Memories of a land I
found disappointingly homogenous and unexotic, apart from this one mountain
place called Kosovo
SUNDAY 25 APRIL 1999
Years ago, before
nationality had become a reason to be killed there, I travelled through Yugoslavia as a naive backpacker.
For most of the time, one was only vaguely
aware of the fact of multi- ethnicity. There were those who called themselves
Serbs and those who called themselves Croats, but everybody knew that such
vestigial differences were preserved mainly as quaint relics of the Ottoman empire - partly to amuse
tourists and partly to perpetuate the Communist myth that the Yugoslavs were a
voluntary union of disparate ethnic groups.
Disparate ethnic groups? If only! Yugoslavs, as far as I could
see, had turned into modern Europeans whose national language was Serbo-Croat.
If anything, in fact, they looked drearily homogenous. Under the mighty walls
of Diocletian's Palace in Split I found housewives
buying fish wrapped in newspapers. In the cobbled backstreets of old Belgrade I saw office
workers in raincoats. There was nothing "ethnic" in sight.
The irony was that, as a tourist, I could have done with a few
sharp differences between the ethnic groups. Why ever would I want all those
endless old Communists in trilbies when I could have had - say - a warring
hotchpotch of swarthy Montenegrins, moustachioed Serbs and feuding Albanians
instead?
On only one tantalising occasion did the Yugoslavia I had been hoping
for show its face. In the middle of a long bus journey over the mountains
between Dubrovnik and Skopje (now in the
independent state of Macedonia ), we stopped for a
break at the local equivalent to a motorway service station.
It was the dead of night and bitterly cold. Walking into the
bar, I expected to find, at best, a fat Eastern European truck driver or two on
a vodka break. Instead I seemed to step through a time warp. At dozens of small
tables were sitting crowds of furtive men in black hats playing cards and
drinking Turkish coffee. Oriental music wailed through the cigarette smoke.
Where on earth was I? The last thing I knew I had been boarding a bus in
European Dubrovnik. Suddenly I had landed in an orientalist's fantasy world.
Here at last was plain evidence of Yugoslavia 's multi-ethnic
identity: exotic, diverse, colourful. Just what I always wanted. It was only a
few days later that I discovered we had been driving through a place called
Kosovo.
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