We might have tried heading east or northeast, along the Landstrasse or the Oststrasse, ending up at Bratislava, Prague, or Budapest. Or we might have struck out southwest along the Triestenstrasse, and found ourselves at the now-Italian port city of Trieste, a fine medieval-hearted city that had changed hands all too often, but which had reached its own zenith when it had been the Hapsburgs’ principal outlet (and connected to Vienna by a direct railway line) to the sea.
But no. I wanted to be in the Balkan heartland as directly as possible; and so we headed instead to a railway station, the Süd-bahnhof, from which one could dive—more precipitously than via any other route—into the whirling center of the great storm that we could hear and read about all over. I consulted my Cook’s Continental and, at a small travel agency around the corner from the Staatsoper, bought two first-class tickets on that late-afternoon’s train No. 159, The Croatia.
We were about an hour out from the city, and sitting in the lace-trimmed dining car, when something about the wine bottle caught my eye. The sun was already beginning to slant down into the western sky, and a ray must have briefly glinted on the wine’s meniscus, showing it to be sloping quite dramatically. The train, it turned out, was climbing a gradient, an unusually steep slope.
I opened the window and looked outside. The featureless and dreary suburban plains of the Danube were all behind us now, and in their place were sharp peaks and tiny villages, nesting storks, velvet meadows and wildflowers, the sounds of cowbells and flashes of distant snow. The train was snorting heavily through a chain of mountains, pushing through the one physical barrier that kept Austria decently apart from the most troublesome of the hundred races and the thousand languages over which at and the Turks and the ever-shifting friends of both had battled and waged war.
3
To the “Land of the Osmanlees”
IT CAN TAKE a dreamy railway journey through a range of majestic Middle European mountains to put the Balkans into their true and proper perspective. For if there can be said to be any ultimate villain behind all the centuries of Balkan misery, it has to do with mountains, and it is this: the fact that between fifty-eight and twenty-four million years ago the northern part of what is now the continent of Africa moved northward and started to collide with the southern part of what is now the continent of Europe.
This episode, which is very broadly known as the Alpine Cenozoic Orogeny, was, and still is (for it continues to this day) one of the most important tectonic events in the making of the planet—something that will bring scant comfort to the wretches who went on to inhabit the regions it created. An uncountable series of geological events took place during the early millions of years of the collision. Some of them—the forcing together and thrusting upward of crustal plates to create the great southern European mountain chains, like the Alps (part of which our train was heaving itself up and over) and the Pyrenees—were by common agreement major. Others—the forming of Italian volcanoes like Mount Etna and volcanic islands like Lipari and Vulcano, the creation of world’s best sources of pumice stones, or the making of rock veins from which Roman centurions might win obsidian and so carve razor blades and invade their neighboring countries clean shaven—were perhaps less so.
The collisions between the two great tectonic plates took a very long time. During their later phases scores upon scores of smaller tectonic plates, which had broken off from the vanguards of the principal ones, jostled and collided with one another, rolled over and beneath one another and the wreckage of already collided ones—leaving behind a ghastly mosaic of geology that is more complicated than almost anywhere else in the world.
Two major events tended to dominate the picture, however. The first of these was the relatively simple making of the main southern European Alpine chain. The other, more tricky to imagine, was the steady northward movement of the Arabian Peninsula along the huge fault line of what are now the Dead Sea and the river Jordan. This caused a cascade of what would finally be Balkan-related geology to happen. The Arabian Peninsula moved north and caused the creation of the Zagros Mountains of Iran, whose snow-capped higher peaks can be glimpsed south of the holy city of Isfahan. The piling up of these south Persian hills caused the entire Anatolian Plateau of eastern Turkey to be pushed steadily westward, which in turn caused enormous pressure both on the rising peninsula of Greece and, to its immediate north and most important of all, on the eastward extension of the very Alpine range that our train was currently crossing.
