|
Alexander
KIOSSEV
HEROES
AGAINST SWEETS. The Split of National and "Anthropological"
cultures in South - East Europe
Rumours
from Zagreb percolated some weird news: Croat nationalists harassed
Albanian confectioners smashing the windows of their little sweet-shops.
The reason, no matter how hard to grasp for the casual minds, was,
certainly patriotic: the Albanian sweets crowded out the wonderful Croat
and Mittel Europische Кuchen. They deprived the
ordinary Croatian child of the light and ethereal sweets of civilisation,
never too sweet, prepared with a whole lot of cream, bitter chocolate,
curds and cheeses, in order to replace them with stuff entirely
contradicting the Croat nature and Europe – with “ponitchki”
(fried dough), “gevretsi” (bagels or doughnuts) and boza (a
sweet-sour drink made of millet), with the Oriental sugary crusts of the
“baklava”, “saralii”, “tatlii” (very sweet types of Turkish
pastry), with the oily and syrupy “tulumba”, with
“nebbet-sheker” (clots of hardened sugar), Turkish delight and
“sakiz” (chewing gum).
It
is not even so important whether these pogroms have been verified as
true. The very fact that they were born in the Balkan spin-yarn
imagination suffices. It is a symptom, and this is why I would like to
discuss it with you today.
*
* *
In
the era of a multiculturalism which is easy to advertise and hard to
achieve, a great deal of pages were written on culture as an integrating
or disintegrating force. It has become common wisdom for the American
and West-European journalists or humanitarian authors to chastise the
Balkan cultures and the ruling elites for misdemeanour. Those latter
guys, governing the memory selection and the variety of “identity
policies” could simply re-write the history books and get on with
their lives in a network of peacefully co-existing Bulgarian “mehanas”,
Greek taverns and Turkish or Albanian sweet-shops. They could manipulate
the ethnic and social groups of this dark and murky region into
forgetting the stuff that cracks them apart and into cherishing their
similarities aimed at gluing them together in a super-community.
However, instead of doing just that, the elites and their loyals choose
to bandy about foul memories and go centrifugal. They wake up the old
“Balkan ghosts”, smash one another’s shop-windows, and squeeze
themselves into “insuperable differences”, “age-old conflicts”
and bloody hostilities.
In
its traditional connotations the “Balkans” metaphor presumes that
the local nations are monolithic cultural subjects and, at the same
time, naughty rug-rats (who have to be taught lessons and eventually
punished). In its analytical aspects, the metaphor is naïve whereas in
a practical perspective it hardly helps a great deal in sorting things
out. A non-critical, substantialist notion lies hidden behind its use
– that of the “national culture” – while it is exactly
“culture”, with its actual ambivalence and non-substantiality, that
captures a formidable part of the problem.
What
kind of culture or cultures are we talking about? The official national
heritage of Greece, Bulgaria, Rumania, Albania or Serbia, celebrating
heroes and martyrs, saints and ages-old remains? Or its almost
indiscernible ideological duplicate: the visions of the patriotic
literature where the same historic figures, heroes and martyrs have
originated as cultural constructs? Botev and Vazov, Zmaj-Jovanovic and
Jura Yaksich, Eminesky and Krjale, Kazandzakis and Elitis – do they
integrate us or do they set us apart? How does culture blend Kazandzakis,
the “ponitchki”, the history books, the shop-windows together? Where
in the tortuous processes of this (dis)integration shall we place the
traditional popular everyday culture (cuisine, clothing, bodily conduct,
interpersonal relations, family relations, transference of traditional
religious beliefs, the feast and the moral stereotypes)? And where –
its idealisation and “museumisation” into the capacity of national
heritage or its vulgarisation as low-level ideology emblems (e.g.
Bulgarian deride the Rumanians as the “mamaligari” i.e.
hominy-people, those who do not eat bread)? I could further multiply
this polisemia of the “culture” notion by adding up various forms of
Balkan sub-cultures, of the youth counter-cultures, of the popular
entertainment culture, of the culture industry, the media-fostered mass
culture, the material environment culture, etc.
