Porte, The Sublime Used allusively to mean the Ottoman Empire—in fact the gateway into the grand vizier’s offices, and to the Ottoman divan.
Portmeirion Holiday village in North Wales, designed in Mediterranean-fantasy style by the eccentrically brilliant architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis. The village was made famous as the setting for the 1960s television series The Prisoner, starring Patrick McGoohan.
Princip, Gavrilo Serb nationalist assassin of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Hapsburg throne, in Sarajevo, on June 28, 1914—the event that essentially triggered World War I. His blow against the Austro-Hungarian Empire was regarded as heroic until the mid-1990s, when Sarajevo’s understandably altered mood toward all Serbs resulted in the plaque and his footprints, memorials to the event, being removed.
Rasputin Siberian mystic, healer, and philanderer who was introduced to the imperial Russian court by Militsa, daughter of the Montenegrin king.
Raznatovic, Zeljko Serbian paramilitary leader also known by his nom de guerre Arkan: viciously nationalistic, leader of a group of irregulars, the Tigers, and perpetrator of appalling atrocities.
Ricin Poison derived from the castor bean, used in the murder of the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov.
Sanjak (in Turkish, sancàk) An Ottoman military district.
SAS Special Air Services, a British army unit often detailed for small-scale, undercover, deniable military operations.
Seselj, Vojislav Serbian ultranationalist paramilitary leader, associate of Milosevic (q.v.), though later imprisoned by him.
SFOR NATO’s Stabilization Force based in Bosnia, successor to IFOR (q.v.).
Shqiperi Albania.
Sigurimi Albanian secret police.
Sigurnost Bulgarian secret police.
Skanderbeg Albania’s best-beloved martial hero, 1405–68, given his name and title—Iskander-bey, Prince Alexander—by the Turks who raised him; he later embraced Christianity, returned to Albania, and successfully repelled thirteen attempted Turkish invasions. See also Kastrioti, Gjerg.
Slav An enormous eastern and southern European racial grouping that embraces, among others, Russians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Montenegrins, Slovenes, Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks. (But notably not Albanians, however.) The country known as Yugoslavia (q.v.) was a loose union of the southern (Jugo) Slavs.
Sofa An elevated platform on which supplicants were permitted to sit during an audience with a high official of the Ottoman court. Sometimes the hall of audience itself.
Srpska, Republika The Serbian-dominated “entity” within Bosnia, created in the wake of Dayton (q.v.), and effectively ruled as a separate semiautonomous province, distinct from the Bosnian-Croat Federation that rules the remainder of the country.
Stari Most The exquisite Turkish-built bridge (1566) over the Neretva river in Mostar (which derives its name from the Turkish word for bridge), destroyed by Croatian artillery in November 1993—ironically on the anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. Its four centuries of existence stood as a symbol of the ethnic cohesion of Bosnia; its destruction showed that same cohesion’s vulnerability and fragility.
Stari Planina The Bulgarian name for the Balkan Mountains, which have given their name—the word Balkan means simply “mountains”—to the entire region.
Stepinac, Alojzije 1898–1960. The Roman Catholic archbishop of Zagreb reputed in some quarters to have given tacit ecclesiastical support to Ante Pavelic (q.v.) and his notorious Ustashi fighters during World War II; imprisoned for alleged war crimes. Catholic supporters claim he was a victim of Communist propaganda. Elevated to the status of Cardinal in 1952 by Pope Pius XII, and beatified by Pope John Paul in 1996. Jews and Serbs in particular, who suffered horribly at the hands of the Ustashi, find the Vatican’s unyielding respect for Stepinac somewhat unseemly, and controversy about his wartime role—which, in the absence of several mysteriously missing records, is uncertain—continues.
Süleyman the Magnificent 1495–1566, ruled the Ottoman Empire as Sultan Süleyman I, from 1520 to 1566. It is generally recognized that during his reign, the Ottomans achieved the zenith of their administrative, military, and architectural genius. Istanbul’s largest and grandest mosque, Süleymaniye, is a breathtaking reminder of his achievements.
Sultan The Turkish sovereign.
Tito, Josip Broz 1892–1980, the anti-Soviet Communist leader of Yugoslavia, whose skills in holding the fractious ethnic groups together in a single country are now regarded with nostalgia as a mark of rare political genius. Tito’s father was a Croat, his mother a Slovene; and the young Josip Broz (the name Tito was added when he was forty-two) was apprenticed as a locksmith. His rise to power began when, as an antifascist communist leader, he led his Partisan (q.v.) fighters to harass the occupying Germans. He ruled Yugoslavia as president from 1953 until his death, and remained a figure much respected by all sides in the later conflicts.
Tost (or Tosk) Albanian tribal group, composed of peoples living generally south of the Shkumbi River, most often landless and subsistence-level peasants. See also Gheg.
UCK Initials of the vernacular name of the Kosovo Liberation Army.