And it was this last that left the Balkans the geologically and topographically wild place they are today—the crushing of one newly formed mountain chain (the Balkan Mountains, largely in Bulgaria), heading westward into another (the Dinaric Alps) that was curving south and eastward. The two chains smashed into another to create a geological fracture zone that became a template for the fractured behavior of those who would later live on it. Like the complicated patterns that are made by intersecting ripples from a number of stones thrown into a pool, with sizes and shapes that can only be confirmed by the deepest calculus, so these two, or three, or four colliding ranges of hills formed yet newer ranges of hills and valleys that then trended in directions that were the varied sums of the trending directions of all their parent ranges, and were extraordinarily complex as a result.
The ranges of hills had unexpectedly steep faces and deep and curiously isolated valleys, rivers that twisted and turned in corkscrew patterns, defiles that became dangerous culs-de-sac, hidden and unexpected plains, eternally defensible hilltops and impossibly deep canyons, eccentricities of microclimates, and on the coastline (which was of amazing length, and adorned with bizarrely shaped islands, skerries, and reefs) deep fjordlike harbors and wriggling estuaries that proved terrifyingly nightmarish to innocent navigators.
Add to all this the fact that the rock out of which the Balkans are made was not something grand and imperturbable, like granite, dolerite, or marble, but rather the soft young limestone, made in Permian times in the warm Tethyan Sea, that dissolves so readily in the mild hydrochloric acid that is rainwater that even in areas of classic and stable geology like North Yorkshire, it forms areas of fantastic topography—these are the so-called karsts, with their deep caves and gorges and vanishing rivers. A fantastically troubled underneath and a waywardly malleable and porous upper surface: How much weirder a landscape is it possible to imagine?
And that is even before the human population had been grafted onto it all.
One might say that anyone who inhabited such a place for a long period would probably eventually evolve into something that varied substantially, for good or for ill, from whatever is the human norm. I imagine it can be argued that geologically and tectonically stable (and so generally rather tediously flat) regions—like Holland, Kansas, North China, the Australian Outback—tend to be inhabited by the less fractious of the world’s peoples—peoples who depart from the norm in being perhaps less aggressive, less bellicose, perhaps less curious, less imaginative. Places that have a more crazed geology, on the other hand, quite possibly tend to attract, or maybe even to produce, peoples who are of a (let us say) more robust character.
Given that the Slavs who moved into the Balkans two thousand years ago were already of fairly robust stock—they were probably Iranian-led and came from the shores of the Black Sea, the wilds of the Caucasus and northern Persia’s Elburz Mountains—it is scarcely surprising to find that, once they had vanished into their isolated Balkan valleys and hidden harbors and climatically unrelated culs-de-sac, they became—one from another and all from those outside—a very different people indeed.
Such were my musings on the train. I almost missed the border inspections, of which there were quite a number. We were stamped out of Austria by an efficient and smiling pair of guards, and then into Slovenia, at a place called Maribor, by a posse of gray-suited and rather miserable Slovenes.
These, then, were the first true Slavs we had encountered and if one wanted a reminder that the word Slav is
a portmanteau term that encompasses as multiethnic and polyglot a group as it is possible to imagine, then this forlorn group of Slovenian frontier guards more than amply fitted the bill. One of them, the passport stamper, was very round and fat, with a shaved head, and he looked like an only very slightly animated potato. One had such sharp features that he reminded me of a weasel. Another was short, dark, and sallow. A fourth was burly and had a beard. The sole woman among them had flaming red hair. There was no apparent ethnic unity to them at all—and all that distinguished them from the people from among whom we had come is that while those behind us had been all Germanic and did all have the same very general kind of appearance, these here in the Maribor railway station were in no way Germanic and all looked quite different. Two of them, though, had crucifixes around their necks, and not one them wrote in (nor were their passport stamps written in) Cyrillic script.
