Šar Planina – Kosovo 18-26 July 2009

Join me this summer on one of the Balkan's least visited and most beautiful mountains. Together with biology students from Novi Sad and Kragujevac we will spend 7 days botanising, birding, photographing and getting to know each other around a shared passion for wild places, conservation and cultural heritage.

We are forming a small international camp at the foot of Šar Planina within the National Park on the Kosovo side of the border with Macedonia. This is a large Serbian enclave where life is slowly getting back to normal after the 1999 war. It is safe and the people are very welcoming. Šar Planina National Park has become isolated and one of the purposes is to encourage eco-tourism and active conservation.

There are flights to Skopje in Macedonia; we will pick you up and take you to the camp. It is possible to travel by train or bus to Serbia, Kosovo or Macedonia. Contribution for food, camp and local travel expected.

• Explore an outstanding Balkan alpine landscape

• Talk conservation in a changing world

• See traditional Albanian shepherding

• Experience local culture, spirituality and music

• Get to know each other and local people

  If you love the good earth and would like to join us, serb, Brit or Kosovar, contact me!

   

  

   

2008 - The Serbian Kitchen

“Who are you waiting for?” I asked Milan, a student friend whom I found loitering at the bus station. “The Čačak bus! Just waiting for a box from my mother; come round later and you'll see!”. Now I have realized that students hanging around bus stations are waiting for consignments packed up before dawn by loving mothers in distant villages. Inside will be slanina (fat bacon), kajmak (soured cream), kobacica (sausage), šunka, čvarci (crackling), granny's cakes and letters from sisters. Not only does the peasant kitchen reach right into those stacked up blocks of grey flats, but domestic ritual and ordinary life are closely connected to the countryside. The mass movement from the land is quite recent and still happening. Every home seems to have an uncle “on” the village where urban relatives gather in summer for holidays and weddings, or in winter for pig killing and slava celebrations. Every home is just as likely to have an aunt in Canada whence returning relatives pack their cases with domestic rakija in plastic bottles and illegal sausages that should cause havoc with sniffer dogs. Once at a meal I was given a huge pile of roasted meat and a bowl of diced raw onion. I tried to protest, not quite honestly, that I was actually almost vegetarian, but my host simply shook his head in pity muttering “Wrong culture!”.

Just go to the pijaca (green market) and you will see this daily material connection between the town and the countryside. These days you are likely to find boxes from Greece and Italy bringing out of season and expensive produce, but essentially you can tell the season exactly by what is being sold on the stalls. If the West is ever to break its environmentally damaging habits we should all learn from the Serbian pijaca and buy locally and seasonally. Come February, depending on the snow, I am waiting to see the first posies of visibabe from the Fruška Gora (snowdrops or “hanging grannies”) tied up in leaves with a red berry; stalls with green salads tell you that someone has a poly tunnel, and orah (walnuts) quite probably come from the Caucuses, but the vendor will name some mystically healthy and distant mountain like Kopaonik. I usually head for the grannies who seem to have brought in a mixture of things from their own bašte (gardens). They will sell you peppers, garlic, tomatoes, and later peaches, apricots, apples and pears, all reassuringly misshapen but delicious. If you are brave you can try mušmule (medlars) putrid and sweet after the first frosts. When you see men playing speed chess amongst the leeks and others selling almonds and pomegranate from the rocky Serb lands above the Adriatic you realize that many of them might have quite different lives if they hadn't been forced from distant communities in the time of war.