Ustashi Irregular Croat nationalist army, closely allied with the Nazis in World War II, which committed appalling bestialities against Serbs, Jews and other minorities. See also Pavelic, Ante.
Vizier An Ottoman minister-administrator.
VJ Vojska Jugoslavije—the rump Yugoslav army, generally now Serbian, with a number of pressed Montenegrin recruits.
Vlach The name for those Christian herdsmen who, along with the Serbs, originally populated much of the region between the Danube and the northern Adriatic.
Wehrmacht The World War II name for the German army, and which after the defeat fell out of favor. It is now returning to more common usage, as for the German units recently attached to NATO in the Balkans.
Yali An elegant waterside residence, often made of wood and with a formal tulip garden, on the shores of the Bosporus in Constantinople (q.v.).
Yugoslavia A relatively short-lived and inherently unstable federation of southern Slavic peoples that was born after World War I as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, and which began to disintegrate after little more than seventy years, following the death of President Tito (q.v.). The name is currently retained for the Federation of Serbia and Montenegro, but the name Yugoslavia—which means, literally, “the union of southern Slavs”—has very little semantic validity.
Zupan Leader of a zupa, a confederation of Serbian villages.
Suggestions for Further Reading
TO ANYONE WRITING about the Balkans swiftly comes the sobering and humbling realization that there are already an immense number of books on the region—the shelves at the library of the Royal Geographical Society in London, where I always go first when embarking on a foreign trip, positively groan with tomes, but tomes that are, by and large, almost as unreadable as they are apparently indigestible. From the beginning of the nineteenth century every historian, every writer of letters to The Times—every motorist, even—seemed to wanted to play a part in a debate on the Eastern Question, to have his say at great length, and then for posterity place his say between covers of red morocco. And the tradition continues to this day: Few regions of the world can have exerted—and continue to exert—such a magnetic pull on the world’s literary drabs, and works of terrible dullness and labyrinthine sobriety continue to thunder from the presses, destined to win a few respectful and uncomprehending reviews and then to molder and gather eternal dust. Most deserve to go unread; and if this book suffers the same fate, then I can’t say that I wasn’t warned.
But assuming that some readers remain engaged, as I surely am, by the infuriating enticements of the Balkans, I would direct their attention to just three books that stand out, head and shoulders, from all the rest. The familiar but little-read 1943 classic by Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, though far too long and far too full of amusing in
vention to impress purists and pedants, remains wonderfully readable and hugely wise. Robert Kaplan has done a splendid job with his Balkan Ghosts, written in 1993, even though he deals more rigorously with Greece and Bulgaria than with the Balkans in the strictest sense, and even though his writing has been so lucid as to influence heavily President Clinton’s policy caprices in the region. And finally, and most important of all, there is Ivo Andric, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961 in part for having written, in 1945, The Bridge on the Drina, a work that captures the beguiling insanity of the Balkans like no other, and that will make even the sternest of historians weep at the madness of it all.
All three volumes are still in print (in paperback, from Penguin, Vintage, and the University of Chicago Press, respectively), and should be devoured by anyone who wishes to take a further interest in what is, it has to be remembered, an unending story—a saga that will go on, I suppose, until the waters of the deluge finally submerge every last spire and minaret and steeple between the Danube and the Peloponnese.
For Help Along the Way
FIRST, AND WITHOUT THE SLIGHTEST DOUBT, I want to thank quite unreservedly my good friend and helpmeet Rose George, who kindly took time off from a holiday in India to accompany me through a long spring and summer in the Balkans, and to apply her crucial linguistic and critical faculties to the successful completion of the adventure. We make in the best of circumstances a most unlikely couple: separated by more than two decades and living three thousand miles apart, we are perpetually and fundamentally at odds with one another on almost every level—we disagree on everything from politics to diet (she, an ardent vegetarian, facing something of a problem among the Slavic carnivores), from music to motor cars—and we spend much of our time fighting like furies. But we are somehow addicted to one another’s company, and we remain at heart the best of friends. She is for me the ideal traveling companion, and I find it difficult to contemplate any journey to the faraway—as recently to the Corryvreckan whirlpool in Scotland, or to Manila, or the back streets of Osaka—without hoping that she comes along. She was of invaluable assistance on this occasion, and I doubt if I could have written the book without her.
Before and during the journey we met a wide variety of helpful people (though occasionally, and especially in Kosovo, some who were very unhelpful indeed). Among those whom I wish to thank most particularly are Peter Anton, Patrick Bishop, Avis Bohlen, Daut Bozokurt, Robin Clifford, Guy Crofton, Zlatko Dizdarevic, Shaun Going, Peter Hunt, Danica Jankovic, Günter Düriegl, Jorgen Grunnet, Pyotr Gwozdz, Sybilla Hamann, David Harrison, Mike Jackson, Peter January, Christian Jorgensen, Doris Knecht, Lejla Komarica, Lena Kovalenko, Dieter Lorraine, Jelka Lowne, Erwin Lucius, Sylvie Mattl, Simon Mann, Jean Meisel, Sarah Miller, Fritz Molden, Janet Rogan, Don Branco Sbutega, Mike Scanlon, Vesna Stamenkovic, Milena Stantcheva, Daliborka Uljarevic, Tom Wallace, and, as always, my friend Juliet Walker.