Which
one of these cultural implications or which of these tiers of the
phenomenon unites the Balkans and which disintegrates them? Who and how
is united or disunited? How do they relate to one another? If we
understand the national cultural identity not as a substantial core but
as a complex and ambivalent process of reference to a multitude of
cultural models (each one of them having authority but less than well
harmonised among one another), then the key questions would be which
these models are, in which cultural layer they originate, how they make
their impact and what the competition among them is like.
*
* *
For
shortage of space and for the sake of the initial simplicity of analysis
I will focus on the relationship between two types of culture – the so
called high national cultures and the popular traditional cultures.
Are
these phenomena “cultures” in the same meaning of the word? The
national philological/historical/ethnographical project back in mid-19th
c. (materialised through the efforts of Kopitar, Vuc Karajic, G.
Rakovsky, D. Marinov, the Miladinov brothers, etc.) saw no substantial
differences between these two. The academic specialisation was
negligible at the time. In the very few academic societies and national
universities, the literature experts were cultural historians as well,
the historians were ethnographers, the folklorists were -–linguists
and archaeologists. These people were convinced that each and every
manifestation of the culture of the Nation was precious heritage,
antiquity, “fruit”, “expression” of the Popular Spirit (just
alternate the predicate – Bulgarian, Greek, Albanian, etc.). The
academic and public doxa of the time presumed with a Herderian frivolity
that the language and the literature, the unnamed folk singer and the
individual poet-genius are congenial in their pith, that the “faith of
the forefathers”, the dynastic glory and the national cuisine, the
revolutionary heroism and the national costume manifested the same
“Spirit” by the same measure thus rendering the culture into a
homogeneous “heritage”.
Today,
by dint of sheer intuition, to start with, we are much less prone to
identify the high national culture with that of the costumes, rites,
baklava or Kuchen. Probably one of the reason behind this unwillingness
is the disintegration of the old philology tenement – the literary and
cultural history now stand away from anthropology and ethnology in a
completely different corner of academia. While in the political and the
press discourses, “culture” is still referred to as something
nationally specific and monolith, the academic present sees the
juxtaposition of the high culture of modernity and the elites against
the traditions of the “all but” modernised masses (the studies of
these two cultural strata is divorced into a broad range of subjects and
chairs). These is a plenty of reason for the separation. The high
culture is an agent of modernising ideas, it perceives itself in the
terms of historic development, the personal authorship, the artefacts,
the achievements, the masterpieces, the classics, it is embodied in
modern institutions. The popular culture, on the other hand, relates to
processes and rituals rather than to individuals and artefacts; it is
conservative and traditional rather than evolving and modernising, it is
an integrative symbolic world rather than a reality fragmented into
areas of formal rationality. Its manifestations are the processes of the
anonymous cultural communication rather than the achievements of genii.
It exists in stable and shared by everyone life-forms rather than in
alienated bureaucratic institutions.
However,
such a sharp distinction would stand in the way of relating properly to
the multidimensional interplay between the tiers of the “high” and
the “anthropological” cultures of the nations in the region. I will
be focusing on the cleavage between these two types of culture – the
“high” (the official, the state) national culture and the everyday
culture on the Balkans. This cleavage is a condition for various, often
contradicting identifications. The Balkans seem to be a region where
certain cultural layers favour a larger community whereas others
actively (and sometimes deliberately) prevent it or destroy it. I will
try and step beyond confrontation in an attempt to shed some light on
the symbolic exchange and fight of interpretation going on among these
different worlds, on how each one of them is trying to conquer and
translate the others in the categories of its own cultural idiom.
* **
Everyone
who has lived for a while in different Balkan countries finds the
similarities among their everyday cultures to be rather evident. Every
Bulgarian, Greek or Serb who has longer been somewhere in Europe knows
that if he/she gets a craving after a dear old “manja”, they better
go to a Greek restaurant or buy something from a Turkish shop. The
Bulgarian will have his meals in the Greek restaurant under unknown
names – tatsiki, suvlaki, giros – but they will have a familiar
taste so much like tarator and shish-kebab whilst the sarmi and the
musaka have a good chance to be just like my mom’s sarmi and musaka.
