The Fracture Zone (25 page)

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A city whose history even more markedly hints at the Balkan confusion to come, since it has been variously administered by the Romans, Austrians, Croatians, Venetians, Hungarians, French, British, and Italians, before being incorporated into Yugoslavia, and, since 1991, into the newly independent Croatia. It was also the city where a resident British engineer named Robert Whitehead invented the first torpedo.

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Many of which have their eyes scratched out, and thus look even wilder and more frightening than their medieval artists had intended. The reason, however, is not so much born of sacrilege or desecration: Many Serbian peasants have long held that the chalky paints used for the eyes of fresco figures are cures for blindness, if administered topically, and with permission of the local abbot.

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They pick you up on a motorcycle, seat you on the back, pile on your luggage, and zoom off—scary but immense fun, if it’s not snowing.

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Where by chance I ran into Jørgen Grunnet, a Dane who was now a member of an international monitoring group that had just been forced out of Kosovo, but with whom, when he worked for the newspaper Politiken, I had shared an office in Washington in 1972. We hadn’t seen each other for nearly thirty years: to run into him on a remote frontier-crossing in the southern Balkans seemed yet another example of the wayward capriciousness of this peculiar job.

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A name that the Greeks, believing they have a prior claim, still do not permit themselves to utter. “Is not Makedonia,” spat my taxi driver. “Is FYROM.” The latter, an acronym, stands for the Former Yugoslav Republic of M., and seems acceptable to all, except linguists.

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A city whose vast lexicon of names also hints at the bewilderments of its history:
Constantinople
is well known, of course, as is
Byzantium;
and readers of Graham Greene and Agatha Christie will recognize the names
Stamboul, Estamboul,
and
Czarigrad.
But there are also references aplenty to the city as
Kushta, Gosdantnubolis, Rumiyya-al-Kubra, New Rome, New Jerusalem,
and the
City of Pilgrimage,
as well as, more simply,
Polis,
or just plainly the
City.
More than anything, Istanbul is a city of a dynasty, and that Ottoman dynasty was to do much, both for good and evil, to shape the destiny of the vast and complex mountain lands that lay between the Golden Horn and the faraway city that so very nearly fell into the sultan’s hands, Vienna.

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Among the array of creatures found in the abandoned tents was the Ottoman grand vizier’s pet ostrich, which he had ordered beheaded to prevent it falling into the hands of the infidel Catholics who had broken his siege.

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The half referring to the Gypsies.

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Which is what
Sancta Sophia
means in Latin: The structure was never named after any saint, Sophia or otherwise.

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Although the word
vizier
translates into “the sultan’s foot,” which is where the official sat, on the raised platform known as the
sofa.

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Once, for a not wholly frivolous journalistic reason, I was driving a Rolls-Royce across Russia and needed someone to tinker with engine’s carburator before I took it to places where the gasoline had the look and feel of peanut butter. When I asked Rolls-Royce where this work might be done, the senior engineers, after consulting maps, gave me the address of the official agent in Vienna. “The last bastion of civilized mechanics,” I was told. “After that, who knows?”

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Along with his host, French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou.

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Soon after the Austrians allowed in the migrants from Kosovo, the Ottoman administrators closed down the Pec patriarchy, fully aware of its importance as the Serbs’ spiritual home. Once the news filtered up to the Krajina the Serbs there decided to make their own settlement its spiritual replacement—which is one reason that the Krajina Serbs were so militantly determined to try to keep the land for themselves, and so violently opposed to those Croats who thought otherwise.

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The fortress near Karlovac was the Austrians’ administrative center for only the western Krajina. The eastern half of the frontier zone, in what is now Slavonia, was run from a similar fortress built at the town of Varazdin.

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The Turks were nominally in control of this sector of Bosnia, and their route names were not especially pretty. A few miles west, in a British-patrolled sector, the recommended routes had names like PELICAN, CUCKOO, DIAMOND, and TRIANGLE. The Americans, over on the east, clearly felt homesick: Their tanks and armored cars drove roads named ALABAMA, GEORGIA, and NEW JERSEY.

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I have always thought it a shame that President Clinton never read it or, if he did, that he famously derived his political views on Bosnia and later on Kosovo from another,
Balkan Ghosts,
written by an American journalist, Robert Kaplan.