So they may have been Slavs; they may have been, until 1991, part of the Federation of South Slavs that was called Yugoslavia, but they were not, in any sense, Serbs. The Serbs were Eastern Orthodox by belief, and such were their fraternal links with the Slavs of Russia they used Saint Cyril’s script as their own. In all other ways—except for their given names, which reflected their alternative pantheon of saints—the Slavs who were Serbs were the same people as the Slavs who were Slovenes, as here, or the Slavs who were Croatians, and whom we would encounter when we crossed their frontier in few hours’ time.
And this was one of the abiding complex absurdities of the Balkans: that almost all the people who have been so horribly at odds with one another are all, in essential ethnic terms, the selfsame people. This does not include the Albanians, as we shall see; but elsewhere, the Bosnian Muslims and the Croatian and Slovenian Catholics are of essentially the very same ethnic and genetic makeup as the Orthodox Christian Serbs—a people of whom, until lately, they were true and literal Yugoslav—south Slav—compatriots.
These Maribor Slovenes were more properly linked with their coreligionists far away than with their ethnic kin here at home. These people, to judge by their crucifixes, worshiped, if they did so at all, at the same churches as did their brother and sister Slavs in dominantly Catholic Slavic countries like Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and neighboring Croatia, as well as some of their number in Ukraine and Belarus. They worshipped in the same churches as their Germanic cousins did in Vienna, too, or in south Germany. But they did not worship in the same churches as their compatriots and brother and sister Slavs in Serbia—and there, sad to say, is the rub.
I would like to say it was the great Gothic Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary that dominated my view of the Croatian capital when we finally stepped down from the train at Zagreb station later that night. It was not. Its two towers, illuminated by golden floodlight, pierced the night sky from the top of the low hill on which they and the old Archbishop’s Palace stood. But it was the ordered magnificence of the structures in the square outside the station that first caught my eye. This was Vienna, I thought, all over again. Some of the buildings were faux-Renaissance, some art nouveau, still others born of that Viennese radical architectural school that grew out of—and was, in part, a reaction to—nouveau and was called the Sezession. This may have been a Slav city, but the stylistic influence on its center was pure Hapsburg, from the station itself to the boxy and colonnaded Esplanade Hotel, which loomed fortresslike and severe, to the left of the imposing square. It had been commissioned by the Wagons-Lits company, someone said, for passengers coming in from Paris on the Orient Express (it was always assumed that anyone of any class who arrived in Zagreb would be bound to do so by rail).
The hotel and the cathedral, both of which are relatively modern structures (the first cathedral was knocked down by a furious earthquake in 1880), have something in common—a feature that offered us the first terrible glimpse (and so soon beyond the comforts of Vienna!) of the true horrors of the Balkans.
The imposing, green-washed Esplanade Hotel, as darkly imposing and majestic inside as its outside suggested it should be, turned out, according to the staff, to have been the headquarters during World War II of the Gestapo. And the cathedral, half a mile away, was in some sense a spiritual refuge for those Croats who were committing dreadful crimes either at the behest of the Gestapo or on their own frighteningly warped initiative.
Croatia in the days following the German and Italian invasions was run as a supposedly self-declared and notionally independent fascist state; and though the Wehrmacht and soldiers from the Italian army were everywhere to lend support, it was run principally and with blood-chilling ruthlessness by Zagreb’s dreaded home-grown terror organization, the so-called Insurrectionists, the Ustashi.
The men who peopled this appalling organization of unutterably violent Croat separatists, a body that had existed since the thirties, first came to worldwide attention when, in 1934 in Marseilles, they asssassinated the Serbian king, Alexander I (Alek-sandr Karadjordjevic).* The uncanny connection between cathedral and hotel is that for an indecently long while, beginning in April 1941, the Ustashi were receiving their orders from the Gestapo officers at the Esplanade while at the same time, and even more chillingly, they were said to be receiving their moral imprimatur and, for a while, their blessing, from the archbishop up in the Zagreb cathedral. Sezession mansion and Gothic church were thus united, at least for a while, in the underwriting of one of the great bestialities of modern times.
