Starting With The Birds, Not The Bees

 

New Albanian vocabulary: më fal (sorry), sigurim (insurance)

 

 

Kosovo’s black birds start massing, whirling – and gleefully shitting – just as the sun is going down. Their instincts are attuned to the same trig- gers which send the hoxhas of Pristina’s mosques to their loudspeakers to call the faithful to prayer. But I have watched carefully, and the birds rise into the skies before the call to prayer begins – they are not obeying it. I don’t think these birds are Muslims.

At about the time when people are coming home from work, or sitting down to dinner (at exactly the time when they are sitting down to dinner during the Muslim month of Ramadan, with its requirement for fasting during the hours of daylight), the sky splits open with the moan from the first mosque. A second wail starts up, chanting echoes that aren’t quite in agreement, although the words are the same. If you are in the right place in Pristina you will be able to hear a third and maybe a fourth. And the digestive juices of the population sing in harmony.

It is at this point, while the sense of taste and of sound is being sated, that the birds rise in a ragged black mass – thousands strong – against the darkening sky. It’s impossible not to be impressed, not to think of Hitchcock – or maybe the computer generated scarabs in The Mummy, depending on your age.

And it is to these birds that this land really belongs: the word ’Kosovo’ comes from the Serbian for The Field of Blackbirds. Or perhaps it is The Field of Black Birds. No-one seems very sure about exactly which birds wheel around or through a possible gap in the English words translating the name. Certainly, during my time in Kosovo I never saw a yellow-beaked, Beatles-style blackbird singing. But at dusk each day in autumn and winter I have seen the black (- space-) birds – hooded crows, or maybe rooks, or members of the jay family (my ornithological friends disagree with one another) in their sinister, glorious, frightening, deafening mobbing across the city.

  

  

And it was the 1389 battle which took its name from these birds – the Battle of the Field of Blackbirds – which defined Kosovo, not only etymologically, but politically and culturally for the next 600 years and more.

Appropriately, the story of this battle was my introduction to Kosovo’s history. I had been in the country for less than an hour – a bewildering hour of worry and mispronunciation and worry about mispronunciation. Rob and I had spent most of the hour standing at the baggage carousel of Pristina airport hoping that some of our possessions would soon circle into view, and when they did, hoping that the word we were repeating as we pushed past the men blocking our way sounded something like the apology we were attempting in their strange language.

Then we were out of the airport, greeted by a car from the British Office (in practice the British Embassy, but because Kosovo didn’t have the status of a country, it couldn’t have an embassy) to drive us to our hotel. I had learned quite a bit about our hotel in the last twenty days the period that we had had after Rob had been told that he had been accepted by both the British government and the Prime Minister of Kosovo to be funded by the former as adviser to the latter. Twenty days weren’t quite enough to pack up a house, say proper goodbyes to people who mattered, and learn about the language, culture and politics of your new home. So I had spent those days packing the house and saying my goodbyes, and only wondering where to start on learning about Kosovo. They had been days of excitement as well as a little healthy fear.

Rob and I had met at university and moved to North London together, enjoying ten years of public sector careers. For me that meant mainly teaching, with some poetry. One Saturday morning Rob had gone out to get his newspaper and had come back to read it over his mug of hot chocolate by the window, looking out over our patch of gently maturing garden. In a moment of quiet epiphany he put down the foreign news story he was reading. ‘Do you realise that on current form there is nothing to stop me doing this, right here, every Saturday morning for the next forty years?’ We had both shivered a little, and in the conversations that followed we agreed that it was time for some- thing more like adventure. Most of our friends seemed to have embarked on domestic adventures involving the birth of children. We had decided not to go down that route. When the call had come through inviting Rob to move to Kosovo, I felt the prickling of adrenaline.

While Rob had years of working on the Balkans behind him, I had had less than three weeks to educate myself. His books, with the unpronounceable titles, had been stacked on the shelves in our bedroom, and sometimes I had idly tried to sound out the words along the spines. But they were his, his hobby; I hadn’t properly understood until now that they were also real life for millions of people on the other side of Europe, or that they might become real life for me, too.

