A First Experience Of Honey Served With Albanian Hospitality – And Fli
New Albanian vocabulary: kar (willy), mjaltë (honey: I was later to discover that this Albanian word is special – grammatically as well as gastronomically. It is one of a tiny group that behave strangely in their gender, suggesting they were part of an earlier neuter case that no longer exists. The other nouns in this group – dough, wool, water, wax – have ancient, fundamental significance and you can tell they have survived from early times despite their strangeness, being repeated from mothers to children in Albanian kitchens for thousands of years)
We had found ourselves a house, and we had stocked its cupboards so it felt like a home. But the Albanian expression told us that this could never truly be our home because ‘a house belongs to God and the guest.’ Inviting in the former would be changing the habit of a life- time, but we were keen to fill our rooms with the latter; Rob and I sat down together to make a list of people we could have round for a housewarming brunch.
It was a long list for only a month in a new country; there were the British Office staff – that army officer with the confusing history lessons, the people who managed Rob’s contract, whose address I was able to use for my Amazon deliveries. There were the Kosovan colleagues from the Prime Minister’s Office; British army officers working with the NATO mission; a few other international advisers to the government, or with the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), which supported – or in some cases still ran – the government. The EU also had an office and huge staff in Kosovo, supporting its journey to meet EU standards that were one of the conditions for independence. I was learning about the way that these international missions brought others in their wake – the international charities, and local NGOs, big butch aid organisations who were as competitive and thrusting about their budgets and their development initiatives as their corporate equivalents.
All of the names on the list were people we knew through Rob. I felt rather sad that I had no-one to bring to the party. Stubbornly, I insisted on including the guy who ran the internet café, and the electrician I had organised to come and sort out our fuse box and who had ended up also fixing the wiring for me on the waffle maker we would be using for brunch. Neither of them turned up on the day.
But Rob’s colleagues did. They filled the ballroom, and spilled out of the French windows and stood on the terrace among the pot plants and palms I had dotted hopefully around with an idea of offering attractive places for people to bring their company and conversation. Among the tanned British men cheerfully eating waffles and talking about Kosovan politics, with a cynicism undermined by enormous appetites, stood an elegant Kosovan woman of my age with a friendly smile.
She was introduced as Shpresa. Her name means ‘hope’ – one of many everyday Albanian nouns parents here give to their children as a kind of blessing. The school register must look like a compendium of all the things in life that one generation would want to bequeath to another – Praise, Butterfly, Improvement, Alphabet, River, Patience, Breeze, Dove, Swan, Love, Rainbow (Lavdim, Flutura, Përparim, Abetare, Lumi, Durim, Pohuiza, Kumria, Mjellma, Dashuria,Ylber).
Shpresa became my first friend in Kosovo. The day after our house- warming party she called me and invited me to lunch. It was typical of her, I would discover, and she told me later that it was an Albanian village tradition, to honour someone you’ve just met – something that had lingered in her approach to socialising despite her many years out of the village, out of the country. We sat in a busy café near her UN office and chatted about the people who drove her crazy at work, about her six-year-old son from her first marriage, about men. She told me about the years she had spent working in Germany in the ‘nineties, after she had been excluded from the University of Prishtina, along with all the other Albanian students, and I asked her all the questions I had been saving up about Kosovo.
As we watched the waiters rushing salads and makiatos to the tables around us, she said, ‘I used to work as a waitress in Germany. I swore that one day I would be the one coming out from my nicely-paid office job to sit for an hour in sunshine, and not the one sweating to serve the customers in time.’ But her job in Kosovo had its stresses too – she worked in the civil registry where people came for identity cards and UN travel documents (not passports – as Kosovars were constantly being reminded, they didn’t really have a country).
She was always ready to criticise her country, bemused and some- times angered by my compliments about the place, the things I singled out to comment on positively. One of my Kosovan friends told me later that he believes the sign that someone is truly Kosovan is when they tell you how much they’d prefer to live somewhere else.
I think Shpresa noticed before I did that I was ready to fall in love with this place. She seemed happy to act as matchmaker for me, suggesting walks before work out in the large park just outside Pristina, where she and I gossiped along the dappled trails and politely nodded good morning to the wheezing sixty-year olds in their velour tracksuits, taking an early morning walk for their health. She took me swimming in the outdoor pool set in rolling fields behind the ethnically Serb town of Gračanica, just outside Pristina, speaking politely fluent Serbian to the attendants. I asked carefully about her Serbian.