The Turkish shop will offer white brine cheese, vine leaves, khalva,
kashkaval and boza as well as the cherished gherkins – real sour
unlike the sterilised insipidness they sell in German, French or Czech
supermarkets. The kebabcheta (kevavchichi in Serbia, pleskavitsa in
Macedonia) are obviously a common Balkan phenomenon just as the sturdy
grape brandy and the shopska salad let alone the emblematic spices like
mint, savoury, basil, etc. giving the overall profile of the Balkan
taste. The experts claim the Balkan cuisine is a common heritage
absorbed as Arab or Turkish versions of the Persian cuisine. It has its
natural borders – somewhere round Zagreb it clashes with the
mid-European front of the Austro-Hungarian chocolate cakes, sugary
salads and milky pottages, while to the South, at Rieka – with the
Dalmatian/Mediterranean cuisine of fritti di mare, pizzas and spaghetti.
What matters here is that the area thus outlined hardly coincides with
any state borders in the region. It emphasises a hazy commonality of
taste and culinary style criss-crossed by the multilingual patchwork of
the meals’ names.
The
similarities do not only refer to the cuisine and eating habits but to
the overall cultural type. They are present in the communication customs
– e.g. the penchant for the slow, trickle-down and non-functional
rapport, (the chat, the spin-yarn). They include the peculiar bodily
conduct of the Balkan man whose body at times seems to be unaccustomed
to the fetters of public conventions. Each one of us, the Balkan guys
who have been abroad, knows that he/she can recognise the other Balkan
guy by the gait, by other mannerisms, by the inimitable mechanics of the
body in the street, by the way he/she gets on/off the subway train,
jay-walks the cross-roads lights, approaches the unknown individual, by
the behaviour at the table, etc. The idea of “proper manners”, the
“threshold of uneasiness”, the “borders of shame” (Norbert
Elias) are evidently different form the European ones forged in the
centuries-long process of attaining courtesy and civilisation. However,
it is hardly likely or even impossible, in this model of bodily and
lingual conduct, to set apart the Bulgarian from the Serb, the Rumanian
from the Macedonian who eat, laugh, gesticulate, pat their shoulders,
yell and push about in public places in such a common fashion.
This
listing of likenesses – positive or negative – within the Balkan
type of everyday anthropological culture can be very extensive. I could
resort to detailed parallels between the feast culture of this or that
Balkan ethnicity, I could describe the similarities among the Romanian,
Dobroudjan, Macedonian and Greek costumes, I could draw parallels
between the Bulgarian or Macedonian ring-dances and the Greek sirtaki. I
could just as well remind that the notorious Plovdiv houses often
celebrated as the paragon of Bulgarian Renaissance architecture have
often belonged to rich Greek or Armenian traders and are hardly anywhere
close to being “purely Bulgarian”.
It
is a matter of course that blurring the differences or, indeed, the
contrasts would be just as misleading. Perhaps, the top priority among
them belongs to the confessional ones: the East-Orthodox, the Moslem,
the Catholic and even the Evangelical communities outline a quaint
internal patchwork, a mosaic of borders and crossings. They, apart from
the official doctrines, practice various feasts, bans, rituals, underlie
meaningful variations of costumes, cuisine or sexual conduct.
Nonetheless significant are the variances between the highland, lowland,
Mediterranean and Black Sea regions of the peninsula, with their
different economic life, varying types of trade and cultural
communication with the rest of the world, participation in a variety of
larger commercial and migration areas, etc. All this may have a powerful
bearing on the everyday life, on the wealth and poverty, on the openness
or hermetism of these relatively autonomous everyday cultures. We have
to add up here the remnants of other ethnic groups, typically nomadic or
semi-nomadic formations – the Kazalbash, the Yurucks (Turkish ethnic
groups), the Gagaouz (Christian Turks in the north-east), etc. who stand
somewhat apart in the Balkan panorama described above.
