It is a theme to be noticed all over the Serbian mountains. People are leaving (have been leaving) the land for decades. Sometimes, as on Mount Golija in the central Serbian mountains, there seems to be a threshold factor that keeps communities functioning. This pull to keep the land in good heart, to mow the mountain herb-rich meadows, stack hay, milk cows, make cheese, brew rakija will be continued so long as a community holds on tenaciously. The price is supplementary labouring work such as building in Belgrade, or living on your land with an ageing mother and no wife; there were some 400 of these old bachelors on the northern side of Golija. But it seemed to me that on Stara Planina that threshold had been crossed. The village looked well enough but the meadows were shrubbing over and the hay making looked rather patchy amongst the in-coming tide of the forest. Hay making was the task of small groups with their cows yoked up to drag the sweet smelling bounty back to a barn in the village. People have been leaving for jobs in the cities for decades. Alas, just when the world needs to wake up to the wisdom of peasant lore, the land has been abandoned and with it the secrets of a sustainable land use for the post-oil age.
A key factor in the changing face of the mountains is the lack of sheep. Stara Planina was famed for its cheese and sheep, but now I was pushed to see any sheep bar the normal untidy flocks of village sheep being grazed around the village periphery. But, on those broad meadowed ridges and rounded tops I did spot on the distant other side of the valley one large “mob” of sheep (as the smiling owner called it, whom I happened to meet on his way to hay making). The reason is simple. Shepherding is hard and lonely work and the rewards, thanks to an absence of marketing, are very thin. Thus the forest tide comes in, the juniper scrub grows dense on the tops, mountain meadows are silent but for the wind and the droning of foraging bees, and summer farmsteads stand empty with their massive roofs falling in. It should be reversed! We need cheese, even lamb! One day perhaps the constant flow of Turkish trucks heading for Europe will become a trickle and we shall need wool and knitting again.
A conservation question always arises with sheep. What about wolves? The bad news is that villagers, having no respect for brother wolf, take the lazy and damaging option of putting down poison as soon as wolf predation becomes a problem. Thus, all across the Balkan mountains wolves have become scarce from constant persecution, and collaterally vultures have been reduced to isolated protected colonies. Poisoning is disastrous and ecologically immoral. Before strychnine was invented shepherding went hand in hand with dogs. A combination of special sheepdogs and proper protective enclosures can protect sheep and allow the wonderful wolf of so much myth to live healthily alongside us. I found one young sheepdog with a traditional spiked iron collar for protection. I was delighted to think that it needed it! Serbia may be the only country in Europe where the wolf is unprotected by law. Another project waiting for a champion!
Naturally the bible is full of the imagery of sheep and shepherding, and of course the poor wolf takes the villain's part. But what delights me is the thought of Israel's mighty King David, flawed and human, whose apprenticeship was spent out on such barren hills caring for his father's sheep. No wonder he could write such poetry! “Know that the Lord is God. It is he who made us, and we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.”
8 July 2008 – Following the Red-rumped swallow
Dojkinci is a typical Stara Planina village up a deep valley that winds its way to its fir forested head just beneath the Bulgarian border. The valley sides are forested with beech, the mountain ridges above are decked in golden grass and juniper whilst the valley bottom, in flat patches between twists and turns of the rocky Dojkinačka river, is farmed in a mountain sort of way. That means there are odd patches of oats, potatoes and vegetable plots but in the most part there are little hay meadows where the willow and birch scrub have been kept at bay. Of course it was the hay making season and each day parties would head up the valley to distant meadows. Some had tractors but many still used milk cows yoked up to pull a cart. It is typical of low impact peasant culture to find the most efficient means of achieving all the hard work of farming in places where it isn't flat enough to invest in machinery. Milk cows will pull carts, maize patches will carry beans which form the first crop, and then in October after the maize cobs are gathered the patch is left full of large yellow pumpkins to feed the pig.
Our 3 days were spent in happy communion of shared meals, shared work, conversation, time to reflect, and early mornings beside the tumbling river enjoying the coming and going of a family of dippers. The tall poplars around the Lovački dom (hunter's rest) were full of serins “zizzing” and various finches and tits foraging. Tall trees, tumbling water, a flat grassy place must have attracted man and beast alike since time out of mind. There is hardly a more happy setting than sitting around in such a place sharing what we had found, leafing through field guides, examining maps, and in the case of the insect gatherers, sorting specimens.