Larry Ashmead of HarperCollins was kind enough to suggest this book, after I had first visited Macedonia on assignment for the genial and generous Con Coughlin, foreign editor of the Sunday Telegraph, and to whom I thus owe an immense debt. Juliet Annan of Viking Penguin in London was similarly enthusiastic about asking me to attempt the formidable task of making some sense out of the chaos of the Balkans. I did at first wonder if I was being handed the most poisoned of chalices; if there are errors of judgment, fact, or interpretation, they are very much my own and should in no way reflect on the eagerness of others that I attempt this book.
I wish to thank my agents, Peter Matson in New York and Bill Hamilton in London, as well as Agnes Krup and her tireless and adorable assistant at the time, Jenny Meyer. The tireless invigilations of Allison McCabe and Anya Waddington, my editors in New York and London, respectively, helped turned my unorganized scribblings into something approaching a coherent narrative—as did Sue Llewellyn’s assiduous copyediting—and for this I thank them wholeheartedly.
The editorial staff at Condé Nast Traveler in New York—Tom Wallace, Gully Wells, Lisa Hughes, Gerry Rizzo—were splendidly supportive, as they always manage to be when I absent myself for long periods of time. They were especially tolerant on this occasion, considering that I was writing about a part of the planet that currently, and for understandable reasons, attracts precious few tourists and hardly any people who wander the world for pleasure and enlightenment. My fondest hope, in the aftermath of this terrible little war, is that the Balkans may quieten themselves now, a quiet that will in time perhaps allow visitors to find their way into some of the loveliest countryside imaginable, and to encounter a people whose pride, history, and passion render them, in more peaceful times, the most endearing, most fascinating, and most unforgettable Europeans of all.
ALSO BY SIMON WINCHESTER
The Professor and the Madman
In Holy Terror
American Heartbeat
Their Noble Lordships
Stones of Empire
The Sun Never Sets
Prison Diary: Argentina
Hong Kong: Here Be Dragons
Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles
Pacific Rising
Small World
Pacific Nightmare
The River at the Center of the World
Copyright
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* A city whose history even more markedly hints at the Balkan confusion to come, since it has been variously administered by the Romans, Austrians, Croatians, Venetians, Hungarians, French, British, and Italians, before being incorporated into Yugoslavia, and, since 1991, into the newly independent Croatia. It was also the city where a resident British engineer named Robert Whitehead invented the first torpedo.
* Many of which have their eyes scratched out, and thus look even wilder and more frightening than their medieval artists had intended. The reason, however, is not so much born of sacrilege or desecration: Many Serbian peasants have long held that the chalky paints used for the eyes of fresco figures are cures for blindness, if administered topically, and with permission of the local abbot.
* They pick you up on a motorcycle, seat you on the back, pile on your luggage, and zoom off—scary but immense fun, if it’s not snowing.
† Where by chance I ran into Jørgen Gr
unnet, a Dane who was now a member of an international monitoring group that had just been forced out of Kosovo, but with whom, when he worked for the newspaper Politiken, I had shared an office in Washington in 1972. We hadn’t seen each other for nearly thirty years: to run into him on a remote frontier-crossing in the southern Balkans seemed yet another example of the wayward capriciousness of this peculiar job.
* A name that the Greeks, believing they have a prior claim, still do not permit themselves to utter. “Is not Makedonia,” spat my taxi driver. “Is FYROM.” The latter, an acronym, stands for the Former Yugoslav Republic of M., and seems acceptable to all, except linguists.
* A city whose vast lexicon of names also hints at the bewilderments of its history: Constantinople is well known, of course, as is Byzantium; and readers of Graham Greene and Agatha Christie will recognize the names Stamboul, Estamboul, and Czarigrad. But there are also references aplenty to the city as Kushta, Gosdantnubolis, Rumiyya-al-Kubra, New Rome, New Jerusalem, and the City of Pilgrimage, as well as, more simply, Polis, or just plainly the City. More than anything, Istanbul is a city of a dynasty, and that Ottoman dynasty was to do much, both for good and evil, to shape the destiny of the vast and complex mountain lands that lay between the Golden Horn and the faraway city that so very nearly fell into the sultan’s hands, Vienna.
* Among the array of creatures found in the abandoned tents was the Ottoman grand vizier’s pet ostrich, which he had ordered beheaded to prevent it falling into the hands of the infidel Catholics who had broken his siege.
* The half referring to the Gypsies.
The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans Page 23