The
variances among the regions and provinces on the peninsula are just as
sweeping, with their involvement in the civilisation orbits of a number
of empires. Up until this day and age, the invisible border between the
long ago swept out of existence Habsburg and Ottoman Empire divides the
peninsula not only in terms of religion but also through a variety of
signs in the everyday life forms. Here the official administrative and
economic life, the standing of the dominant religions and languages, the
privileges or restrictions upon the congregations, the social or
linguistic groups have had a crucial impact on everyday cultures.
However
the map of anthropological delineation typically does not coincide with
today’s political map. Furthermore, the regional variations do not
obstruct the impression of an overall network of similarities cementing
the relative unity of the anthropological type. This is particularly
evident abroad where the common denominator in the mannerisms of the
Bulgarian, the Greek, the Serb, the Albanian, the Turk, the Balkan Jew
or Armenian will clearly mark him out of the other crowd.
Let
me revert to my initial claim: despite all material differences among
them, the everyday cultures on the peninsula may nonetheless be pictures
as a relatively united anthropological Balkan regional type. If
there are differences, they are not among Bulgarians, Greeks, Serbs,
Macedonians and Rumanians: they are differences between the Balkan
Moslems and Christians, between East Orthodox and Catholics, between
highlanders, lowlanders and coastal people, between the settled and the
nomads. Therefore, talking of the “national people’s culture” of
Bulgarians or Serbs, of Macedonians or Greeks is almost illegitimate –
the anthropological substratum evades defining in national terms, it is
super-national, common and regional.
*
* *
How
do things stand with the very “high” state and national cultures and
their formative elements – literature, historiography, philosophy and
science, fine arts, the educational and cultural institutions, public
life, the national ideologies and doctrines? In a short essay, some five
years ago I wrote The Self-colonising Cultures the
following: …in the genealogical knot of the Bulgarian national
culture there exists the morbid consciousness of an absence - a total,
structural, non-empirical absence (where are "our" magazines,
literature,rhetoric, mathematics, logic, physics, philosophy, etc.,
etc., which man needs more than bread? Where is our history and
civilisation as a whole?) The Others - i.e. the neighbours, Europe,
the civilised World, etc. possess all that we lack; they are all that we
are not. The identity of this culture is initially marked, and even
constituted by, the pain, the shame - and to formulate it more generally
- by the trauma of this global absence. The origin of this culture
arises as a painful presence ofabsences and its history could be
narrated, in short, as centuries-old efforts to make up for and
eliminate the traumatic shortages. And I claimed that the "Westrnisers" and the
opposite ideologues of the Native represent two mirror compensatory
cultural reactions to this traumatic notion of lacking.
To
my surprise, three years later I came across the following surprisingly
similar idea in the working papers of the European University Institute
penned by Antonis Liakos (in his essay The Canon of European
Identity) … in
Greece, the awareness of the complex historical reasons of backwardness
prevailed due to the experience of failure of the expectation that the
national independence could lead to catching up with Europe. Against
this background there developed what we could define as a negative
consciousness. This kind of consciousness describes the
"self" not as what it is, but what it is not. Hence Greece was
described as having a history of absences, as suffering the lack of
Renaissance and Reformation, the shortage of bourgeoisie and well
defined social classes, the insufficiency of industrial revolution and
liberalism. … Turning the trauma of self-exclusion to sublimation, the
negative identity gave birth to an intellectual trend supporting the
rejection of the West and the pursuit of an alternative cultural
project… early in 1875 the historian and playwright Dimitrios
Vernakides wrote: "Never have I been convinced that the European
civilisation is suitable for our nation… We rejected all our
traditional values and borrowed all our way of lifefrom the West.”
Where
do these profound structural similarities between two national Balkan
cultures lead? The resemblance were indeed so striking that Mr. Liakos
and I formulated them in almost the same words. Does that imply that our
two cultures so much alike in their traumatic fixation over the
“civilisation absences” will try and inch closer to one another,
will share their interest in one another, will effect certain cultural
and symbolic exchanges?
This
kind of resemblance however stirs the opposite reaction: the national
state cultures in the region typically choose to foster their mutual
isolation and an aggressive segregation from the neighbour. The
origination of the autonomous Balkan nations of Bulgarians, Serbs,
Rumanians, Greeks, Macedonians was a process having little in common
with the already mentioned relatively shared anthropological context.
