The Discovery of the Balkans


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The Balkans have not yet been discovered by us nor by the outside world. We are not talking about their geographical discovery. What do we think we know about ourselves? What does the world think it knows about us? Others’ ideas and our ideas are oftentimes misconstrued. Is there a “Balkan soul”? Doesn’t it comprise those common specific aromas, sensations, ideas, myths, hopes and legends of the peninsula? A way of thinking and living of the separate nationalities as different as it is similar and close. Enmity in this life has ancient roots, just like struggle for domination does. The worst sworn enemies from the past mirror each other. Winners and losers seem to resemble each other more than differ from each other. The world is wrong if it continues to see us through the sights of mutual Balkan hatred.

The future has already challenged the sleeping Monsters of the Balkans. There is no turning back and what once was can no longer be. After the removal of the ideological bans and scarecrows, attempts to resuscitate the religious are visible. The 21st century is too rational, and the integration of the Balkan people and their states in the European Community will not leave thinking at a primitive folklore level.

Balkan modernization and civilization is given a new impetus. It is only natural that there are different viewpoints about what is going on and what is to going to be.

The century-old fear of melting and assimilation of Balkan neighbors has not yet dissipated. The need for integration – economic, political, and cultural – provides easy food for nationalism in its xenophobic and chauvinist manifestations. But it also gives hope to alert and intelligent minorities to look for new roads, to build new bridges, to look for passages to the future. Our responsibility for the future, for our children’s children is greater than that for the past.

Whoever lives only and primarily in the past remains in the freezer of history. Deeply authentic and frozen.

In order to survive as Balkan people, to react appropriately to the new challenges we have to find new arguments and reasons and not lazily memorize what our ancestors have found out for their time through lots of blood, sacrifice and suffering. Their answers, taken mechanically and effortlessly, won’t work. Resorting to this so loved method is a sign of helplessness and lack of insight.

Balkan people are marked by their past. Young people, the new generations have the chance to shake off the shadows and look to the light, to turn their backs on hatred and invest in a normal natural human communication.

It is not easy because many lies and myths for domestic use will collapse. Today these lies stand in the way of the future.
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I am glad that in May 2005, in Belgrade, when the academician Dragoslav Mihailovich opened the premiere of the novel “Prey” translated into Serbian he reminded us of the deep and old roots running between our two peoples. He himself invited me to be a guest in his house while I was staying in Belgrade – just like that, very humanly, in a very Slavic way and not so much in a European way.

I accepted his invitation. The time when Bulgarians and Serbs had a common experienced judgment of Balkan joy and sorrow was not so long ago. What’s more, Dragoslav Mihailovich is maybe the most popular Serbian author in Bulgaria (after Ivo Andrich) with his novels “When the Pumpkins Blossomed”, “Petria’s Wreath”, “Villains”. He mentioned Lyuben Karavelov, for example – a great name of the Bulgarian Renaissance which lies in the foundations of the Serbian and Bulgarian literature.

At the same opening the friendship between the great Bulgarian poetess Elisaveta Bagryana and the remarkable Serbian poet Rade Drainats was mentioned by the writer Ivan Ivanovich, Deputy Minister of Culture of the Republic of Serbia. The people who were present weren’t aware, and how could they be with this mutual communication deficit, that it was precisely publishing house “Balkani” in April, 1999 (when Belgrade was bombed) that published the book of Blaga Dimitrova and Yordan Vassilev “Meeting at the Crossroads” dedicated to Rade Drainats and Elisaveta Bagryana.

The attraction between neighboring literatures and cultures is present today as well, though the winds are not always favorable. Because despite the favorable winds this is about a personal choice, a personal attitude, and a personal culture. Because the poets and the writers have always been those alert and intelligent minorities who have seen into the future, while others have slept…

These thoughts come to mind now, before everything else.

Before the thought of the “fast” orient-express Sofia-Belgrade-Sofia which traveled about 400km in 13 hours. Not to mention the dirt in the Bulgarian cars, the lack of mirrors in the compartments and toilets as well as the missing parts of seats, unlike the Serbian cars.

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The bridge is something which reaches out to connect two or more roads. If it is not there, life stops, sinks into itself, becomes desolate and overgrown with weeds. Will this be understood by a person who doesn’t walk the Balkan roads, who’s not convinced anything valuable has been lost that he should be the one to find? How many are the flighty people who take it upon themselves to do it? Adventurers and scoundrels on their way to find profit and justice around the neighboring countries and peoples. Which are we?

No bridge, life becomes savage. Its roots grow wild and it becomes so bleak it is even impossible to go around. In places like this man loses himself as well as others. Regardless of the Internet.

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For so many years Balkan roads have been inside me. Traveled lands, found people, stored impressions… I told acquaintances and friends this and that and I could see they were interested. They had not set foot there – in the neighboring Balkan countries – it wasn’t about far away lands and people. The 50-year isolation was really coming to an end. First of all some ideas and prejudice instilled in their heads in the past were stirred. They pricked up their ears and almost agreed, for example, with our Macedonian brothers. It was Macedonians who told me for the first time a somewhat forgotten Bulgarian and Slavic word. Why were they the ones convincing us that this whole thing was “temel ”. It was the first time I’ve heard such a definition and to this day I still think about it.

