One kick too many in the Balkans

When Jeremy Atiyah watched a grim derby clash beween Croatia's two top clubs, he expected an explosive encounter. But not that explosive

Jeremy Atiyah 

Sunday, 3 August 1997

You often hear that the Slavs of eastern Europe are a tormented lot, oppressed by poverty, nightmares, history, bad weather and long distances. My experience of this torment was a Croatian football match.

It was odd enough, on a summer morning in a quaint Mediterranean port, to see football fans asleep under every hedge and bush. But this was Split, and it was derby day: the sleeping visitors were fans of Croatian rivals Dynamo Zagreb, here to visit the stadium of Hajduk Split. I decided to go to the match as a variant on the normal holiday routine. And the stadium, on the edge of town, turned out to be the most impressive sight in the city: architecturally this was Split's most important statement since Diocletian finished his palace 16 centuries ago. I joined a queue of tough men drinking from litre bottles of beer, and tried to relax.

Once inside though, I was not at ease. I found myself jammed in far above the pitch, seated amid thousands of unaccompanied smoking males, all wearing singlets, stretch- denim jeans and two or three days of black stubble on their chins. The only exceptions were the scattering of uniformed people from various branches of the armed forces. I sat up and looked over the top of the stand at the jagged Dalmatian coast which was turning purple as the sun sank into the sea.

But the bitter faces around me were intent on the pitch, where a struggle of strength and menace was about to begin. The warm-up amounted to players from both teams competing against each other in 100-metre sprints, while military music swept around the stadium. There was no chat or humour, just a tense shuffling in the seats.

The game itself did not progress according to plan. Presented with a first half full of fouls but no goals, the local fans decided enough was enough. The mass letting off of flares and rockets from one end of the ground began. In minutes, half of the pitch was enveloped in a body of rolling purple smoke. The entirety was made luminous by the flashes and fires from what sounded like an exploding arms dump. I wondered, idly, how so many sacks of fireworks could have been sneaked into the ground without anyone noticing. This was no celebration: this was an attempt to stimulate - to demand - the conditions of victory.

The referee's first reaction was to throw up his arms and run for shelter. The game ceased, the players fled. A petulant public announcement followed, presumably to the effect that the public had better behave themselves or else. It made no difference.

By the time the ammunition supply had been exhausted, and the smoke had cleared away, the atmosphere of mob violence and timorous officialdom had triumphed. In this mood after the restart, Hajduk Split successfully hacked their way to an unhindered 4-0 victory in the final half-hour.

At the whistle, no one left their places. Fifty thousand pairs of shoulders were shaking in an almighty ovation. As I made my way back through the dark streets I saw the stadium lighting up the city night, resounding with marching music. Back in town I tried to get a comment on the match from a little brown-suited waiter in my restaurant, as he translated the menu for me.

"We have very good prstaci with spinach or chicken," he began. "...and hot spices in rice with a little salad, we have a little pork with lamb and bacon marinated on a bed of rice..." It seemed for a moment as though football talk did not enter his repertoire - until he pointed one finger to the sky and announced: "Yes, it is very promising, we performed with great spirit! The referee could not stop us winning today!" Franjo Tudjman could not have put it better.

Into the heart of Yemen

Jeremy Atiyah chewed qat, bonded with his taxi driver and followed in the Queen of Sheba's steps

Jeremy Atiyah 

Sunday, 3 August 1997

Not for nothing did the Romans call this place Arabia Felix, or Blessed Arabia. With torrid deserts to the north and the steaming Red Sea to the west, this corner of the Arabian peninsula should have been as hot as hell.

Instead it became the happy land that supplied the temples of the ancient world with their frankincense and myrrh. The Queen of Sheba - the Yemen's best-known businesswoman - even rode up the Frankincense Road to the Mediterranean for trade discussions with King Solomon. Gold poured south down the caravan routes, while the blessed tree resins flowed north, keeping temples fragrant from the Rhine to the Euphrates.