But from wherever they are Serbs are consistent about certain staples. If you invite students for a meal, heaven help you if you forget to buy several loaves of bread. And in a Serbian home don't take the bread with the soup; they only do that in Macedonia where one presumes things were once so bad that there was nothing to follow the soup. Whether it is the gypsy on his bicycle or the businessman coming home for lunch at 3 o'clock, each will likely have 4 loaves of bread under his arm. Our next door neighbour in the village has a bakery, and you can tell the time by the smoke rising from his oven. Every day bar Sunday he and his wife prepare the dough by hand and bake it in a mud-brick oven heated with corn stalks. “We are the last of the Mohicans” they said. When their gate opens at 3 I am almost first in to buy a warm sweet loaf; don't leave us, please! An endearing and frugal custom, for the sake of the widow on a tiny pension, is to cut a loaf in 2 (using the paper provided to avoid handling or there will be hell) and buy but half a loaf. In Raška near Kosovo, where što južnije to tužnije (farther south the sadder) I found a quarter of a loaf, and that was before the steep increase in the price of bread. Thanks to the good quality of flour there is another staple made from very thin rolled pastry called kore. On the corner of any city street there is likely to be a baker selling fatty burek flavoured with cheese or meat. Working men will drop in for breakfast and eat it standing up with a cup of yoghurt. Gibanica is also a kore based traditional pie with cheese and eggs. One wonders whether eating habits that can sustain a man toiling in the fields will adapt to less demanding urban needs.

Whilst burek-eating men puffing on the poisonous weed seem quite relaxed about their health, Serbs are not unadvanced in hypochondria. I think I would blame rural myths perpetuated by mothers and grannies for the mortal fear of drafts and wet hair, both of which are “dangerous”. If you are foolish enough to ask for tea rather than coffee your host will immediately say “Oh dear, are you ill?”. And here I am entirely converted. Somewhere on the pijaca there will be a sprightly elderly man with a concerned look on his face selling a mysterious array of herbal teas collected and prepared in distant fields and woods. I even keep my own stock of Hajdučna trava (achillia) and Kantarion whose pale yellow bitter liquors sweetened with honey will cure you of anything, even depression. Honey producers fill the same niche with little bottles of propolis and packs of pollen. Honey with orah, one market friend claims with a wink, is a sure aphrodisiac.

However you look at things, it always seems to come back to families, and food preparation is an occasion for families to gather, share the work, enjoy the banter and carry off the goodies. From the end of November real villagers are getting ready for the svinjokolje or pig-slaughter. “Be there by 8!” they said, and by 8 on a freezing winter morning the first large pig had already had its throat cut and was being de-bristled in a trough of hot water. By late evening when we gratefully retired indoors from the cold to celebrate a good job well done and enjoy the spoils, all that was left of 2 large porkers were a few pieces of skull. Nothing was left but the squeal as they say. It is hugely impressive to see how everything is used. We even cleaned out the guts under a running tap ready to be filled up with the family recipe for hot kulen sausage. The offal had its own recipe for making haggis-like sausage, the head was used to make garlic filled švargla, hams and fatty bacon pieces were stowed away in a barrel with salt, and surplus dripping from these very fat pigs was poured into drums for use in winter cooking. Thanks to the dry cold winters these tasty sausages, hams and bacon will later be smoked and hung up under the roof to cure.

Plenty of other occasions call for the cousins to gather. In summer there is potato lifting, later there will be fruit gathering and raspberry picking, and on high mountain pastures people will gather to rake up the bilberries. Perhaps it is the fruit that gives rise to the universal taste for sok or fruit juice which varies from delicious award-winning quality to juices of questionable provenance. When the season is well advanced smoke may rise from gardens to tell you that people are gathering to boil down their apricots or plums to make pekmes; this is unsweetened natural and delicious fruit jam to be spread as thick as you like on fresh white bread. But it is early autumn when fathers are seen hurrying home with sacks of red peppers to be grilled and skinned on any little bit of open ground outside the flats. Garlic and peppers are stored in jars or crushed in oil to make delicious ajvar for the winter. Fear of winter is real amongst the older folk who no doubt have reason to know. “What will you do?” they ask with concern if you say that you have no time to make zimnica (winter preserves). in the West it is only farmers who seem to waste their breath talking about food security, but for myself I would take a lesson from my elderly neighbours and learn some of their skills in thriftiness.