The high national cultures on the Balkans have sprung up in a state of
rivalry which tends to proliferate in the course of history and expand
into drastic disunity and stand-off even in the unfortunate terms of
non-speaking isolation, of political and ideological hostilities. In
spite of their common in-depth models or, perhaps precisely because of
this proximity, being cultures of narrowly based, traumatic and
compensatory in their ideology elites, they do not communicate among one
another, they do not know one another, they do not see or tend to deny
their likenesses. Thus, originating and developing in an ever growing
isolation from one another, each one of them constructs, along the flow
of the tragic vicissitudes of Balkan history, the image of the opaque,
adversely deviant and actively hostile neighbour. The Bulgarian-Greek
example is particularly indicative in this respect. As early as in the
dawn of Bulgarian renaissance, the attitude towards the Greeks and the
Greek national culture is rather ambivalent. On the one hand, “the
Hellenic” is the civilisation paragon of Bulgarian revival literati as
Neofit Rilsky, Vasil Aprilov, Raino Popovich, etc. In the 30s and 40s,
following Greek models, they, among others, establish
“Slavic-Hellenic” schools round the country. Parallel with that
however, back from the times of Paisii, that same Greek civilisation to
the early Bulgarian intellectuals implied corruption, hypocrisy, hatred
and repression of all things Bulgarian. By the mid-30s of the 19th
c., the cultural contacts between the Bulgarian and the Greek elites
start slowly loosing their previous significance, with the horizon of
the young intelligentsia suddenly bouncing back and expanding. The
Balkan cultural centres loose authority and appeal – they are now too
close and casual unlike the more distant cultural hubs of enlightened
Europe which are already gaining a visionary attraction. Young
Bulgarians will now increasingly pursue higher education in Leipzig,
Vienna, Prague, even in Paris or Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Odesa, rather
than in Thessaloniki, Istanbul, Belgrade or Bucharest. The
Slavic-Hellenic model of Bulgarian education will be gradually crowded
out by an educational utopia worth calling “Bulgarian-European”. Its
hidden agenda reads that the young Bulgarian intelligentsia has nothing
to find in terms of role models with its nonetheless provincial and
backward neighbours, it better look straight into civilised Europe, e.g.
the Lancashire system of education, the Russian and French literature,
the German philosophy, aesthetics and science.
They
same goes for the rest of the Balkan nations. Each one of them harbours
processes of education institutionalisation and setting up of relevant
systems – nationally specific and all but completely isolated from the
systems of the neighbours. Each one of them is in contact with an
imaginary centre dubbed “Europe”. However, the Europes of Greeks,
Bulgarians, Albanians, Romanians, Croats and Serbs are scattering
ideological constructions, metonymies of each one’s cultural utopia.
Their untranslatability impedes rather than facilitates the rapport
among neighbours.
Furthermore,
relating to its own imaginary “Europe”, each one of these national
state cultures constructs in a different way its authenticity and
greatness. This is propaganda centred round an idealised nativeness and
authenticity or round irrational, ecstatic and heroic manifestations of
the Native.
The
actual historic developments support the scattering away national
imaginations. The Balkan history of the last century and a half is rife
with wars, treacheries, back-stabbing, territory robbing, treaty
breaches, intrigues, mutual pique and condemnation
(“allies-villains”) or tragic refugee flows. In its course, the
nation-centred institutions of these cultures amplify and push to the
extreme the opaqueness, the arrogant ignorance and neglect of the Balkan
neighbour, his culture, identity and attitudes.
Meanwhile,
over the period 1830-1870 ground is lost not only by the regional
authorities of the Greek and Serb education. The unifying pan-Slavic or
pan-Balkan utopias slowly follow the way of all putrid flesh. This
refers to the “Russo-Slavism” of the Sremski-Karlovats group of late
18th c., to Kopitar’s “pan-ilyrism” of the early 19th
c., to the waning slavophile Czech and Russian influences of the middle
of the 19th c. and to the project for a Balkan federation of
Liuben Karavelov and Svetozar Markovich a bit later in the 60s. In
reality, all ideas of a Balkan political or cultural unification prove
fadingly utopian against the backdrop of the intensifying mutually
hostile national ideologies and separating states.