So as we took off from Gatwick, for what amounted to an extended blind date with this place, my knowledge of my new home had been largely based on two things. First was the Wikipedia article on Kosovo. Significantly, it is a ‘locked’ article because of the rival amendments being so angrily and regularly proposed by different ethnic groups. That was probably one of the most important things I did learn about Kosovo during those days, and it made me realise, too, how my entry into this debate would be perceived as partisan, by both sides. The second source of information I had was the website of the Hotel Baci. As a result, before arriving here I had picked up only a healthy respect for the ethnic differences within my new home, and a healthy disrespect for its taste in interior décor.

My only other guide to the place was an Albanian-English dictionary. As we drove in the British Office car through the dusty, baffling streets of Pristina’s suburbs, I looked up as many words as I could. The images flickering past my window – half-finished houses, dark-haired, dark-eyed young women in tight jeans, overloaded cars, people greeting one another enthusiastically as they passed in the streets – were untranslatable. Who were these people? Which were Serbs and which Albanians? What were they thinking? Translating the words on bill- boards and small business frontages was at least a start at understanding a place. I learned the words for insurance and depilatory cream, and one of the first words I looked up on that drive was displayed on the sign that announced ‘Fushë Kosovë’. There was something written in Serbian underneath it, but it had been spray painted out. Anyway, I didn’t yet have a Serbian dictionary.

‘Kosovë’ I thought I recognised. If I could just find out the meaning of ‘fushë’ I hoped I might be able to translate my first Albanian phrase. I looked it up; it means ‘field’ or ‘plain’. I had found myself the Plain of Kosovo, and if I’d had that Serbian dictionary with me then I would have had a clue earlier on as to what I might find flying above it.

The Plain of Kosovo stretched out around us – flat, rich but mainly uncultivated land extending to the lines of mountains in the distance with snow still on them. The British army officer driving us told us that this was the site of the Battle of Kosovo. Since he had just told us about the military showdown that had taken place at the airport between NATO and the Russians in 1999, I wasn’t immediately sure what century this other battle might have happened in. The confusion was appropriate as it turned out, because you could argue that this was a battle fought in 1389 for 600 years. It is the Dunkirk of the Serbian people – the military defeat proudly displayed centuries later: not like a scar, but like a scab.

We were driving past mosques and small modern Orthodox churches scribbled round with barbed wire. Rob had told me about the epic poem about the Battle of Kosovo, where the Turkish Sultan tells the Serbian prince Lazar about this land, ‘We cannot both together rule here.’ The army officer filled in some military details to my literary framework. The Battle of Kosovo was between Ottoman Turks and fighters now usually referred to as Serbs. They were soldiers led by a Serb prince, but it seems likely that the ‘Serb’ army in fact included men who were Albanian, and from many other ethnic groups across the Balkans. It is seen as the point at which the Serbs – and the Serbian church – lost Kosovo to the Turks, and to Islam. The battle actually ended in a draw – both the Serbian and the Turkish commanders were killed, and the Ottomans retreated to regroup under their dead sultan’s son before they came back a generation later to stamp their rule on this country.

What really happened, however, is less important than the poem – the way that the epic, heroic story has been told and used since. This scruffy suburb, named after the battleground, where we were driving was the setting that Milošević chose in 1987, and then on the 600th anniversary of the battle, in 1989, for picking at his nation’s scab - reiterating the claims of Kosovo as a Serb homeland, which led to nationalist policies brutally enforced against Kosovo’s Albanians.

The subsequent ten years, with their atrocities and injustices of the Serbian administration against the Albanian majority across Kosovo finally led to the 1999 NATO bombing and the UN administration of Kosovo. They led to the establishment of what was called the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government, and the appointing of its Prime Minister keen for British connection and advice. They led to Rob’s appointment as the PM’s adviser, and to him and his baggage being driven from the airport at the end of May 2006, wordlessly looking things up in a brand new dictionary, starting a new life on the Field of Blackbirds.