We enjoyed one morning exploring the village of Dojkinci. It stretches its way along the valley bottom between rocky windings of the river. There are few modern houses to spoil a theme park impression. Houses and farm buildings are built with wooden frames and sturdy lathes of wood for the walls into which is pressed mud. It is of course a version of vernacular architecture known all over Europe in the Middle ages before it became easy to machine-saw timber. Building materials are taken from the surrounding landscape; nothing could be more ecologically sustainable. And interestingly, only once before in Northern Spain, had I seen the use of massive stone “slates” on the roof. Not sure where these are quarried but one wondered at the ingenuity and work to acquire, transport and raise such massive materials. They made one a little cautious standing beside the more dilapidated or abandoned buildings. Unlike in other regions of Serbia there seemed to be a preference to gather hay into barns rather than leave it in stacks in the meadows. An attempt to buy honey failed, although we were entertained with juice of dren (dogwood, I think), home made bread and a taste of honey in the comb. My suspicion regarding bees is that villagers who once kept bees without thinking about it find that they are losing colonies to veroa and other disease. Even remote cold and healthy mountain valleys are no defence against global diseases which need modern techniques. Here is a project waiting for someone: revitalize village bee keeping to reap nature's wonderful harvest of mountain honey from those carpets of many coloured flowers waving in the upland breeze.
In these mountain parts we were accompanied by the Red-rumped swallow, a very dapper relative of the barn swallow, who builds impressive mud nests with funnelled entrances. Several families were hunting around the village, black forked under-tails like evening dress, and pale rose rumps flashing white in the sun. Interesting to speculate that when Homo sapiens roamed into Europe and settled in caves he would have found the Red-rumped swallow and the house martin well established millennia before him.
7 July 2008 - The flowers of Sveti Djordje
It is that summer season. Exams are finally over, the temperature goes up, evening boulevards and squares fill up, water sides are crowded, and the happy young luxuriate in the idea of a long hot summer without school and lectures. But it is also the time for excursions, summer camps in the mountains and the long hot trail to the sea. And for biology students it is the season of camps and expeditions in the mountains, time to sit around fires, drink beer, collect insects, ring birds, press flowers and generally enjoy the cool and novelty of some other place remote from the sizzling concrete of university cities. Thus I headed for Stara Planina on the Bulgarian border to join some 50 students from Novi Sad and Kragujevac. “Joining” them isn't quite the right word. The bedlam that prevails is hardly endurable! I wasn't the only one longing to get just a little bit farther where there was peace and sufficient order to enjoy the environs and the company. Walking the few kms up the Temštica river to the little monastery of Sveti Djordje I soon found Prof Sneana Pešić waving a collecting net and tapping plants in her search for lurking weevils. With her were a happy band of students and research assistants similarly turning over stones, chasing butterflies and enjoying the flower strewn rocky way. Later that evening we formed an escape plan involving a base camp at the Lovački dom (Hunters' rest) up a wilder valley from where we could mount our own explorations.
I soon found the monastery and was astonished to find it a mass of flowers. There was a tiny church where the next day I attended liturgy, and a number of spacious buildings including the konak, or visitors' lodgings, but it was the beauty and peace of the whole yard that was delightful. Alas a community of only 3 nuns and a lot of work which I for one much appreciated. Having washed and drunk at the spring, for monasteries were always built where there was plenty of water, I found a quiet corner and pulled out my book. Water, flowers, the coming and going of birds, the hum of insects and foraging of bees; one couldn't ask for a more Eden-like place. “The earth is the Lord's and everything in it”, especially the flowers of Sveti Djordje.
5 July 2008 – Injustice, thank God for it
It is not often that you read a novel that you know you will never forget. Mesha Selimovic's Drvish i Smrt (Death and the Dervish) was already my favourite Balkan novel, but now I have read his sequel Tvrdjava (The Fortress). Selimovic, I believe, was a Partizan during World War 2 but disillusion set in, particularly following the execution of his Communist brother for a trifling offence as an example to others; apparently he had taken (stolen) some requisitioned furniture from a warehouse to furnish a flat in post war Sarajevo for his new wife. Both novels are set in 18thC Turkish Bosnia and appear to be critiques of the new Communist order. Thank God for novels where truth can be told! And the issue is power versus truth, expediency versus integrity. Tvrdjava is set in Sarajevo and concerns the attempts of a young veteran of the Ottoman wars in distant Ukraine to settle back into his native Bosnia. Ahmet Shabo was one of the very few of his unit to survive and though traumatised by the horror of a pointless war he finds healing in the love of a young Christian girl. But the wisdom and the integrity of the man quickly bring him into conflict with the established social and political order. No crime is more deserving of punishment than to threaten the jealously well defended edifices of privilege and power.