Take the Futog cabbage; there is no more versatile and healthy cooking ingredient. But celebrity chefs have quite overlooked what Serbs everywhere know; kiseli kupus (sour cabbage), salted and fermented in plastic bins on the balcony, is an exquisite ingredient for any dish from the famous Serbian sarma to svadbarski kupus (wedding cabbage) where ribs of pork and cabbage are cooked up in huge clay pots on a bed of smoking embers. It is at celebrations, clannish affairs when people gather from afar, that traditional food is best enjoyed. Kusturica's films usually manage to include a surreal feast, such as in Black Cat, White Cat, that makes it clear that hospitality is deeply rooted and generous, and its enjoyment accomplished and lively. Arrive at a rural home and a small tray with exquisite embroidered mat will appear with a dish of honey from the hive and glasses of cold water and spoons for the traveller who has come over hill and mountain to get there. Home brewed rakija will follow, and follow. One shudders to think how the EU will, one day, cope with the Serbian custom of brewing rakija. Everyone with a plum orchard has a still hidden in a shed somewhere, and come August when the plums are dropping, barrels of fermenting mess are being poured into stills, and small fires are distilling off the clear šljivavica. Most seem to pour the first distillate back so that it goes round a second time and twice as strong. My ex landlady and friend who survived the Second World War in a concentration camp swears by a tot with her coffee every morning. And I have to say that there is nothing better if you are facing a Serbian village breakfast.

Walk along an unspoilt street in Belgrade's old town and you will be reminded of history. One shop, with the impossible name of a poslastičarnica if you have already drunk some šljivavica, sells horrible sweet cakes which seem to come from Vienna. Incidentally, if you hear at a party the cry “torta”, which also comes from Germanic regions, stand back to avoid being crushed. A few doors down you will find a café or kafić (not to be confused with a kafana which is full of drifting smoke and sedentary men) where you can buy baklava, which is Turkish or even Arabic, to be be drunk with thick Turska kafa cooked in a džezva. Turks may also have taught the Serbs to impale sheep on spits to be turned 7 times a minute for 4 hours; this happens at any celebration, such as getting the roof on the house and of course at country fairs and festivals.

We mustn't overlook fish, unavoidable at a monastery feast. Lands far from the sea along slow wide rivers enjoy wonderful šaran, som i smuđ (carp, catfish and zandar). Riverside restaurants, riblja čorba (rich paprika-red fish soup), tambura or gypsy orchestras and much singing all go together. Take care if you are entertaining Serbs during a period of fasting which could be almost any day of the year; vegetables is about it, or you might get away with fish. But, as the psalmist says “Better a meal of herbs where love is than a fatted ox where there is discord”.

2008 - Roma in Serbia

It was an obscure village on the way to nowhere in the wide open spaces of Banat. I drove slowly out on a small road with the village rubbish discarded in heaps on either side. Near the road, loading a rusting stove onto a cart was a gypsy couple. She wore high heels and a long silk skirt, no doubt found from some similar village dump; and she was strikingly beautiful. Slim, fine features, long lustrous black hair pulled round over one shoulder revealing a slender brown collar bone. Her man wore a shining white shirt and carried a slender whip, and their skinny horse rested quietly while they picked over the rubbish for something useful, mostly scrap it seemed. I drove on a short way to the edge of a marsh to see what birds there were about. When the cart shortly came trotting down the slope towards me I couldn't resist holding up a hand to halt these birds of passage. “May I take a photograph?”; “yes, why not!”. Initial suspicion at this unusual attention, especially from a foreigner, turned finally to warmth. I tried to imagine their children, a tiny brick house on the edge of a village, how they survive. Soon they went on their way again waving goodbye, disappearing into the vast wide open Vojvodina landscape on an earth track heading for who knows where. Just like the birds I had been watching it seemed to me; they know how to survive, where to find what they need, day by day, season by season, somehow unplanned, always marginal by the norms of settled communities, and quite unregistered in terms of Gross National Product.