’Yes, of course I know how to speak Serbian. I played with local Serb kids as a child.’ She treated racism with disdain, as yet another sign of Kosovo’s backwardness. She offered trips to the theatre with Rob and me, and I sat attentively through my least favourite Shakespeare play translated a century ago into incomprehensible Albanian. It was with Shpresa and her boyfriend that I first went to the nearest water to Pristina, a lake forty minutes outside the capital, where we sat eating fresh fish while the boyfriend told us about how the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army, the KLA, was funded. It was with her that Rob and I ventured to a sanatorium-style thermal spa with garish streaks of rust and minerals across its paintwork, but water that left my skin like a baby’s.
I babysat her son, bought her books to fuel our pop psychology discussions (I’m OK, you’re OK from Amazon), she introduced me to her friends, and taught me words of Albanian, including the swear words. She seemed as pleased to have a British friend as I was to have a Kosovan one.
One day she called me up. ‘Are you and Rob free this evening? Would you like to come to supper at my family’s home?’
It was from Shpresa that I had first learned the uselessness of a diary in Kosovo; all arrangements were made at a moment’s notice. Her village was about an hour by car from our house. I wasn’t insured on our Kosovan car, and I wondered whether Rob would be free from work in time. But this was the first time we had been invited into any Kosovan home.
I phoned Rob at work. ‘Will we be able to go? Please?’
It was a hot summer’s evening with a dusty haze softening the light across the rolling hills. As we drove out of the city we were entering a different world. Shpresa was born in a village, and there is no-one more keenly aware of the difference in mentality between the capital we were leaving behind and the rural community we were driving towards. This was the journey of Shpresa’s life in reverse.
It was on this journey that I caught sight of my first beehive. Ranged in a field I saw a line of wooden boxes, as evenly placed as crosses in a military graveyard. The wooden boxes were about the same size as the slatted wooden weather stations you sometimes see by the road in the UK. Some were painted too. Shpresa explained what they were as we drove on past homes from which we caught whiffs of wood smoke, as dinner was being prepared, and I wondered about Shpresa’s mother getting supper ready for us in the house that Shpresa told us was yet some miles away.
We passed egg-shaped haystacks and sunburned men resting at the end of a day spent building them. Women with headscarves and lined faces stood with a hand on a hip and a glance at our car while they supervised skipping grandchildren in their front yards. Fields of maize shimmered. We saw the concrete representation of Kosovo’s tight-knit families – repeated clutches of ‘brother houses’, each group of three or four identical houses set at a respectful distance from one another in a single field, where a family of brothers had used the same architect, like DNA, with only occasional differences in paint choices or an eccentric balcony showing the effect of nurture over nature.
We caught snatches of music distorted through loudspeakers from the week-long weddings which dominate the Kosovan summer. At the edge of villages, as we passed small clogged streams, we got sudden reminders of sewage. Far from Pristina’s bars and politics, the ‘internationals’ and the big white UN cars that roamed the capital, this felt like a place where the stuff of living was really going on.
I pointed out all these things to Shpresa in delight. As the journey went on and the road surface deteriorated she responded to me less and less enthusiastically.
’You need to understand the villager mentality, Elizabeth,’ she said. The word ‘villager’ has two meanings in Albanian. It means someone who lives in a village, but also a peasant; it’s a term of abuse by city folk. I wasn’t sure exactly how Shpresa was using it now. But it was also clear that this ‘mentality’, where the world shrinks to the size of your own plot of land, wasn’t something she wanted me to think she shared, and she didn’t want me to be seduced by it.
Off the main road, and bumping along unmade tracks, Shpresa told Rob to stop when we came to a high wall with a high gate set in it. It opened and her mother and father came out to welcome us. Her parents looked old – older than they should have done for what Shpresa had told me of their age. Her father shuffled towards us and her mother stood stooped and smiling to greet us.