The 2 worlds clash endlessly and inevitably. “Is honesty such a mystery to you, Mula Ibrahim?” he asks of his employer. “It's not honesty that's a mystery, it's your behaviour......I'm trying to make sense of you. ....The war robbed you of your years of apprenticeship to life.” Shabo Ahmet replies “I learned a lot in war; too bloody much.” Ibrahim: “Not what you need for peace. War's a cruel but an honest struggle, as between animals. Life in peace is a cruel struggle, but a dishonest one, as between men. There's a great difference.” So the amoral world is summed up in 18thC Turkish Bosnia, and has anything changed? Ahmet says “I said the truth!” to which Ibrahim retorts “Speech is gunpowder: it explodes in a second!” And Pontius Pilate asked as he washed his hands of the Son of God “What is truth?” Indeed, what is truth in an amoral universe where expediency rules to protect the privileges of power? Isn't that why astonishing privilege blossoms whilst its loyal shock troops trample on the wretched?
Shabo Ahmet said “Injustice, thank God for it, had taught me that life is beautiful when it's free, even when it's hard.” And Jesus Christ says “I am the way, the truth and the life.” and “the truth will set you free.”
27 June 2008 – The ice cream parlour
My illusions of environmental harmony around our village of Stara Moravica have taken a blow. Searching for a fisherman to advise me about taking the canoe on the lake I hunted down Nikola at the “ice cream parlour” which is a collection of tables and chairs in the shade where the old boys gather to drink coffee, chat and wink at the “young” women. Alas, he told me, the lake has been sold to a “kriminalac” in Topola; here colourful village imagination tends to take over. Said well know entrepreneur won it at gambling, is now “developing” it, and the fish are poisoned. And this could all be true. It seems that, like so much other land and property, the lake (or a long lease?) has been sold, apparently without the village knowing anything about it. The pattern is already clear; a couple of riparian plots are being developed as vikendicas (causing polluting drainage), farmers are spraying herbicide on the steep slopes draining into the lake, which is forbidden, (hence fish are being poisoned), and in winter there is already an invasion of Italian hunters (well known for shooting anything and everything including protected species). I hope it is not as bad as this, but I fear the worst. There is little more damaging to communities than powerlessness. Foreigners are often frustrated by young Serbs' indifference to politics, but one tends to sympathize when you see that power rules rather than democratically upheld law. I went to the wood yard to order a couple of cubes of beech wood for the winter. I seem to have stumbled on a nest of socialists at last. Not surprising since Moravica, for long a poor village, had happily accepted Communism and its promises of a fairer world. I was gently assured that capitalism would destroy us. It is man's greed and lust for power that will destroy both us and the lake if not constrained by reasonable and just law.
The swallows are sitting on a second batch of eggs in the stable and the village storks have 4 healthy young who will soon be flying. As we move into high Summer everyone is bringing in the wheat and howing weeds, and the markets are bursting with new fruit and vegetables. The turning of the seasons reminds me that there is a greater order of things, and that frames the challenges with hope. In a week when oil hit $140/barrel changing fortunes and environmental realities may favour our cursing cart drivers and their horses. There is hope indeed!
It is a theme to be noticed all over the Serbian mountains. People are leaving (have been leaving) the land for decades. Sometimes, as on Mount Golija in the central Serbian mountains, there seems to be a threshold factor that keeps communities functioning. This pull to keep the land in good heart, to mow the mountain herb-rich meadows, stack hay, milk cows, make cheese, brew rakija will be continued so long as a community holds on tenaciously. The price is supplementary labouring work such as building in Belgrade, or living on your land with an ageing mother and no wife; there were some 400 of these old bachelors on the northern side of Golija. But it seemed to me that on Stara Planina that threshold had been crossed. The village 
looked well enough but the meadows were shrubbing over and the hay making looked rather patchy amongst the in-coming tide of the forest. Hay making was the task of small groups with their cows yoked up to drag the sweet smelling bounty back to a barn in the village. People have been leaving for jobs in the cities for decades. Alas, just when the world needs to wake up to the wisdom of peasant lore, the land has been abandoned and with it the secrets of a sustainable land use for the post-oil age.