Thus,
the currents of modernisation on the Balkans gradually take the shape of
alienated and hostile nationalisms, with each one having its own values,
mythologies and institutions. By late 19th c. these attitudes
ate upheld by the already autonomous states as well, with their policies
of isolationism towards the neighbouring states and of assimilation
towards their own internal minorities (one of the most extreme examples
is the Greek dictator Metaxas under the rule of whom the Slavic
population in the north was banned from speaking its own Bulgarian or
Macedonian language even at home).
This
naturally leads to models of counter-identification with the neighbours.
The cultural discrediting of the neighbour is de rigueur in the Balkan
states since the 60s and 70s of the last century. In Bulgaria, the image
of the Greek wanders far away from the initial admiration of the Greek
“knowledgeability”. By the same time, Karavelov wrote: The
Bulgarian-Greek unification has all but become impossible. The
Bulgarians are dealing with various visionaries, with mindless
braggadocios paying heed to none, having no ear for common sense and
holding every truth in contempt. Similarly, the perception of the
Serbs slowly edges from admiration and love to mistrust and sheer
hatred. The negative sentiment to “the brothers” had already sneaked
into the writings of Rakovsky and Botev (e.g. Botev wrote: “…the
high Serbian government ordained that from now on all Bulgarians,
Croats, Slovenes, Albanians and Kinese will be named Serbs)
I
do not comment at all here on the image of the Turk and the Turks being
subject of a blatant demonising throughout the nationalist period of the
high Balkan cultures as the “five-centuries tyrant”, Orientals, a
rotting cadaver steeped in opium and lechery, the sick man of Europe,
the Asia in Europe, the man-eating barbarian, etc.
Thus,
in a trend of a growing historical segregation of nationalisms, the
cultural elites of the young states, in their capacity as vehicles of
romantic-nationalist or enlightenment-universalist values, are striving
to distance themselves and their nations from the common Balkan
anthropological base and one from another. If they find themselves in
need to do that, they simply “push away” and forget all Balkan and
regional (e.g. Rumania, Croatia, Greece and Slovenia will never admit
they are merely “Balkan countries”). Hence, in their school
curricula, in their libraries and athenaeums, in their press one would
find more French, German, English, Russian or even American examples to
be follow, and very few things relating to what the Balkan intellectual
attempts to forget – the hateful Balkan context. The already quoted
Aleko Konstantinov is vexed by the Bulgarian students abroad kicking it
off with some little Greeks, Croats, Turks, Albanians or Armenians. He
would rather they abandoned this disgraceful oriental milieu smelling
of kitchen and sulphurous hydrogen and make company with the
Germans, the French and the English, always offering good example
in their entertainment, an epitome of the good
manners and the moral universe of the European…
The
opaqueness of the individual nationalist discourses in their relation
towards one another can be surveyed at different levels but it is
perhaps most visible in the national martyrologies.
First
and foremost, the Balkan nations seem unable to thrash an agreement over
the pantheon of heroes and martyrs which every national ideology of the
19th c badly needs. The figures canonised in the Bulgarian,
Serb or Greek cultures are either unknown outside the borders of their
national states or stand in an asymmetric juxtaposition to one another
overturning their value all the way to mutual incompatibility. E.g. the
Serb saint Sava, Doushan Silni, tsar Lazar, Milosh Obilich, Haiduk Velko,
Starina Novak are only known to the historians and folklorists in
Bulgaria. There are instances, however, where the neighbouring nations
heroes or founding fathers cannot possibly be recognised as such from
the vantage points of the different nations. The hero a nation might be
the villain of its neighbour, or the hero might exist and be constructed
in a couple with a villain who is a prominent member of the neighbouring
nation’s martyr shrine. The Byzantine emperor Basil the Murderer of
Bulgarians, a crucial Greek pantheon figure, is no less important as
subject of hatred for our national mythology. On the other hand, the
Bulgarian historic legends celebrate Kroum the Fearful who won over the
emperor Nikeforos and thereupon did something that the Greeks probably
see as identifying Bulgarian with cannibalism – he plated
Nikeforos’s skull with silver and sipped “foamy wine from his
gourd”.