It was at Shpresa’s home that I learned about Albanian greetings. When we arrived, Rob and I were introduced to her mother and father. The greetings procedure began, and for the first time, thanks to Shpresa, I had a translation of this key set-piece of Albanian social contact. I was to learn that these extended ritual greetings are almost identical, with the same insistence and concern, whether with a close friend or a sales assistant. The translation runs as follows:
’How are you? Are you well? Are you tired? Did you manage to get here? Your health? Are you feeling OK? Everything OK? How’s your family? Father, mother, your husband?’ The answers, of course, are set- pieces too. How am I? Well. Am I well? Yes. Am I tired? Just a bit. Did I manage to get here? Here I am. But it is a kind of competition because at the same time that these questions are being asked of me, I should be trying to ask them of my interlocutor. There are also some required responses to some of the answers and ‘Thanks be to God’ at appropriate moments. What’s more, after this extended triangulation of my alleged state of health and well-being, attention was turned to Rob. How are you? Are you well? Are you tired?
Well, I thought we’d covered that – they’d asked me how my husband was a few minutes ago, even though they could see he was standing right beside me in a state of peak physical fitness. Maybe I hadn’t been convincing enough in my replies. The interrogation continued to him. He was answering as required – yes, he was well, no, he was only a bit tired, yes he managed to get here – here he is. And then they asked ‘how’s your wife?’
How many times do we have to tell you? Quite, quite well. But, in all honesty, now just a little bit tired.
It is a genuinely charming ritual. Where in the UK we might restrict ourselves to ‘how are you?’, perhaps throwing in the Protestant How’s work? if we really want to reach into someone’s soul, I got a sense that Kosovars were getting to the heart of things. A thousand miles from England, to be asked how my family was – Father? Mother? Everyone? I sometimes did get a lump in my throat and wanted to thank people for asking.
Once we had got through these preliminaries, Shpresa announced that her mother had prepared a special dish for us. This visit was to be our initiation into another important Kosovo Albanian institution: fli – with Kosovan honey. The enormous round tray of something like closely stacked pancakes was placed on the table and we sat down with the family – Shpresa and her parents as well as her brother who lives with his wife and two children in the family home. We all peeled off strips of fli with our fingers and ate it with helpings of yoghurt, home- cured cucumbers, home-grown tomatoes, a wedge of white cheese – and a dollop of honey.
I later understood that fli is the most lavish form of hospitality a Kosovan family can offer you; with it I had found my first comfortable role in Kosovo, in the sacred position of the guest.
My first taste of fli
Ingredients
• A triangular stand to go over a fire and support the tepsi (a round, deep baking tray; in this case about 50cm diameter)
• The saç – a metal dome which covers the tepsi and is itself covered with hot coals or ash (it’s easiest to visualise this item if you know that the word saç is also used in Albanian for a satellite dish)
• A long metal hook for lifting the saç on and off the tepsi
• The flour, butter, yoghurt and salt water for making fli
• The family cow to produce the white cheese (something between Wensleydale, curd cheese and cottage cheese, a moist paste smelling like sour milk) for serving with the fli
• Honey to drizzle over it all
Grease the tepsi
Heat the tepsi over the fire.
Sift 8 cups plain flour with 2 heaped tablespoons of salt.
Add water to the flour and salt until you have a thin batter – slightly thinner than for pancakes, but still able to coat the back of a spoon.
Drizzle strips of the batter into the tepsi in the form of sunrays from the middle. There is a theory that making fli with this distinctive design was a way of honouring the sun, which was sacred to the Illyrians –the ancient inhabitants of the Balkans.
Put the saç on top. Leave until the strips are golden with spots of brown.
Melt 400g butter and combine with 300ml of thick yoghurt.
Brush the golden strips with the butter/yoghurt mixture.
Drizzle new strips of batter into the spaces left between the ‘sunrays’ the first time.
Bake under the saç again.
Brush the more recent strips with butter/yoghurt, and continue alternating the batter with the butter/ yoghurt until all the batter is used up.
The resulting fli takes some hours to make, owing to the repeated layering and baking of the batter. I have since been told of a tradition that you shouldn’t make fli alone. No-one has been able to confirm for me whether this is superstitious or practical advice, but it is certainly true that having two people at work (one slathering with butter or drizzling batter while one heats the saç-es) will speed up the process. Of course it is possible to make the dish in an oven too (200 degrees).The fli ends up two to three inches high, and enormously wide. It’s an outsized food, making a statement about the outsized hospitality it represents. The laborious process and the huge, dense product at the end of it are the hallmark of Kosovan hospitality. I was later to eat fli in other homes, in a school where the staff had prepared it for me as a special guest, in the traditional surrounds of a restored old stone kulla – and every time the feel of the solid slab in my stomach echoed the solid slap of the enthusiastic handshake of welcome I’d received from our host. Fli is a food and also a phenomenon.