A key factor in the changing face of the mountains is the lack of sheep. Stara Planina was famed for its cheese and sheep, but now I was pushed to see any sheep bar the normal untidy flocks of village sheep being grazed around the village periphery. But, on those broad meadowed ridges and rounded tops I did spot on the distant other side of the valley one large “mob” of sheep (as the smiling owner called it, whom I happened to meet on his way to hay making). The reason is simple. Shepherding is hard and lonely work and the rewards, thanks to an absence of marketing, are very thin. Thus the forest tide comes in, the juniper scrub grows dense on the tops, mountain meadows are silent but for the wind and the droning of foraging bees, and summer farmsteads stand empty with their massive roofs falling in. It should be reversed! We need cheese, even lamb! One day perhaps the constant flow of Turkish trucks heading for Europe will become a trickle and we shall need wool and knitting again.
A conservation question always arises with sheep. What about wolves? The bad news is that villagers, having no respect for brother wolf, take the lazy and damaging option of putting down poison as soon as wolf predation becomes a problem. Thus, all across the Balkan mountains wolves have become scarce from constant persecution, and collaterally vultures have been reduced to isolated protected colonies. Poisoning is disastrous and ecologically immoral. Before strychnine was invented shepherding went hand in hand with dogs. A combination of special sheepdogs and proper protective enclosures can protect sheep and allow the wonderful wolf of so much myth to live healthily alongside us. I found one young sheepdog with a traditional spiked iron collar for protection. I was delighted to think that it needed it! Serbia may be the only country in Europe where the wolf is unprotected by law. Another project waiting for a champion!
Dojkinci is a typical Stara Planina village up a deep valley that winds its way to its fir forested head just beneath the Bulgarian border. The valley sides are forested with beech, the mountain ridges above are decked in golden grass and juniper whilst the valley bottom, in flat patches between twists and turns of the rocky Dojkinačka river, is farmed in a mountain sort of way. That means there are odd patches of oats, potatoes and vegetable plots but in the most part there are little hay meadows where the willow and birch scrub have 
been kept at bay. Of course it was the hay making season and each day parties would head up the valley to distant meadows. Some had tractors but many still used milk cows yoked up to pull a cart. It is typical of low impact peasant culture to find the most efficient means of achieving all the hard work of farming in places where it isn't flat enough to invest in machinery. Milk cows will pull carts, maize patches will carry beans which form the first crop, and then in October after the maize cobs are gathered the patch is left full of large yellow pumpkins to feed the pig.
Our 3 days were spent in happy communion of shared meals, shared work, conversation, time to reflect, and early mornings beside the tumbling river enjoying the coming and going of a family of dippers. The tall poplars around the Lovački dom (hunter's rest) were full of serins “zizzing” and various finches and tits foraging. Tall trees, tumbling water, a flat grassy place must have attracted man and beast alike since time out of mind. There is hardly a more happy setting than sitting around in such a place sharing what we had found, leafing through field guides, examining maps, and in the case of the insect gatherers, sorting specimens.
We enjoyed one morning exploring the village of Dojkinci. It stretches its way along the valley bottom between rocky windings of the river. There are few modern houses to spoil a theme park impression. Houses and farm buildings are built with wooden frames and sturdy lathes of wood for the walls into which is pressed mud. It is of course a version of vernacular architecture known all over Europe in the Middle ages before it became easy to machine-saw timber. Building materials are taken from the surrounding landscape; nothing could be more ecologically sustainable. And interestingly, only once before in Northern Spain, had I seen the use of massive stone “slates” on the roof. Not sure where these are quarried but one wondered at the ingenuity and work to acquire, transport and raise such massive materials. They made one a little cautious standing beside the more dilapidated or abandoned buildings. Unlike in other regions of Serbia there seemed to be a preference to gather hay into barns rather than leave it in stacks in the meadows. An attempt to buy honey failed, although we were entertained 
with juice of dren (dogwood, I think), home made bread and a taste of honey in the comb. My suspicion regarding bees is that villagers who once kept bees without thinking about it find that they are losing colonies to veroa and other disease. Even remote cold and healthy mountain valleys are no defence against global diseases which need modern techniques. Here is a project waiting for someone: revitalize village bee keeping to reap nature's wonderful harvest of mountain honey from those carpets of many coloured flowers waving in the upland breeze.