The Roma people came to the Balkans in the Middle ages, maybe even earlier, in various waves along with other peoples. Certainly a main wave arrived with the Turks from the East. Since they live on the margins, as outsiders, their nomadic instincts propel them farther whenever frontiers open or their hosts are driven to migrate. It is extraordinary testament to their community and traditions that so many centuries of life in the Balkan peninsular has left them still ethnically and communally distinct. In any bus station in all of Serbia who will see Roma people who look as if they could have arrived that day from a dusty road in the Indian sub-continent. They are brown skinned and dark eyed, different and beautiful, almost impossible to understand, formed entirely of otherness. For all the integrity of Roma ethnicity, their communities are a mosaic of historical movements. A cluster of hovels on the river bank outside a Serbian town, often known as a mahala, looks to a Westerner used to TV images as if it is a Third World refugee camp. But not a bit of it! “We came here 30 years ago; we are Romanians.” “Romanians?!” “Yes, we came from Romania”. And this is typical; Roma adapt quickly to their host culture absorbing whatever bits of its language and customs that are useful. In Vojvodina there are Romanian and Hungarian gypsies. In the large cities like Novi Sad there are “Albanian” gypsies who are Muslim, and since the Kosovo war of course there are many thousands of Kosovo gypsies who were pushed out along with the Serbs. Their lore, their language, their histories carry cultural threads of all the major migrations of Balkan history. Strange tides that outsiders will never understand, and well meaning attempts to settle them and integrate them are usually, and perhaps thankfully, frustrated.

If you take the train into Belgrade from Novi Sad you see gypsy communities squeezed onto every little triangle of empty space up against the railway. Their huts, made of scavenged brick, pallets and tin are sometimes even numbered with power lines dangling from makeshift poles. Many of course live in conventional homes, but even then their yards are often full of discarded possessions and the litter of the scavenging nature. Where families have made the successful jump to employment or pečalba working as gastarbeiter in Austria or Germany they build opulent houses with kitsch gateways and cement lions. But still the washing, if there is anyone home from that other country, will be festooned over the fencing or strung between Romanesque columns. In the villages of Vojvodina there is often a gypsy quarter, perhaps, as in our village, scattered on common ground around the graveyard. But it is strange to someone like me who loves plants that growing things just isn't in the Roma blood. Not a patch of green, not a fruit tree will be found. Their skinny ponies somehow make do, chickens seem to look after themselves, dogs on ropes may be the only fellow travellers that look at home.

Essentially the Roma survive by their attachment to other people's settlements. Recycling is the most prominent way of life. Every single rubbish dump in the land will have its Roma community existing from the pickings. Wherever there is a market, the gypsy will find a livelihood. In the city streets there are various daily routines. One will go through the bins searching for bread; maybe he sells it to someone with a pig. A woman will search for clothing; so strange to an outsider that they often prefer to throw away clothes than to mend or launder them. There was a backward step in Novi Sad. Our bins at the corner where daily visited by gypsies who successfully sorted out useful items and materials. Cardboard recycling is a well established business. But then the city authority modernised us backwards by taking the communal bins away and giving everyone individual wheely bins which are now out of reach. No more recycling on our doorstep, and even the cats are going hungry. I wish Serbia wouldn't blindly follow the West where individual consumerism is costing us dearly! In this case its a “double whammy”; when the city rubbish truck comes round it is gypsies who do the collecting. They strain their backs lifting by hand impossibly heavy wheely bins to tip out our rubbish. A particularly heavy bin gets thrown down with disgust breaking its wheels!

A visit to a country vašar or market is revealing. The one at Ruma under the Fruška Gora is typical. Once a month the road is jammed with horses and carts, and old trucks bring ponies and livestock to a muddy field on the edge of town. But it isn't a proper livestock market where Serbian farmers would sell stock and finished animals. Far from it. It is really a gypsy horse fair where animals are traded, and it seems in many cases, fed as little as possible in between finding them new owners. Even cows and calves that one might have expected to improve with feeding looked emaciated. No, they are traders and not farmers! But I did see there a Lipizaner stallion that I recognized as once belonging to a neighbour; Soko (falcon) had an admiring crowd around him and certainly looked well if a little muddy from his lower class accommodation. And at a horse fair you will find the Džambas or horse dealer swaggering with loud voice and whip shouting instructions or locked in negotiations at a small table beside his horses.