Blessed trees? In austere, puritanical Arabia? The Yemen is full of them. Its cool, green highlands, terraced by thousands of years of agriculture, produce almonds, peaches, oranges, pears, pomegranates and qat. The people of these mountains were no dour desert nomads but beneficent qat-chewing farmers who built permanent towns and villages; so permanent, in fact, that their fabulous embellished towers of cut stone still guard the highlands today.

Not that all this greenery is apparent when flying into the capital Sana'a in July. I had the vaguest impression of white molten lead as we crossed the Red Sea. On land, the air was brown with dust kicked up by summer storms. Only from close up did features such as dusty acacia trees, then entire vineyards, become visible. The Yemen is not a PR job. I rode into town from the airport in a juddering old car with a shouting Arab at the wheel. The road was lined by half-built breeze-block structures surrounded by plastic litter. When we reached it, I found that the main road encircling the old city doubled up as a wadi.

What of it. Men in tweed jackets and scruffy headwraps, hitching up their white futas (skirts), picked about the puddles, showing hairy legs and plastic sandals. Wives in black trailed just behind.

What the Yemen lacks in PR it soon makes up for in substance. Complete strangers kept stopping to shout greetings to me in the street. I checked in at the pounds 8-a-night Taj Talha Hotel, and clambered up six flights of stairs to the top. The steps were giant slabs of stone, while the walls of whitewashed gypsum were wrought into ornamental reliefs. I opened a tiny carved doorway to my bedroom and looked out at the old city of Sana'a. Can any hotel have better views than this? Probably the largest intact medieval city on earth, an Arabian cityscape of cut stone, mud, ornate geometrical plaster reliefs and brick arrangements spread out around my windows.

I was looking at - quite literally - fancy medieval skyscrapers. Round windows, arches, balconies, rough plaster friezes and open lattice-work multiplied in all directions. Tall, square towers reached for the sky. Occasional palm trees lent a splash of green, while the mosques gleamed pure white in the growing darkness. A sheep on a nearby rooftop was bleating and lightning flickered in the mountains.

The next day I went walking in the old city. The streets were as rough as old goat tracks. Approaching the Bab Yaman, the last gate from the old city wall, I crept through the flag-stoned entrance, past political posters, past skirted congregations of water-sellers and moneychangers with daggers in their belts. Rubble and heaps of rotting litter lay about in the sunshine; a giant cactus protruded from a wall. Later I noticed sticky dates, raisins, cinnamon, trinkets. Stubbly youths pushed wheelbarrows of dried chillis. Pungent tobacco leaves competed for my attention with chunks of incense. And everywhere, the stone turrets of Sana'a loomed above our heads.

How ancient could this city be? Were there, perhaps, still remains of one of the great churches of the world, the teak Ecclesia built by Ethiopians, supposedly with nails of gold and silver, and destroyed by Muslims around AD700? I asked a passing banana-seller if he knew where the Ecclesia was.

"Galise?" he echoed, using an Arabic word (qalis) which sounded remarkably like the modern French word for church. "Of course. It's round the corner." I followed his directions to a smelly hole in the ground, which banana-sellers know about because their fathers and grandfathers (in a line extending back 14 centuries) have told them about it. In search of more relics, I wandered into the National Museum, off the Maydan At-Tahrir. Here I found Yemeni teenagers, riveted by evidence of animal sacrifice and naked statuary, as well as the sight of ancient South Arabian runic script. "You can read this?" enquired one boy, perhaps hoping that I might be in touch with my ancient Christian forebears. Sadly, I wasn't.

I was titillated by the suggestions of cultural diversity though. And when, after lunch, a taxi-driver called Abdul invited me to join him in a qat-chewing session, I saw it as a chance to dig for the heart of the Yemen.

First step: head for the qat market (qat has to be bought fresh ). Qat- snobs apparently prefer long woody branches covered in foliage; Abdul recommended plastic bags stuffed with leaves. In the car, we began nibbling qat like crisps from the bag. It wasn't easy - qat leaves look like rhododendron and my mouth instantly overflowed with bitter saliva.