The
effigy of the enemy in the Balkan national ideologies very often belongs
to a neighbouring nation. The Greek national heroes fight against Turks
and Bulgarians, the Bulgarian ones jostle with Greeks, Serbs and Turks,
the Serb ones – with Greeks, Turks and Bulgarians, the Macedonian ones
clash with Bulgarians, Serbs and Greeks and so forth. At the structural
level, there are mirror-type constructions of heroic figures, almost
identical in their legendary constitution yet underpropping hostile
mythologies. E.g. Pavlos Mellas of Greece is nearly a mirror image of
Levski and Gotse Delchev of Bulgaria and Macedonia.
The
opposite phenomenon is just as well in place – the new nations
sometimes cannot agree on the belonging of one and the same hero or
cultural figure. The odd figure of the Turkish vassal Marko from Prilep
who will later be bloated into the mythical Krali Marko, will be pulled
away at by Serbs, Bulgarians and Macedonians alike. Similarly, the row
over tsar Samuil, the Miladinov brothers, Raiko Zhinzifov, Gotse Delchev
and Vaptsarov are still brewing between Bulgarians and Macedonians. What
especially matters here is that all these are transformed into
incompatible or hostile figures by the individual national narratives.
They act in different plots, fight on different sides in the national
enmities, offer different interpretations to the national elites, thus
giving further momentum to the discord rather than helping to alleviate
it.
The
picture gets even more complicated by the fact that the high Balkan
cultures demonstrate substantial variances in their concepts of the
historical flow of time, i.e. of those key moments or epochs which make
up the meta-narratives – the great national historic plots. History,
in its individual Balkan versions has varying depth, highlights or
time-structure. Under the influence of European Enlightenment or
Romantic models, the Greek perception of a national historic tradition
is fixed centuries, even millennia back in the classic era of ancient
Hellas. The modern Greek literature sprang up as an effort to revive the
ancient tradition of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Simonides of Keos,
Alcaeus and Sappho, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Menander. Again
under the impact of Romantic models, a totally different history of the
Serb people came into being: the high culture recycled age-old spoken
lithurgical traditions in order to promote the 1389 Kosovo Battle and
the death of the legendary tsar Lazar as a sublime European drama, the
sacrifice of the Serb people for the sake of European Christianity’s
destiny.
.
In contrast to that, the Bulgarian heroic historicism is founded upon
other sublime spots – not thousands of years ago and not in the
clashes with the conquering Islam either. Instead, it attempts to
convert its own modern day into legend. The Bulgarian literary myths
beautify the death of Hadji Dimiter and/or Botev on top of Stara Planina,
the paradoxical defeat/victory of the April Uprising in 1876, the
self-sacrifice of the little town of Perushtitsa that Cartage
surpassed and Sparta put to shame. They lionise the battles at the
heretofore unknown peak of Shipka (1887) – this name new, great and
antique. They try to transform nondescript little villages along the
frontline like Slivnitsa (1885) into a classic heroic toposes.
Thus
the Balkan high cultures have never arrived at an agreement of a common
“time of heroes”. They drag it to an fro along the historic axis
through centuries or even millennia, with some of them anchoring it in
the antiquity, others in the Medieval times, still others in the hot
present day. The backbone of historic temporality is constructed by a
broad range of mystic/ecstatic happenings, typically sacrifices (these
of tsar Lazar, of Hadji Dimitar, of Botev, of Gotse Delchev, of Mellas,
etc. ) the sublime character of which is hard to grasp from an external
viewpoint. We shall leave the analysis of their emotional paradoxes
(defeat is victory, death is life, terrible suffering is sublime
ecstasy, etc.) to another – psychoanalytical – study. I only note
here that the historic imaginations of these high cultures prove opaque
to one another, they tend to misunderstand the paradoxes and
idiosyncrasies of one another’s martyrologies.