At the other end of the traditional social spectrum there are the beggars. Well which end of the spectrum is that? I once took a photograph of a trio of young musicians on Belgrade's Kneza Mihailo, all less than 10 years old, the smallest a girl hardly able hold up her fiddle. But still, they made a beautiful sight and something like music! They deserved every 50 Dinar note thrown them and had quite a crowd of admirers. It was only on getting home and examining the photo that I noticed a smartly dressed young Roma woman in fashionable jeans sitting on a bench nearby keeping a watchful eye on her charges. This was business, and a good one. And the team of small children thrown out daily on Trg Republika to beg is also business; jauntily they wander about quite adept at their profession, blowing accomplished clouds of smoke from cigarettes. An honourable profession but I wish they were in school; how can they have any of the choices they deserve if they remain illiterate and scarcely employable? Less honourable, but no less of a profession, is the pair of teenagers in short skirts and bleached hair standing under a motorway bridge waiting for Turkish truck drivers. One can't help wondering how parents and relatives can coerce children and teenagers into these harmful and dangerous social niches. But typically they don't look sorry for themselves. I was waiting once at the lights on the bridge over the Sava at Železnik when a cheery smiling face appeared at the window. A boy of 12 perhaps, he recognized the car from last time and came up immediately to say hello, interrupting his progress down the line seeking small change and cigarettes. “Are you rich yet?!” I asked. “I am!” Indeed, wealth of a different sort.

It was late on a hot Saturday afternoon and the back streets near the centre of Novi Sad were deserted. Almost everyone seemed to have gone to the Danube to swim and play sport. But not quite everyone; a Roma youth and his girl were collecting carton from the bins on the deserted street. This is their work every shining day. The girl was pretty and well dressed, the boy seemed reticent, quite at odds with the pop idol on his tee shirt. They let me photograph them while their pony rested and they packed the cardboard. Then I became aware of a car that had stopped behind me. Eventually the horse was whipped up and they went on their way; the large Mercedes slowly moved on, the driver shaking his head in mockery; “they are gypsies! why are you photographing them?”. The Roma have an ambiguous relationship with Serbs. Survival is the prime preoccupation with all of their community that lives on the edge without settled jobs; this may be the majority. Scavenging on the margins means that they will squat on unused land, collect firewood from unprotected forest, gather nuts from unguarded vikendicas, and alas it must be admitted, some will break into homes or summer houses and steal. This is the hackneyed image of the gypsy that makes Serbs mistrustful or even fearful of them. This attitude is not without elements of racism, but in its more benign form it is a fear of “otherness”. Their mess, their antisocial comings and goings, their dogs and noisy children all make them unpopular neighbours unless you have embraced this otherness as something exotic and special.

The outsider status of the Roma has always drawn them into marginal and unpopular roles. In Ivo Andrić's Bridge on the Drina it was the Roma who traditionally filled the role of executioner for the Turks. In this story “the gypsy” has the expert and hideous role of impaling the luckless Serb rebel. Even among today's displaced from Kosovo there are gypsies claiming that they were involved in “special operations”. Best not to talk about those, and it may be mere bravado, but it illustrates this outsider niche. Yet if you ask for a considered Serbian opinion on the Roma, you will find considerable sympathy. One may give the ultimate compliment, “they are real Serbs!”. Why? Well, Serbian history is one of long abuse at the hands of great powers, whether the long oppression of the Turk, or the punishment of Serbia by the Austrians, and lets not go into the break up of Yugoslavia. The Roma have suffered every single hardship and more along side the Serbs, and frequently they have been less able to protect themselves. In the living experience of the elderly was the nightmare of Fascism. Gypsies were high on the list for extermination, and at Jasenovac, perhaps the most notorious of all the WW2 Balkan concentration camps some three quarters of a million Serbs and gypsies were murdered. Serbs see them as fellow survivors, and even admire them for the the way they are resigned to prejudice and hardship.