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In 1999 Bosnia had 280 radio and TV stations, and seven hundred transmitters—one for every five thousand people, thus making its population the most broadcasted-to in the world.

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Though an explanation has little place in the the Balkan story, the word
morganatic
does have a compelling origin. It refers to a marriage in which the only benefit is the “morning
[Morgen]
gift” of the spouse, the token reward offered for consummation. Nothing else—such as a title or a fortune—is to be given or inherited. In Germany morganatic marriages were sometimes known as “left-handed” marriages, since it was the custom for the groom to offer his left hand during the ceremony, instead of his right.

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“Jamie” Shea, the formidably professional voice of NATO, and spokesman for its policies, during most of the bombing campaign.

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The Bosnians, having no other outlet to the Adriatic, negotiated an arrangement with the Croatians allowing them to use the port of Ploce, where the Neretva flows into the sea. There is a railway terminus at Ploce, and notionally at least Sarajevo’s ruined station can be reached in six hours, with a change at the frontier.

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More so than the menu, which offered, among other delights, Cack-erels, Bogues, and Pilehards. The last I recognized as pilchards, the oily Mediterranean fish; the others I never dared to order.

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Kosovo, on the other hand, like the relatively unknown northern territory of Vojvodina, is regarded as a formerly autonomous province within the Republic of Serbia. It is thus administratively junior to Montenegro, which, if one accepts the validity of Yugoslavia’s 1990 constitution, is a coequal member of the Federal Republic, along with Serbia.

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Only outsiders call the country Montenegro. The official name is Crna Gora, and by some accounts means the same. (Others say it refers to a Prince Crna, long dead.) The mountains on the coast, however, are decidedly white.

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Gone are the days of such trenchant portrayals. From this same issue we learn that the Lapps “are the roundest-headed people in Europe,” but have unfortunate children whose faces are “frequently drawn and ugly, as if with age.”

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The cleric was a keen military man as well, in common with most Montenegrins, and liked to show his skills by having an attendant toss into the air a lemon, which he would speedily shoot and destroy. “A singular accomplishment for a Bishop,” wrote a British diplomat who met him.

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About which Werner Herzog made a film,
Fitzcarraldo,
some years ago.

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Including Cyrillic volumes printed by a press set up in Cetinje in 1493, just twenty years after Caxton invented the idea of movable type. But as befits the weird mix of scholarship and war characterizing the Montenegrin, the lead type had to be melted down soon after and made into bullets instead.

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The diplomats who were posted to Cetinje worked rather little—one result being that it was not until 1995 that someone noticed that a formal state of war still existed between Montenegro and Japan. It had been declared in 1905, and no one had bothered to lift it. It has been now.

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Since American Christian evangelists have recently made Albania a target for their proselytizing zeal, and young churchmen from Kentucky and Ohio are to be found, with their short-sleeved shirts and ever-ready smiles, standing on street corners everywhere from Scutari to Elbasan.

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Which, along with Serbo-Croat, is the language spoken by most of the Kosovo Albanians.

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Durres is the Albanian terminus of the great Roman road to Istanbul known as the Egnatian Way. It was twelve feet wide, raised in the middle to allow rainwater to run off, and it had staging posts every dozen miles so the soldiers could change horses. Little of it remains, though the straight line of the Durres-Tirana road looks very Roman indeed.

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AFOR for Albanian Force, KFOR for Kosovo Force—but in Bosnia, SFOR for Stabilization Force, and IFOR for Implementation Force. This last referred to the soldiery sent to make certain that the provisions of the Dayton agreement on the internal frontiers of Bosnia were fully and properly set in place.

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His name was Edmund, but since most Albanian names have to end with a vowel, Monday seemed most suitable.

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Soldiers from Nepal, who were originally recruited by the Crown during the days of British rule in India, and who have since continued to be eager members of the British army, finding themselves on duty in curious places—the Falkland Islands, Cyprus, Hampshire, Kosovo—that must be utterly alien to their own traditions.

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The ethnic makeup of Macedonia can hardly be said to augur well for the newborn country’s long-term stability: the Macedonians themselves account for about 1.5 million, the Albanians (most of whom live in the west, close to the Albanian frontier) 500,000—and there are significant numbers of Turks, Gypsies, and, most ominously of all, Serbs.