I
could carry on and describe other types of divergence referring to other
substantial ingredients of the elite cultures (the overlapping ideal
territories of the Balkan countries, the “imagined communities”, the
rival national doctrines, etc.). Or I could just as well wrap up my
schizophrenic divergence claim and comfortably revert to the common
anthropological context – the forgotten and shifted away basis of the
national cultures on the Balkans. This, however, would be just a
modification of the initial cliché: the basis then would join the good
side whereas the naughty elites would form the mean side.
Indeed,
the elites behave so since a century and a half ago they had tried to
radically fill their most poignant void. They had adopted the national
emancipation ideal (all-European at the time) in the most cherished way.
They had, therefore, tried to stir their own nations out of their
“historic drowse”, to shape the amorphous and variance-ridden ethnic
groups into political subjects getting up onto the historic stage and
holding the reigns of their fate in their own hands. By dint of its
Enlightenment and Romanticist essence, this subject, interiorised at
first and later institutionalised into a state, is of a historic nature
– i.e. has a firm identity back in time (in its invented tradition) as
well as forth in time (in its cherished national ideals). In has turned
space into territory, thus delineating and segregating itself from the
other peoples around. The very structure of the modern national historic
agent predestines divergence from the Others and from the Akin. Within
the framework of a legendary/utopian time, it is bent on communicating
with its own ideal (which may, as we mentioned, be discussed in terms of
the absence – the freedom, the emancipation, Europe, the civilisation)
rather than with the actual others in the actual space and time.
Secondly,
as vehicles of modernity, over a period of over 100 years, the national
elites were striving to segregate themselves from the “alien in
themselves”, i.e. the anti-modern, the traditional, the oriental, the
natural, the chthonic – all stuff to be overcome and got rid of.
The
segregation operates at two rather different levels. On the one hand,
the high national cultures foster European standards and everyday life
forms, they are willing to import an anti-oriental anthropological
substrate. Hence, with the spreading of the European houses, the
Viennese furniture, the silver cutlery and the “ala franga”
clothing, the manners, the fashion and the social etiquette comes the
disgust and loathing of the traditional oriental or popular ways. The
Bulgarian literature, for instance, offers affluent specimen of
intelligentsia derision towards the “rural” and the “hickery”,
the hygiene deficit, the rough manners, the machismo of the sexual
demeanour, the publicly flaunted carnality. The overall anthropological
substrate is not simply rejected, it is perceived as the heavy, dark or
malignant adversary of modernity.
There
is also the other end of the modernity march. This is the sublimation of
the intrinsic alien into a most intimate and idealised authenticity.
From the general Balkan grassroots, a romanticist product is snatched
apart comprising all that could be passed off (by high cultural
analogies) as “creative work of the people” or “artefacts of the
unnamed national genius”. In the course of roughly a century, parallel
with the divergence of the national elite cultures, flows the
undercurrent of ideology-fuelled national adoption and
institutionalisation of what could not be genuinely national by its
nature. Thereby Bulgarian, Serb, Greek or Albanian national costumes and
dances, architecture and cuisine, carpets and embroidery were compiled
in spite of their original belonging to the regional network of
variances and similarities of the cross-border anthropological type.
Abstracted from this overall canvas and transported into Romantic
categories, such phenomena might be interpreted as “the very essence
of the national”. Hence, the Bulgarian poet Pencho Slaveikov viewed
the Bulgarian folk song as the most authentic cultural heritage whilst a
preface to a Greek culinary recipe book claimed the recipes’ roots
were sucking back from Alexander of Macedonia and the ancient
philosophers. The national cultures deliberately suppressed their
anthropological communion and transformed the common or similar life
forms into a hostile multitude of ideological emblems – Turkish coffee
or Greek coffee, Bulgarian kebapcheta or Serb kevavchichi. The emblems,
however, are worth all things under the sun – one can eat tulumbichki
yet one can just as well smash shop windows.
SUMMARY
This
essay
tried
to show the Balkan cultures as complex conglomerates defying the naïve
mixtures of easy multiculturalism and essentialist notions of
“culture”. The cultural diversity and the conflicting nature of
these conglomerates is perhaps a result not only of their notorious
backwardness but also of the radicalism of catch-up modernisation
involved in their contradictory processes of convergence and divergence.
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