From the evidence collected in the years since the war, it seems that almost every dire act the Croat madmen perpetrated against the Serbs—the butchery, killings with knives and mallets and hacksaws, the throat slittings, the ax murderings either because the Serbs were members of what many Croatian Catholics considered the apostasy of the Orthodox Church, or because they were reckoned to be Communists—was said to be done under the invigilation and approval of one of the more allegedly diabolical figures that the modern Roman Catholic Church has produced.
He was called Alojzije Cardinal Stepinac, and his consecrated remains, lately blessed by the pope, lie in the cathedral today, in an elegant tomb not far from a celebrated Dürer bas-relief, and under the gold stars and azure sky of the cathedral ceiling. His memory is revered by thousands of Croats still—I watched a line of several dozen young women with their children waiting to kneel before his tomb, to kiss his image and mutter incantations over their rosaries. Yet seen by today’s standards, Stepinac seems hardly worthy of such unswerving Christian devotion. He was by too many accounts to disbelieve a cruel, dogmatic man, a puritan zealot and a bigot, and a figure who was cynically used by the Ustashi to give moral authority to the terrible things they were doing to the Serbs who lived among them.
One side of his zealotry was harmless enough—he was a stickler for the unvarying protocols of church ritual, he took a Franciscan oath of poverty, he believed that Masons were everywhere plotting, and he railed against the immorality—as he saw it—of such innocent pursuits as sunbathing and mixed swimming. But he also made sermon after impassioned sermon condemning those who wanted—as many intellectuals did in those days—an end to the schism between the Eastern and Roman churches. The archbishop’s firmly held belief, at least as a young man (and he was first inducted into the Zagreb cathedral chancery when he was only thirty-two) was that the Orthodox Church represented a perversion of holy truth, and all who held to the Byzantine beliefs should be shunned, converted, or worse. His belief mirrored precisely the stated policy of the Ustashi regime, which famously and chillingly said of the Serbs that the only way to deal with them was to ensure that one-third were exiled, one-third were converted, and one-third were killed.
The most egregious example of Stepinac’s alleged tyrannies had to do with both conversion and killing. He is said to have directed, and on occasion presided over, the forced conversion to Catholicism of tens of thousands of Orthodox Serbs at the infamous Jasenovac concentration camp, seventy miles away from Zagreb. The conversions were given, or force
d, just moments before the camp’s Ustashi thugs set about the men with hammers and axes, killing them in such numbers and with such viciousness that even the Nazi Germans—who had taken industralized killing to high art—were hard put to outdo. They were made Catholics, the Croatian church leadership later explained, to ensure that after their deaths they could go to heaven.
By chance a trial concerning the horrors of half a century ago at Jasenovac was going on in the Zagreb county court on the day we arrived. A former camp commander named Sakic was being prosecuted for mass murder and war crimes—an effort by the eight-year-old Croatian state to make some amends for, and come to terms with, events that had taken place in the name of its people. On the days that we spent in the city, a Jewish former inmate named Josip Erlih had been brought in from Belgrade to testify: He told gruesome stories of men being machine-gunned to death because they were Jews, or of Serbian farmers being beaten to death with mallets, axes, and picks, or of the hanging of large groups of Chetniks, the most prominent and active of the Serb partisan fighters.
Some 350,000 prisoners had been killed at one camp, he said—40,000 of them alone Gypsies. Anyone who departed from the Croatian Catholic norm—Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, gay men—was regarded as beneath contempt. “There was so much killing. The Ustashi tried to burn the bodies in the incinerator but gave it up because of the terrible stench. They tried to make soap from the prisoners’ corpses, but gave up that effort, too, because the bodies were so frail and there was not enough fat in them for that.”
The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans Page 6