The more “temel”, or foundational, a thing is, the more it is thought through, skillfully refined and confirmable in the future, because – after all – in the end it will have to support a roof, people will be born and will die under this roof, and will hope, and will make love.

To be honest moving my glance away from the sky, and from dreams, down to the earth and the temels startled and scared me. It was only then that I realized, to a certain extent, how complicated and impossible, difficult but also gratifying and magnificent this whole thing about Balkan temels and bridges is.

The truth is that in the last decade of the 20th century people rarely thought about others, even about themselves. Our Balkan time dragged along like a feeble donkey (it was imported in Bulgaria by tsar Ferdinand) on the Balkan paths and roads, whereas the world vigorously approached the Balkans. From the computer I’m typing on I can summon a whole universe in my room, at a symbolic price, while before it was lots of walking and rumble and tumble until we got to the addresses we looked for and which crossed our paths. And all this in only seven years!

The question of life and death, good and evil, power and justice is inseparable from the question of temels. Governments, like whores, last only so long. People remain. Has the time of doom or the time of creation come?...

If it’s the second, then let’s check our temels.

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Temel works are such that have their eyes fixed on at least a hundred years into the future, when neither the stonemason nor his plumb-lines will be around, when in fact the temels will be present much more than now, provided the poor guy did his calculations right. Provided he didn’t bet on the fast, the easy, and the selfish, as long as he was able to do it, if the time had been enough…

Once in a while the Balkans become a bleak place, but the villain is not in the bleak place. We are in this barren land, not knowing where we’re going nor how to come back.

Traversing the Balkan roads can also make you wild, because it happens that some bridges that are there on the way out but are not there on the way back. Then it’s as if they are telling you, “So you see now! There is no way back!” As if they are saying, “You are free to become wild now”.

So, Bulgarian brothers, how is it over there at your place, those acquaintances asked us. Well, like yours, brothers. The three chain-gangs have been released, needless to say, and every one of us can be an emperor. Intoxicated by our freedom, giggling and shouting, rallying and shouting slogans we hoped for new chains.

Where was Krali Marko to tell us?

Later, much later, a Macedonian academic smilingly asked me, “And how are we going to split Krali Marko up? Whose is Krali Marko – Macedonian, Bulgarian or Serbian?

And that is where the simple, but historically proven difficult task for the South Slavs lies: the splitting of Krali Marko and of everything else, which unites them. Instead of, let’s say, being glad there is something big which binds them together, such as the thousand-year old common culture. The disagreement over the inheritance of the Ottoman Empire, the disputes over lands, hills and borders have turned to be incessant divisions and partitions about everything else as well.

The New Times, I think, have another answer to this old question whose solution is sought through wars and blood. Krali Marko belongs to everyone, my Serbian brothers, who loves and respects him.

Ivo Anrich writes, “Why can’t Balkan states enter the circle of the enlightened world even through their best and most talented representatives? It’s not a simple answer. But, I think, one of the reasons is the lack of respect for man, for his complete dignity and for his total inner freedom, and at that an unconditional and consistent respect.”

Here we are always given our freedom and respect, as if human dignity were not valuable in itself, above and beyond any situational, worldly and other rules, laws and conventions.

Dignity precedes the order that wants to manipulate and degrade it. The history of the Balkans, including modern history as well, is a history of this degradation, I think. It was Ivo Andrich who wrote The Cursed Yard whose metaphor is: the Balkans are the cursed land, a prison land. He is also said to have read Memoirs from Constantinople’s Dungeons by the Bulgarian Svetoslav Milarov.

The Cursed Yard was the opening work in the Balkan Library publishing series of publishing house Balkani. Its first international premiere along with a poetic volume of Giorgios Seferis, the other Nobel Prize winner, was on Easter day, in May 2002 in Instanbul. The great Bulgarian writer Gencho Stoev, author of the novel The Price of Gold (about the bloody April epic of 1876) and I had very interesting conversations with a dozen prominent Turkish writers who’ve been translated into English and Spanish, something their Bulgarian counterparts can only dream of. They looked forward to our visit and had even prepared homemade sweets for the holiday, as is the Balkan custom. Besides the meetings in the Bulgarian exarchy, in St. Stefan’s church and St. Georgi’s church in Odrin.

Will the Balkans have the chance for the first time in so many years to be a land of free and successful people? The happiness and joy of one not to be at the expense of another, of the neighbors! There are no more dictatorships on Balkan soil. And Europe, the old-new Europe, will it rectify the sins committed in the distant and not so distant past?

The most difficult Balkan obstacles seem to begin with respect for the other’s dignity – your friend’s, your neighbor’s, with the acknowledgement of the other’s sacred right of an opinion and values.