"Eat on the left side of your mouth," urged Abdul, now that my whole mouth was green with qat. Abdul's left cheek, meanwhile, was bulging nicely. Serious qat chewers never spit out their qat, but accumulate it in the side of the mouths.

The key to qat is perseverance. Abdul led me up to the Mafraj, the traditional room at the top of the house where qat must be chewed. There I reclined with taxi-drivers on cushions overlooking the city.

What is qat for? It is banned in Saudi Arabia and in America (but legal in most of Europe, including Britain) so it must do something. From what I could see, its main effect was to encourage bonding between locals and tourists.

"You are welcome to stay in our country as if it were your own family," one man announced. "By Allah," added another. "You are welcome a thousand times."

Qat left me immune to hyperbole. As the afternoon wore on, and left cheeks bulged ever larger, we effectively covered politics, tribes, marriage, families. In the political sphere, America and Saudi Arabia (the two qat- hating countries) were definitely out, but Britain was tentatively in. These were charming people.

Like all Yemeni males, they were armed. In addition to the curved dagger (jumbiya) dangling from their belts, they all admitted to keeping a Kalashnikov or two under their beds. Abdul explained the rationale for this. "If, for example, your brother kills my brother, then our families will eat qat together in the mafraj and agree on how much compensation you should pay. We will all bring our weapons and put them on the floor. Governments cannot solve family problems, you know." After half a kilo of qat, who needs litigation? I never got used to the taste, but by nightfall I had certainly bonded with my taxi drivers.

The next morning I was curious to see more of this blessed country. Hiring Abdul as my driver, I spent a day touring the stern villages of the highlands. Soaring stone walls sprang organically from the rock of the land. In the town of Thulla not far from Sana'a, where the alleys were little more than random gaps left by buildings, I crept about in the shadow of bare rock. Donkeys and a cow grazed in filth. Grubby children scuttled out to be my guides.

The countryside around comprised green terraces swirling round the hillsides. We drove up to the sinister village of Kawkaban, stone walls on top of menacing cliffs, overlooking a sister village of Shiban far below. Walking the tiny 1,000-metre path down the cliff-face, I kept running into unpuffed, wiry old men, on their way up. "Everyday!" they cried. "We walk up everyday!"

Where was the original life source of the Yemen? On my last day we drove out into the eastern desert, down from the cool highlands and into the torrid zone that eventually merges with the empty quarter.

We passed road-blocks full of soldiers hollering about rebels on the road to the north (tourists are put into armed convoys around here). In the desert we were soon irritable in the heat. But it was down here, where the Wadi Adhanah flows into the desert, that the first Yemeni civilisations emerged. The Queen of Sheba, known in the Yemen as Bilquis, cultivated her fabled wealth here around the great dam of Ma'rib.

According to local folklore, the stone relics baking silently in the sands of Ma'rib are the temples and palaces of their Queen. The vast ancient sluice-gates of the original dam, which controlled the waters of the wadi, can still be seen, spanning an impossibly huge, but now waterless, canyon.

Had the Yemen lost something there in the sands? Driving back into the cool hills afterwards, Abdul began singing with joy. Beside a green field he scrabbled down to kiss a peasant on the forehead. "Thanks be to God," he shouted, returning to the car with a bulging cheek. Here in the uplands, the spirit of Yemen was still alive and well.

FACT FILE

Getting there

The author flew from London to Sana'a with Yemenia (tel: 0171-4092171). Yemenia flies new Airbuses but does not win prizes for sticking to schedules. There are two flights per week, current three-month return fare pounds 440, dropping to pounds 390 later in the year. For organised tours, contact Explore Worldwide (tel: 01252-319448).

Getting around

In the Yemen, the author received assistance from Universal Travel and Tourism (tel: 00-967-1-272861; fax: 00-967-1-275134). 4X4 cars with driver can be hired by the day.

Accommodation

In Sana'a, the author stayed in the Taj Talha Hotel (tel: 00-967-1-237674) whose rates are variable according to season, but should not exceed pounds 12 for a double room with separate bathroom. For five-star luxury, try the Taj Sheba Hotel (00-967-1-272372) in the centre of town. Rates from pounds 122.