When it comes to music, suddenly the Roma take centre stage and their role is secure and respected, a part of Serbian culture and life. A gypsy boy was asked if he could play the violin; he shrugged pensively and replied “No, but I suppose I could.” Music is in their fingers, wired into their system. Any Belgrade splav on a weekend is likely to have a gypsy band; some like the Black Panthers, are a world known phenomena. Any Novi Sad restaurant on a Saturday night will have a tamburaši orchestra, often gypsy. Bands do the rounds of restaurants playing at table; “how you pay, how they play” as the Serbian expression has it. More colourful playing, especially these strange Balkan brass bands, is to be found over the weekend outside the matičar or Registry Office and churches where wedding parties are queueing up. Gypsy brass bands, beggars, crowds of children gathering coins all jostle for attention. Any aficionado of Kosturica's films, Underground or Black Cat White Cat for example, will have enjoyed gypsy brass at its frenetic best. But the brass festival of Guča every August is the place to hear the stars, the golden trumpets of Serb and Roma alike. Naturally they use the music of their adopted culture, but there are older traditions that resonate from long ago and farther East, exotic and enchanting.

There is a classic Serbian film that seems to sum things up. In Ko To Tamo Peva (who's that singing out there) a bus load of unlikely companions are making their way to Belgrade on the very eve of the Second World War. Two gypsy boys, in the middle of nowhere, and without possessions but for an accordion, sing to the twanging drombulje (“Jew's harp”) while they wait. Once on the bus, all the stereotypes are played out, including suspicious glances at these ne'er-do-well gypsies. It is not long of course before the most stupid passenger loses his wallet, and it is quickly concluded what everyone knew all along; it was the gypsy boys. And so they are beaten up. But, as this unhappy bus full of prejudice heads into Belgrade, the war overtakes them. Bombs, clouds of smoke and dust, a terrible roar of aircraft, the Balkan world once more is torn apart, and the bus, like Serbia and its mixtures of people, is thrown on its side. Silence for some long seconds as the dispersing smoke reveals the tragedy. Suddenly 2 gypsy faces appear through the wrecked windows, the only survivors. Helping each other out, they dust themselves down as if surviving life's wreckages is an everyday occupation. Accordion and drombulje intact, they sing the signature tune with its refrain “Some day the sun is going to shine!”.

2008 - Religion

A fine spring day had come to an end and I was feeling agreeably sleepy. But it was Uskrs, Easter, and I was determined to get to the Great Easter liturgy at Kovilj monastery. I arrived on the stroke of midnight and slipped in at the side door. That was the first shock. The whole church was full of silent people waiting in the darkness while the assembled monks, novices and assistants chanted the preliminary offices. I adjusted myself to what I could see was going to be a few hours of standing. One can try to match up the liturgy with Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer, but Church Slavonic is not archaic Serbian but an older universal language of the Slavic church. Suffice to say that the entire liturgy with Gospel readings are chanted in plain song, unendingly throughout the celebration. And it is full of symbolism, so natural to the Eastern Church. Whilst standing in the darkness each clutched a candle, waiting, remembering. It is a powerful illustration of Christ's victory over death; not some passion to motivate us, but a true sacrifice of the Son of God for all men. When the Bishop at last lights his taper, the crowds surge forward to receive the light. Needless to say it took some time to get through all 700 souls; mostly young it appeared, possibly reflecting the endurance required to stand for hours on end. But for all that an interesting view of modern Serbia's return to her true spirituality.

Following the Bishop we encircled the church 3 times with our lighted candles, for Father, for Son for Holy Spirit. We surged forward again to kiss the cross, we queued to receive an anointing of oil, and finally many came near to receive the pričešće, sacrament of bread and wine. Following some others' lead I gratefully adopted the Byzantine position of prostration, which at least relieved the agony in my back. And like others, having given up entirely on the 3 hour estimate, I slipped out of the church for some air. From a pale blue Eastern horizon the dawn came treading. Redstarts were already singing sweetly on the monastery roofs, and across the fields in the village hidden from view another mighty choir had already started up; a thousand cockerels worshipped the rising sun of a new day. Finally Bishop and monks swept out with vigour, as befitted the triumph of the empty tomb. The night's work was done, and a quietly happy procession in an utterly still and beautiful dawn repaired to the čarda beside the still waters of the bara for some breakfast. Only the monastery sparrows seemed unmoved and continued to argue noisily;living in community must be demanding!