In these mountain parts we were accompanied by the Red-rumped swallow, a very dapper relative of the barn swallow, who builds impressive mud nests with funnelled entrances. Several families were hunting around the village, black forked under-tails like evening dress, and pale rose rumps flashing white in the sun. Interesting to speculate that when Homo sapiens roamed into Europe and settled in caves he would have found the Red-rumped swallow and the house martin well established millennia before him.
It is that summer season. Exams are finally over, the temperature goes up, evening boulevards and squares fill up, water sides are crowded, and the happy young luxuriate in the idea of a long hot summer without school and lectures. But it is also the time for excursions, summer camps in the mountains and the long hot trail to the sea. And for biology students it is the season of camps and expeditions in the mountains, time to sit around fires, drink beer, collect insects, ring birds, press 
flowers and generally enjoy the cool and novelty of some other place remote from the sizzling concrete of university cities. Thus I headed for Stara Planina on the Bulgarian border to join some 50 students from Novi Sad and Kragujevac. “Joining” them isn't quite the right word. The bedlam that prevails is hardly endurable! I wasn't the only one longing to get just a little bit farther where there was peace and sufficient order to enjoy the environs and the company. Walking the few 
kms up the Temštica river to the little monastery of Sveti Djordje I soon found Prof Sneana Pešić waving a collecting net and tapping plants in her search for lurking weevils. With her were a happy band of students and research assistants similarly turning over stones, chasing butterflies and enjoying the flower strewn rocky way. Later that evening we formed an escape plan involving a base camp at the Lovački dom (Hunters' rest) up a wilder valley from where we could mount our own explorations.
I soon found the monastery and was astonished to find it a mass of flowers. There was a tiny church where the next day I attended liturgy, and a number of spacious buildings including the konak, or visitors' lodgings, but it was the beauty and peace of the whole yard that was delightful. Alas a community of only 3 nuns and a lot of work which I for one much appreciated. Having washed and drunk at the spring, for monasteries were always built where there was plenty of water, I found a quiet corner and pulled out my book. Water, flowers, the coming and going of birds, the hum of insects and foraging of bees; one couldn't ask for a more Eden-like place. “The earth is the Lord's and everything in it”, especially the flowers of Sveti Djordje.
be critiques of the new Communist order. Thank God for novels where truth can be told! And the issue is power versus truth, expediency versus integrity. Tvrdjava is set in Sarajevo and concerns the attempts of a young veteran of the Ottoman wars in distant Ukraine to settle back into his native Bosnia. Ahmet Shabo was one of the very few of his unit to survive and though traumatised by the horror of a pointless war he finds healing in the love of a young Christian girl. But the wisdom and the integrity of the man quickly bring him into conflict with the established social and political order. No crime is more deserving of punishment than to threaten the jealously well defended edifices of privilege and power.
My illusions of environmental harmony around our village of Stara Moravica have taken a blow. Searching for a fisherman to advise me about taking the canoe on the lake I hunted down Nikola at the “ice cream parlour” which is a collection of tables and chairs in the shade where the old boys gather to drink coffee, chat and wink at the “young” women. Alas, he told me, the lake has been sold to a “kriminalac” in Topola; here colourful village imagination tends to take over. Said well know entrepreneur won it at gambling, is now “developing” it, and the fish are poisoned. And this could all be true. It seems that, like so much other land and property, the lake (or a long lease?) has been sold, apparently without the village knowing anything about it. The pattern is already clear; a couple of riparian plots are being developed as vikendicas (causing polluting drainage), farmers are spraying herbicide on the steep slopes draining into the lake, which is forbidden, (hence fish are being poisoned), and in winter there is already an invasion of Italian hunters (well known for shooting anything and everything including protected species). I hope it is not as bad as this, but I fear the worst. There is little more damaging to communities than powerlessness. Foreigners are often frustrated by young Serbs' indifference to politics, but one tends to sympathize when you see that power rules rather than democratically upheld law. I went to the wood yard to order a couple of cubes of beech wood for the winter. I seem to have stumbled on a nest of socialists at last. Not surprising since Moravica, for long a poor village, had happily accepted Communism and its promises of a fairer world. I was gently assured that capitalism would destroy us. It is man's greed and lust for power that will destroy both us and the lake if not constrained by reasonable and just law.