for the purpose in the prince’s forests were brought to the academy at Smorgonie, and sometimes there were as many as several dozen animals there at one time. . . . A dozen or more Gypsies were permanently employed in looking after the animals and training them. With royal permission, the Gypsy bear leaders set off into the world with the graduates.”*

  Elsewhere Ficowski quotes a book called Images of Domestic Life in Lithuania by Count Eustachy Tyszkiewicz, an archaeologist and historian whose father “as a true Lithuanian always kept a cultivated bear at home by the kitchen.” When the pet turned out to have a talent for dancing, he was sent to study at Smorgonie. “Enrolling a student here involved less bother than in Wilno, for there was no demand for either a baptismal certificate, or proof of inoculation against smallpox, and the evidence of his descent was all too obvious,” wrote Tyszkiewicz. And he continues: “The Gypsy taught the bear how he should stand on his hind legs. There was a large chamber, which instead of a floor contained a tile stove with a pillar in the middle, to which the student was bound by the hind legs; the stove was fueled until red-hot, the bear’s hind paws were wrapped in cloth and slippers, the student was put in there, and as soon as his front paws were scorched, he instinctively stood on the hind ones. At this moment the Gypsy standing in the doorway would sound his horn, and thus the bear would grow accustomed; thereafter at the sound of the horn, thinking that his feet were sure to become heated, he would rise up and perform various contortions.”

  According to legend, as distinct from the Bulgarian bear keepers, who preferred female bears, the Smorgonie trainers only accepted males. The Bulgarian Gypsies say the females are easier to train—they’re less aggressive and don’t attack people. But the Polish Gypsies regarded the training of the females as dishonorable. In their view, the females should bear young, so the keepers would never lack bears for their work.

  In Bulgaria the bears were not allowed to hibernate, but at Smorgonie they certainly were. From November 1 to the end of February the academy was closed, and several of its rooms were lined with pine needles and branches. There the bears went into hibernation.

  The British envoy to Poland during the rule of the Saxon kings (1697–1763) made fun of the state of Polish education, writing in a letter to London that “the best academy [in the country] is at Smorgonie in Lithuania, where bears learn to dance.”

  The Smorgonie academy was closed down by the tsarist authorities during the November Uprising (1830–31), but to this day Smorgonie has a bear in its coat of arms, approved by the Belarusian president, Lukashenko, and the city authorities are planning to erect a fountain in the downtown area to commemorate the academy.

  In the twenty-year interwar period, the term “you student of Smorgonie” was still a genuine insult in Poland.

  In Poland, keeping bears was banned before the war, but Karol Parno Gierliński from the Sinti Gypsy group recalls that in the 1950s there were two bear keepers in the camp with which he traveled about Poland. “They did less dancing by then, but more healing,” he said. “People in the villages believed that a bear was better than the wisest doctor.”

  5.

  The female bear called Vela had spent fifteen years with the Marinov family—her entire life, because Gyorgy Marinov bought her when she was only a few months old. Each year was the same for her: in the spring and summer she went to village fairs and seaside resorts, where she performed tricks and let herself be stroked so people could win the lottery, be healed, or find a better job. But then Vela spent the fall and winter tied to a wooden stake in the middle of the Marinovs’ yard in a state of semihibernation.

  Until one day a series of unusual events began in Vela’s life, which her bear’s brain couldn’t possibly follow.

  First of all, some people in green clothes arrived, who put her in a cage and took her on a long drive for hours and hours.

  Then they moved her out of the cage and into a room where everything was white.

  There she felt a sharp jab and fell asleep. When she woke up, something strange had happened to her nose. It felt smaller. There was something missing.

  It had also stopped hurting—before then the pain in her nose had been as obvious to her as breathing.

  Vela couldn’t work it all out in her bear’s mind. She spent the next few days holding her snout in her paws. She roared and rubbed against a tree. She chewed her own paw.

  She noticed, to her surprise, that she was no longer tied by the nose to a tree or a fence. For the first time in her life, she could move about freely.

  She had no idea what it all meant or how to cope with this new situation.

  “Our bears had rings through their noses all their lives,” says Dimitar Ivanov, manager of the bear park at Belitsa. “It’s just as if a part of their body had been amputated. Or a piece of their personality. The piece that made them into slaves.”

  Most of the rings were taken out in person by Dr. Amir Khalil, head of project development at Four Paws. He was happy to do it. He regarded it as a special moment for each bear—the symbolic restoration of its freedom.

  “We always do it under anesthetic. The bears react in various ways to the lack of the ring. Some of them feel strange for several days and keep putting their paws to their faces—they’re confused. Vela was like that.”

  For days on end, Vela kept touching her nose, looking for the ring. Although it had caused her pain throughout her life, she couldn’t cope with its removal, as if she’d grown so used to being a slave that she regarded her sudden freedom as a threat and feared it more than the pain.

  The same thing happened with Mima, one of the bears taken from the Stanev family.

  But there are also bears who feel fine in a few minutes and never wonder where the piece of metal that always caused them pain has gone.

  That’s what happened with Misho and Svetla. They reacted to the removal of the ring as if losing it were the most ordinary thing in the world. They immediately got on with fighting for their place within the group, and later with love affairs. The lack of the ring never bothered them in the least.

  6.

  The bears are introduced to freedom in gradual stages.

  Once the rings have been removed from their noses, for a day or two they sit in a concrete-floored artificial cave, where they get used to their new situation.

  From the cave, they are let loose in
to a special section of the park, which borders the area where the other bears live but is separated from them by a wire fence. The animal gets used to the smell of the other bears, sees them, and eats its meals close to them but has no physical contact with them. At the moment, the only resident of this section is a bear called Monti, the youngest at the park, who is almost two years old. The employees are afraid the other bears might bully him, so he’s going to spend at least another year in the first section.

  “It’s hard to call it socialization, because in nature bears are loners,” says Ivanov. “But it’s the time when they have to learn to live with other bears. Accept their smell and their presence. Some of them do it quickly; others take several months. We observe them, and then at one of our daily meetings we decide if it’s not the right moment yet, or if the time has come to give it a try.”

  The first and most important thing the bears have to learn about being free is that they have their limits.

  In their case, the limit is an electric fence that stretches around the entire park. It has to be there to stop the bears from escaping into a world where they’re not capable of surviving. Within the reserve they can do anything—they can go where they like, eat what they want, they can sleep, they can play, and they can copulate.

  As long as they don’t touch the fence.

  “Luckily, bears are highly intelligent,” says Ivanov. “Usually, their first—at most their second—contact with the fence is enough.”

  V. Instincts

  1.

  Dimitar Ivanov has a small, raven-black beard and goes about in a leather jacket—it’s black too—and he’s totally dedicated to his work. When he talks about the bears, he becomes emotional and gesticulates—even his facial expression shows total commitment.