7 July 2007 – The cattle on a thousand hills

Taking the track down hill in a day full of sunlight and bird song, we took it easy stopping to listen to birds, to photograph flowers (my first bee orchids) and “laugh at gilded butterflies” (but unidentified). Whilst resting on a bank listening to a Cirl bunting we became aware of the “whisper” of the scythe in the grass behind us. With measured rhythmic strokes learned over a lifetime an old man mowed the grass; in the cacophony of the modern's world the sound of the scythe in the mountainside silence is almost lost from the world. Presently, wandering around the shoulder of the hill we came upon a scene that is even more scarce. We heard the deep rounded voice of a man driving a pair of oxen. Father and son of the Ristić family still work oxen, and they were up on this patch of cultivatable land for 10 days to plough and sow oats. That really is a joy. They seemed ox-like themselves with their strength, deep voices and open nature. Sounds and sights that one seems to recognise from Chaucer, lost for ever from among the yeomen farmers of England.

The furrow of herb-rich turf is only shallowly ploughed. One can see flowers and seed heads still showing. At first sight it looks quite inefficient, but not a bit of it. the herbs and flowers will come back, but not before the oats have gained a march, and all together the crop will make a rich hay, or the grain will be cut and threshed by hand and the straw will be fed to the animals. One gentle ox, a Simental, was persuaded to let us inspect his shoe; and there it was bright and shiny from working the mountain soil. But they are not cooperative like horses when it comes to shoeing them. The ox is made to stand while his legs are bound to a post of wood laid beneath him. He is then gently (well with some trouble perhaps) pushed over and rolled onto his back where in the recumbent position his cloven hooves are shod, every 3 weeks we learnt. Like most of us I suppose he gets used to indignity.

We had to tear ourselves away from this timeless scene. I would like them to have realized how much we admired their work. Those rhythms of the soil, the turning of seasons, the endless hard toil that would not be recognized as anything other than normal, the relationship between man and beast, a man and his neighbour, father and son, all bound together close to the land. I can still hear echoes in my head of a deep voice talking to the oxen as they turned at the end of a furrow. “Šaran and Jelen, we go back now!”; a Serb will come up with the right names, and in English it sounds odd, but the point is that beasts are named, they know the man's voice, together they work in a dependency that has been little changed over thousands of years. "The cattle on a thousand hills are His" wrote the psalmist. As I turned to go on my way I said “Everything is God's”; one and then the other replied without pause “Everything!”, “Everything!”

6 June 2007 – Grey falcon

Leaving the Black redstart to attend to her young above our open air breakfast table, we headed downhill for the Trešnička gorge. Our goal was the shelf of land that hangs above the gorge, cliffs below and crags above. We were never sure whether old horse tracks and goat paths on the out of date map would still exist, but we made gradual progress seeing few people. We were scolded for disturbing some excitable spotted sheep, we met a woman, still a good hour from the nearest village, walking in her best clothes with a basket, and in Provalija we found a woman knitting as she walked in the time honoured fashion. We really have no idea how the world has changed thanks to textile manufacturing. Once when all women spun wool in the mountains, there was not an idle moment; walking up a goat path or watching the skinny sheep on a bit of pasture, there was wool to be spun and clothes to be knitted. Sadly this village seemed mostly in ruin; only 5 of them left she told me. Hanging on the valley side hidden in plum orchards without easy access the sound of children and singing is only a memory as rafters fall through.

But farther on Miroš was in better shape. We came up onto a flat place with a tractor in the yard and a young family building a new house. Mountain hospitality is always a delight; the rakija is brought out and thick “Turkish” coffee brewed. This family sent 2 children to school 5 km down the rugged gorge to the Drina river, and 2 went up to the lip of the gorge, a stiff climb but only 2 or 3 km. What a place for a field centre. They were looking out at a tooth of a crag with a huge Golden eagle's nest planted in a cleft. A downy white head sometimes appeared and finally the long winged black silhouettes of the parents wheeled round and away again. The weather was a little overcast and not quite what was needed by large birds of prey, but eventually the “white headed” vultures took to the wing. Like surfers spotting a big wave some 15 of them launched off from their crags almost as soon as the air cleared and a thermal of warm air might carry them aloft. Somebody must have thrown out a dead something for on black and tan wings they para-glided down to some unseen field below.

Admiring vultures, seeing eagles, enjoying the rippling blue distance of Bosnian mountains we thought we had probably seen our share of delights. But no! Just as we packed up from our front row position a dark fast sharp-winged shape flew, or shot, over our heads and cruised in an easy glide down to the beech forest underneath, a Peregrine falcon, Sivi soko or “grey falcon” in Serbian. The Peregrine is a bird often adopted in Serbian folklore as a spiritual messenger. It was the Sivi soko that came to Czar Lazar on the eve of the defeat of the Serbian army by the Turks on Kosovo's plain. Better honour with defeat than making terms with the invader. “The grey falcon came from heaven...”.and so scimitar grey-winged the Serbian destiny was fiercely cast.

5 June 2007 – Returning to the soil

We were asked once whether we minded living near the graveyard here in Petrovaradin. That rather alerted me to the Balkan mix of superstition and a preoccupation with the departed. It is a big subject which I must think about more, but as I wander amongst the elaborate graves of the local graveyard I am touched by the acute pain revealed in the messages, especially of course where children have been lost. It is also like reading a history book. Serbs attach great importance to the graves of their family and loved ones. When the great migrations took place in the 18^th Century, whole communities fleeing the unrelenting cruelty and privations of the Turk and their Janissaries, took up the bones of their saints to cross over into Austrian territory. And in the recent civil war graveyards were sometimes desecrated, or the coffins or bones taken up to pre-empt such cultural desecration. Maybe Reformed theology has eroded a Westerner's preoccupation with his mortal remains. Our bodies are sloughed off, laid to rest with some thanksgiving and mourning, but cremation is often the first choice. My brother and sister and I scattered our father's ashes, with mixed feelings but with closure, in icy late winter wind amongst his favourite daffodils on his own land

We never thought of leaving him with ready opened bottles of Fanta (exclusive use), closed bottle of rakija (available for the needy traveller), cups of coffee, any little gift of food, favourite momentos. I imagine Saints Cyril and Methodius taking a bit of a short cut on this one. It is of course a pagan custom, but why not contextualise it, offerings of thanksgiving and affection for a life lived before God, one way or another?

On our walk in the mountains I frequently paused by the graves along the way. Families lay their people close by, in the very earth that they ploughed and tilled, cut hay and lay on of a summer evening. We came from the earth and its appropriate to be laid back beneath “the green green grass of home” where memories are near of “Mary, red lipped, hair golden” coming to meet the traveller. I love the names, archaic and gracious, Serbian saints and kings, warrior virtues, Slavic folklore. I hurt to read, so succinctly chronicled in stone, the lives cut short, the lonely years of singleness. In Ravna (meaning flat, an ambitious name for a shelf above the gorge) we found a dear widower, alone for 12 years, still keeping his lonely farm in perfect shape; in a corner of the yard was the grave of their son who died in his 19^th year whilst rescuing a football from the swollen river. Along the way I saw another grave of a 21 year old who “died as a soldier”. Terrible losses anywhere, but families in the Balkan mountains are so close, so hefted to the soil, so acquainted intimately from many hours of mowing, ploughing, working together.