These lessons must first pass through self-respect and self-rediscovery, through a dignified appreciation of one’s own human and cultural worth. But not through one extreme to another – from the superiority complex to the inferiority complex. Two very typical Balkan extremes.

When you acknowledge in others what you acknowledge in yourself, when you don’t do to others what you don’t want done to you – then you stand fast, you have a temel. From here on you can build a friendship, cultural contacts, even state cooperation.

If you get tangled up in hatred and envy, in intrigue and slander, in lies – sooner or later you will yourself fall into the trap you’ve set for others. Christian, Biblical truths…

After the pillaging of the land and people in Bulgaria after 1990 a Dutch friend of mine told me, “Bulgarians need no explanations whatsoever, they need a hug and sympathy.” Without knowing well the Serbian soul and Serbia, I venture to say our Serb brothers, after all that has happened to them, maybe don’t need words, maybe they need precisely a hug and sympathy. In his Travel through the Years Konstantin Konstantinov describes the Kalemegdan Park in the center of Belgrade in 1901. As if he were there yesterday, if I compare it to my impressions from a couple of weeks ago. All the same small steps on the trees, care of the birds, cleanness, order and enough lighting. Even young girls walked around unworried in the late hours. The contrast with our Borisova Gradina came to the fore – broken monuments, mobsters driving down the alleys, permanent black out… And we are supposedly closer to Europe than Serbs, but there are things to learn from them!

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And we rushed down the Balkan roads to fix the world. Our grace thought and thinks the Balkan union is not far, just like the European union, it is already forming. In general, unity and cooperation among the nations. Before material misfortunes grabbed us by the throat, before freedom was paid through the nose, for a few months, maybe a year we were more real than we’ve ever been before. Meetings and conversations among intellectuals – be it Macedonians, be it Greeks, be it Turkish, Cypriots, Romanians or Serbs.

It’s good to live, because everyone can by themselves, but isn’t it better together with your neighbors?

That acquaintance of mine who told me about the “temels” patted my shoulder with his strong hand and said, “It’s better, of course, how can it not be!”

Who’s there to tell us that even if we had had the stride of Krali Marko, we shouldn’t have tried so hard, because Balkan hills are huge and numerous and you can’t just easily jump over them to come out in the clear, clear and open for everyone.

The Voivodas led by Krali Marko from Prilep are humbly looking at you from the wall.

The humble look of Lyuben Karavelov is also there. He made up his mind to publish a pan-Balkan newspaper. Once. He managed to put together only one issue. In his home in Koprivshtitsa there is still a printing press.

It has a curious history. This press traveled a lot abroad and in Bulgaria. It was modern, it seems, for its time but it was quite heavy metal. His debt because of it has not been paid in full to this day. More than a hundred-year old interest awaits us who are thinking of going down this road, and who are on it already.

It looks like with this press Lyuben Karavelov hoped to change a little something in Bulgaria and on the Balkans. No wonder that once we turned our eyes to the light, we too, not to be left out for anything, decided to continue, if we could, as much as we could.

If we make a single furrow on this Balkan field overgrown with weeds, Serbian brothers, it is something.

So, like an adventure of the spirit, the private publishing house “Balkani” came to life in 1991. Its activity has not yet had a precedent in the rest of the Balkan countries. So far tens of great Balkan writers have joined in on this adventure. Among them are the Serbs Ivo Andrich, Dragoslav Mihailovich, and ready for the printer’s are Danilo Kish, Milisav Savich, Ivan Ivanovich, Goran Petrovich, the famous Montenegrin writer academic Evrem Burkovich. There are many more we have to publish, I know. Other Bulgarian publishing houses, for example “Stigmati”, “Ednorog”, Biblioteka 48”, also publish interesting Balkan writers. The new edition of the Literary Balkans magazine – or “chasopis” as it is in Serbian – is dedicated to modern Serbian poetry and prose. We have already published such editions about Slovenia and Macedonia, yet to come are editions about Romania, Albania and the rest of the Balkan literatures.

It would be a great joy for Bulgarian readers, if Serbian publishing houses open their doors for Bulgarian authors famous also in Europe but not known enough to our neighbors – Emilian Stanev, Yordan Radichkov, Gencho Stoev, Vera Mutafchieva, Valeri Petrov, Anton Donchev…I mention only a few, there is plenty more.

I get the shivers now, I got them back then, in 1991, too, when I remember how seriously and honestly ordinary people took our word. With such a trust!

This is a temel work, guys, there’ll be lots of digging and hoeing, but it’s worth it, our host then suddenly said.

He, the anonymous and seemingly uneducated Balkan peasant, seemed to have foreseen this whole moral and spiritual support we’d get in the future from so many different and talented writers and culture figures from all the Balkan countries without exception. Thanks to whom we make step after step. As if he had also foreseen our meeting today.

The author has presented this text for the upcoming International Writers’ Meeting in Belgrade, to which he’s been invited, which is organized under the initiative of Serbian writers.