It helps to understand the spiritual heritage if you go back to Byzantium. The Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and established his ecclesiastical capital in Constantinople, now Istanbul. Church squabbles always gave rise to some competition between Rome and Byzantium, but really it was geography and history's human tides that separated the West from what then came to be called the Eastern Church. Rome was sacked and barbarian war lords overwhelmed the Empire. Then came the Islamic conquests, first the Arabs and then the Ottomans. For a 1000 years the West knew no such persecution while “Turkish Europe” was plunged into half a millennium of darkness. The Turks tolerated the ecclesiastical order, provided it submitted to taxes and occasional plunder; but worse, they used it to their own ends. The Byzantine union of Emperor and Patriarch with its ecclesiastical order were manipulated by the Turks for their own administration. The Church under persecution, however, remained a repository of Serbian culture and mythology. Education and scholarship were preserved there. Icons, wall paintings, relics and libraries were protected. Bishops often took responsibility for rallying the people, and at every uprising there could be found bishops and priests. Bishops led the 2 most famous turn of the 18thC migrations of people out of Serbia, across the Danube into Austrian territory.

The Serbian Church thus became a citadel of both Serbian culture and nationhood. Sremski Karlovci, for example, and the monasteries of the Fruška Gora, became vital ecclesiastical centres. Even under Communism the Church was tolerated, if impoverished. Not surprisingly, Church and State are closely linked, historically, culturally and emotionally. One might even venture to say that the new turning to Orthodoxy is fatally tied up with nationhood. “If you are a Serb, you are Orthodox!” It is a little uncomfortable for those who happen for historical reasons to be Serbian citizens of other denominations, religions or of course ethnicities. But one should not discount the genuine search for spirituality after the arid experiment in atheist socialism. The young people to be found every day in the churches and at weekends at monasteries is evidence of an openness and acceptance that God of all the earth calls nations to worship him.

Winding your way up some tiny mountain road to a remote monastery you are quite likely to find a huge bus from Belgrade bearing down on you. Place is important in a way that uprooted Westerners have probably lost sight of. It goes both ways. Monasteries and churches, especially such special places as the Serbian Monastery of Hilander on Greek Athos, are sacred places in the sense that for centuries monks and pilgrims have kept the Christian light burning. Day in day out they are up some hours before normal mortals have even heard the alarm. They are special places for prayer, for reconnecting with the sacred, for getting a proper perspective on the material pressures of life. And it works the other way perhaps in that such a bloody history, so many centuries of persecution, the unhappy fortunes of a small heroic nation, seem to possess a spiritual darkness. Things often go wrong! There is a strong call to pilgrimage and prayer. Nothing strange to an Orthodox believer.

But not only believers keep the Serbian Krsna Slava, or saint's day celebration. A family saint reflects both the central importance of the Balkan family and Orthodox roots. Its a privilege to join family, kum, close friends and neighbours for the slava meal. The full tradition, as you would expect, is full of symbolism. The very gathering of those closest to you is symbolic; culture, history, even theology, are all here. The sweetened meal of wheat, communally shared, is new life. The large lighted candle with prayer places the Christ at the centre of the family. The special pogača is held aloft by all and rotated symbolising the unity of the one bread. The round loaf is cut in a crucifix and sprinkled with red wine, the blood shed for all. If you are lucky you may even get a homily on the saint himself. A priest is bound to turn up in an Orthodox family, and home-made rakija is sent up and down the long slava table used for such occasions.

