Golden Circles: My Own Bee-Skeps

 

New Albanian vocabulary: shportë (basket), bukë misri (cornbread)

 

 

The teardrop-shaped skep that Adem had in his shed for catching absconding bees had done its job, and the swarm had been successfully tipped into the new Langstroth hive; I was now the owner of two colonies of bees. Adem offered me his congratulations – and I felt the way that I often did here, when Albanians heard that I was English and wanted to thank me for NATO’s campaign which removed the Serb forces. ‘It was nothing to do with me!’

There is something very beautiful about the shape of these baskets, and I like the fact that they’re made locally from natural materials. They are different from traditional British skeps that I was familiar with from the Gale’s honey label. Where British skeps are woven spirals of fibres coiled into a bell shape, the Kosovan models are made with vertical sup- ports around which pliable branches are woven. If I wanted one of these then this country would be the only place I could buy it.

So when I saw one of the skeps for sale at the side of the road while I was in the car with some friends, I shrieked at the driver to stop. My friends were indulgent, screeching to a halt and waiting, even though we were running late, as I skipped back to my skep-seller and started to haggle. For no reason that I could understand, I bought two of these strangely elegant cones, bundled them into the car, and we continued on our way.

It was an auspicious day for Kosovan traditions – we were driving to the festival in Gjonaj which is held every year to showcase local dancing, costumes and baking. Gjonaj is in the steep hills near the ancient cobbled city of Prizren and is in the centre of Has country, a region of Kosovo with its own distinctive costumes. Even the older Has women wear their hair long, and dyed a startling black. More startling than this, however, is their unique skirt which includes a yoke of wood around the waist, used for balancing babies, buckets of water, or baskets of produce – particularly useful for women negotiating mountain paths in this rugged part of Kosovo. I never saw a young Has woman wearing the traditional costume, but I was delighted to hear about a UK company who have recently started marketing to her modern British counterpart something that would look very familiar to any Has girl. In England you can apparently now buy a rigid shelf attached to a strap to be worn around the waist, for taking the weight of toddlers when they need to be carried on the hip. I imagine that the young women of Prizren would never entertain the idea, but Islington’s yummy mummies will be all over it.

We wove higher and higher up the hillside, the air noticeably chilly now, and our journey getting slower not only because of the strain on the gears but because of the weight of traffic. Everyone was heading for the festival, and everyone must have been running late. The views and the driving were breath-taking as cars tried to inch past each other, with the mountain falling away sheer to one side. I concentrated on the spectacular panoramas.

When the car had slowed to less than a walking pace we stopped and got out to go the rest of the way on foot. We had less than twenty minutes to walk, but as we got closer, we were joined by more and more others, all like individual notes coming together in a great orchestral crescendo that built until we reached the loudspeakers that were blaring over a temporary stage erected at the end of a basketball court. We wriggled through to a point where we could see the stage. The performance had started and on tiptoe, jogging my head from side to side as the people in front of me jogged theirs too, I watched one troupe after another come out onto the stage. Each was greeted by their claque in the audience, and as the whooping and cheering vied with the music, girls skipped and twisted, bounced neatly across the stage in well-practised dances. They flirted politely with lithe young men in their white Elizabethan-style smocks, multi-coloured woven sashes, the baggy white woollen trousers with thick black seams making geometric shapes across the groin and seat. Somehow the men managed to look smouldering and athletic despite these encumbrances.

Most smouldering and athletic of all was the ‘eagle dance’ of the Rugova valley – the stately, stealthy prowl, pounce, swoop, and leap per- formed by elegant men with poise and excellent thigh muscles. The line of men have their arms around one another’s shoulders so it looks like a can-can, but a can-can that is painfully, stunningly slow so that the dancers’ control over their scraping, dipping, is the main display. As the men hover and glide in unison there are moments where you can almost believe that it’s not muscles but the thermals of the air high above the mountains which sustain this flock in flight.

Throughout their dancing they are serenaded by a musician who keeps pace with them, moving with them, maintaining eye contact with them, bending low when the dancers bend low, straightening as they soar upwards; but this musician is no violinist, this no fragile lark arising, but a pounding martial drum beat inciting the dancer to fight.

With the early summer evening chill from being high in the hills, and the throbbing music, heads dipping to and fro to see the performers, there came a point when I was ready to leave the outdoor performances. My friends and I retreated into the small Culture House behind the stage. We must have been conspicuous – we had been the only non-Kosovars in the audience – and were offered a guided tour of the display which had been laid out in one of the rooms to show the baking for which this region is famous. A conscientious young man from the municipal headquarters led us to the exhibition and gave us a tour of the tables covered in an untouched, untouchable banquet of tepsis containing local dishes. Every combination of corn and wheat, dough and batter, yeast and yogurt seemed to have been prepared in an endless succession of golden circles. Some of the breads and cakes I recognised (fli and pogaqe, cornbreads and pite), others were new to me, but this was an exhibit, not a meal, and without being able to sample any of the models laid out it was a tantalising demonstration of plenty. Surely only someone who deep down didn’t really like food would put on such a frustrating show, I thought – and then remembered the empty skeps that I had just bought for no reason other than the pleasing shape of them.

When we got back home late that night, I put the skeps in my hallway, either side of the front door. I didn’t know what I would do with them eventually but they could stay there for now.

In fact those skeps never moved. When a friend’s small and adventurous daughter came to the house she managed to hide herself entirely underneath one of them, and once she had drawn my attention to their potential as hiding places, I kept my handbag under one, hoping to thwart all but the most thorough burglar. I don’t know what this substitution of money for honey says about my developing identity as a beekeeper but with skeps of my own I felt I was moving somewhere.

 

I later learned to make golden light, rich cornbread circles of my own too. This is the recipe for leçenik, given to me by my friend, and museum guide, Alisa.

 

Ingredients

4 eggs

salt – 2 pinches

200ml oil

800ml yogurt

500g cornmeal

200g flour

6 tsp baking powder

200g mild white cheese like feta

 

Mix all the ingredients together and put the resulting mixture in a tepsi and bake at 185 degrees for 20 minutes.