Reading

Tim Mackintosh-Smith's new book Yemen, Travels in Dictionary Land (John Murray, pounds 18) is a little masterpiece of wit and erudition.

Yemen festival in the UK

A festival of Yemeni culture will be running in the UK from 18 September to 1 November, with events in London and a national tour. A free brochure is available from the Yemen Festival Hotline (tel: 0171-354 4141).

'To be polite, I made sure I kissed 80 men'

Yemen was fun, but Jeremy Atiyah expected the party he attended in Saudi Arabia to be a dull affair. It turned out to be an absolute hoot

Jeremy Atiyah 

Sunday, 3 August 1997

Women and whisky - I was sure the Saudis didn't go for that at their family parties. So what did they go for? When a friend of mine, Abdulaziz, suggested I join him in partying with his uncles in Riyadh one Saturday night, I decided to go along and find out.

The house of Abdulaziz's first uncle looked like most Saudi homes - a walled fortress in a suburban street, cream-coloured, angular, impregnable. "Just come straight in," said Abdulaziz, slipping off his shoes and stepping over the threshold.

I glanced in. To my alarm, an immensely formal meeting appeared to be taking place right there: 80 bearded men, all wearing brilliant white, pressed thobes and red ghutras, were sitting on cushioned seats lining the walls of the reception hall - awaiting my entrance. Breaking my laces in the effort to get my shoes off, I stumbled in. Abdulaziz had started kissing and shaking hands with everyone in sight. Gingerly, I set off after him.

Starting in the centre from the ancient uncles with scraggly white beards exuding power, I moved on through the multitude of hulking sons and nephews who had come to respect their elders. Nobody seemed to be worried about why I was there. Finally I took my seat at a place by the wall, and did the best I could to be inconspicuous. I watched the number one uncle himself arrive, wrapped in a camel-hair gown edged with gilt brocade. A crowd of grandsons surged forward to kiss him on his head and whisper deferential phrases into his ear.

There was little chat. People drank tiny coffees, ate dates, and passed around a solid gold incense-burner. Abdulaziz was with his cousins, going through greeting-rituals, each taking it in turn to say one word, as though running down a list at speed. The whole conversation, from beginning to end, was a dance that had been learnt long ago in the deserts of Arabia.

At last the feast was ready. We walked through to a leafy courtyard open to the hot night sky, and found, on carpets, several entire sheep cooked in dishes of saffron rice. Abdulaziz made a cut in the first sheep with a two-foot-long knife and people tore burning pieces of meat off the bone with their fingers. The food was disappearing in silence, and I worried whether the presence of a heathen - me - was spoiling the conversation. Abdulaziz assured me this was not so. "Everyone likes you," he said, chewing fast. "We know you are a good man. You believe in God."

I did not catch his eye, and concentrated on my food. It wasn't long before we were being pushed aside. The second shift - a scramble of little boys - had arrived to take our places; these would be replaced by the household women. On the subject of women, there was, needless to say, none in sight. I was conscious though of what sounded like a primary school playground just behind a wall; this was where all the mothers and daughters had been hidden away.

Abdulaziz suggested the time had come for us to move on. And having taken our leave (80 polite handshakes), we drove off to the house of uncle number two. I was introduced to more bearded men who were being presented as the brothers of the sister-in-law of the uncle of someone from the party we had just come from. Abdulaziz had a big family. And the uncle himself, it transpired, was a billionaire. He sat there grinning and showing a big wet tongue, happy in the company of 17 sons and dozens of grandsons. A group of camels grazed nearby. In a country where a man is measured by the size of his family, the uncle was a hero. But he had some bad news: "My fucking days are over," he said. He was offering a reward of $2m for any doctor who could replace his old genitals.

The hot night air, the playful grandsons, the hubble-bubbles, the smells of charcoal and incense, the smiling, imperturbable faces: parties in Riyadh were fun! "Well," Abdulaziz said, with a slight shrug. "I'm glad you enjoyed it. But I prefer women and a little whisky at my parties."