Rakija, coffee, bread and cakes also turn up at gravesides. Go to the graveyard on Dan mirtvih (All Saints day) and the whole place is decked out in chrysanthemums, real and plastic, and little red lanterns. The dead are remembered and celebrated, and they receive customary family visits on certain days. I don't know whether it was the missionary saints Cyril and Methodius who started this, but from somewhere the Church accepted the tradition of sending off your loved-one with some vitals. Any country grave may have a half empty bottle of rakijia, coffee cups, Fanta bottles, all left carefully but as if casually at the grave. In mountain areas especially, people bury their dead in the ground that they have mown over a life time of summers. They rest in the land they worked, very fitting for a peasant culture that had no trouble recognizing the providence of the Creator in sowing and reaping.

Unavoidably I see Orthodoxy through a Reformation lens. Authority has many layers, including tradition. After Holy Scripture there come the Church Councils, the Church fathers and more recent ascetic writers, while the Reformation proclaimed an end to muddle and placed authority soundly on sola scriptura. The priesthood also consciously carries apostolic authority passed down in succession, as do traditional Reformed churches; but it explains why the Orthodox Church is so sceptical of the eruption of new denominations and independent churches all over the world, and , dare one mention it, women priests. Protestant churches, going back to Gospel basics, more easily adapt their form to new contexts. One friend asked whether Anglican married couples were allowed to have sex once they had dutifully reproduced some children. “Yes!” I was happy to say, because it is not only sensible but essential and the Bible celebrates it beautifully.

But above all, it seems, there are fundamental issues surrounding the idea of Blagodat or Grace. In a Protestant church you would find books reflecting what Luther called “faith alone”. Christ died once and did it all; man, the beggar, comes to God with nothing but an open hand. But in Orthodox churches popular titles seem to use an ascetic language; man the pilgrim must struggle up many steps to Godliness. Orthodox friends often feel that the spiritual life is unattainable, only suitable for those especially called to it, or they feel unworthy and say “one day I shall be good enough” and struggle on alone.

I might add that Westerners also naturally see Serbia through an Enlightenment lens. A Byzantium world-view has been preserved perhaps by the very history that afflicted it. Westerners are naturally rational, and to Serbs rather cold or risibly pedantic. The Byzantium mind seems to accept mystery and other-worldliness, and invests some things with inestimable value. One supposes that diplomats are used to coping with this, but Kosovo for example requires a pause to understand it.

As you would expect on this Balkan crossroads, many peoples and diverse faiths have come and left their mark. If you stand on Golija mountain and look south in clear weather onto Pešter plateau and the Sandžak you will see in the villages the pencil thin towers of the Džamije or mosques. Here “Serbs of Turkish law”, as they were sometimes called, had settled, and today this broad band across south-central Serbia has a strong Muslim tradition. The breakup of the former Yugoslavia may have encouraged a renewed identity with Islam and the authority of the imam. The džamija in old Belgrade is a small but notable landmark, but the Turks seemed to leave something more lingering; very speculatively one should explore the fatalism that could be a function of Turkish rule and Islamic oppression. Certainly Meša Selimović's Bosnian novel Derviš i Smrt (Death and the Dervish) is a tale of religious obsession and cruelty, read especially as a commentary on the moral compromises of yet another religion, Communism.

If Turkish cavalry brought but one faith from the South, Austrian administrators and merchants brought a multitude of Christian national denominations from the North. The villages of Vojvodina are neatly planned with a Catholic church on one side of the central park and an Orthodox church of Baroque style on the other. Go searching up side streets and behind gates and you may find a Baptist “house of prayer” or an Adventist church. One day outside our village I spotted a burial ground on a small rise; it turned out to be the Jewish graveyard. And once I even found a dusty Star of David under the roof of an old Jewish house under renovation; the family had been sent to Auschwitz in 1941. But pride of place in this village goes to the huge and beautiful Hungarian Reformed Church in the Calvinist style with its benches turned to the middle and a towering pulpit. No iconostasis or “altar” here; any notion of “priesthood” and sacrifice is removed; an open bible lies on a simple table.