My B-Day

 

New Albanian vocabulary: flamur (flag), U bëfsh njëqind vjeç (may you live to 100 – the traditional birthday greeting)

 

 

As the honeymoon of that first summer in Pristina turned to autumn I started to make plans for a big day that was coming up. I am always childishly excited about my birthday, and this year I had discovered that I would have others to join in the celebrations with me: one of the first indicators that Kosovo was a place I could feel at home, belong, was discovering a deep connection between my birthday and Kosovo’s history.

On our very first morning in Kosovo, being driven to register at the British Office I had seen my birthday being used as a road name. It turns out that 28 November is a day of significance not just for me, but for all Albanians. On 28 November 1443, the Albanian hero Scanderbeg became head of the Kastrioti region, from which he waged his legendary attacks against the Ottomans. On 28 November 1912, the Albanian flag (Scanderbeg’s double headed eagle) was raised in Vlora and Albania came of age. From then on, the date was celebrated as Flag Day. Accordingly, the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army, the KLA, chose28 November 1997 to first appear in public.

This year, my birthday was going to be a very special one. After all, a whole country would be celebrating with me. In fact, it was also going to be the starting point for this book.

Walking home on the evening before my birthday, with my head full of treats and presents, I realised that this was how a child – perhaps a pampered princess – might plan their birthday. The town was decked in Scanderbeg’s flag, and there was a holiday atmosphere everywhere. Like a child, I couldn’t help myself blurting out to everyone I met in the shops that it would be my birthday in the morning.

I woke up with a great sense of anticipation. I am used to being spoiled with a small pile of presents from Rob. I sat up in bed and smoothed down a space in front of me. Rob saw what I was doing and smiled indulgently. ‘This birthday you have one present from me,’ he said, and handed over a small, hard heavy parcel. Inside was a pot of amber honey.

I think what I said was, ‘oh!’

As he knew, I do love honey. My appetite had only grown during my introduction to it on fli and llokuma. And from the look of it, this was good quality honey that would be great to spread on toast. Maybe he had also bought me some bread, and we could celebrate my birthday with a sandwich…

Then Rob showed me a photograph. It was of a weathered old wooden box like the ones I had seen from the car, against a deep land- scape of uninterrupted hills. ‘This is your hive,’ he explained, ‘and this is the honey that came from it.

’It was the perfect present. Not only was Bee my family nickname, but the world of the hive had always been a fascination for me. Bees had cured me of the glandular fever that had cost me over a term of missed school as a teenager – I had only recovered when a family friend had prescribed me royal jelly, and the bees’ nutrient-rich food for their queen had saved my exam results.

I had first dreamed of keeping bees myself a year before, in London, when I read Lark Rise to Candleford with the descriptions of self-sufficiency in sweetness from the village hives. This present made that dream come true, but it was a complex gift that also offered me a role in Kosovo, a craft I could learn – a colony I could rule, perhaps, while Rob tinkered with the bizarre politics of human beings. I loved the fact that it would bring me into deeper and more meaningful contact with life in Kosovo’s countryside.

The day’s activities crowded in on us after that early morning quiet view of the hills in the photograph. Rob was busy writing a speech for the Prime Minister for Flag Day. And, buoyed up by the sense of celebration, for the first time in my adult life I was hosting a birthday party.

I had found a fairy-tale setting for it – the eighteenth-century house which is now part of Kosovo’s Ethnological Museum. The house is my favourite place in Pristina – indeed, I am the founder of the seventy- people-strong Facebook group ‘The Emin Gjiku House/Ethnological Museum is my favourite place in Pristina.’ The building is made of wood, with elaborate shutters, and the two entrances typical of homes in Kosovo – one for guests and one for the family. The civilised life led by at least some of its inhabitants is evident from its design – the çardak suntrap where meals could be eaten in spring, the beautiful carved woodwork of its oda or living room (the word is Turkish and it is from this that we get our word odalisque. I have a strong urge to offer my services as an odalisque whenever I walk into the seductive luxury of this old house).The room is carpeted in rich red colours from rugs that cover the floor and the minder – a seating construction running the length of the room.

In front of the seating area is a mangall – a metal bowl with integral stand that would have been filled with coals. These offered heating, could be used for lighting cigarettes, and – most importantly – for making coffee for guests. Coffee making and hosting guests was men’s work, and as such was done in the elegant quarters of the oda rather than the stone-flagged kitchen, the women’s domain.

For my celebration I would be breaking with this house’s tradition of hospitality, then, as the party was going to take place in the kitchen. This was my choice, fretful about the beautiful rugs of the oda, the crumbly cake I was going to serve, and the possible clumsiness of sixty guests carrying glasses of red wine. No-one at the museum seemed worried, so in the end I brought my own fire extinguishers and made my own notices about guests not taking their drinks into the carpeted areas.

I think I was the first person to have used this as a venue for a birth- day party (with the exception, I assume, of the family whose home it was until it became a museum in the 1950s).The success of it as a place to celebrate was reinforced six months after my party when a high- profile high-society party was held there to celebrate the birthday of former Prime Minister, Ramush Haradinaj. He was unfortunately unable to attend himself, as he was detained in The Hague facing war crime charges at the time.

But on 28 November 2006 the party being brought to the old house was a new idea. In fact, when I turned up at 3pm to start to organise the event, the building was locked up and the policeman on duty outside said he knew nothing of the evening. There was temporarily no electricity and no water.

 

A place to party: the oda in the eighteenth-century house which is part of Pristina’s Ethnological Museum

 

The museum guides turned up shortly afterwards, and we formed ourselves into an impromptu party preparation team, joined by the policeman whose initial suspicion was transformed into the telling of incomprehensible jokes and the consumption of cake. By the time the guests arrived at six, the cold old building had also been transformed. Wine was mulling on a portable gas stove set up in one of the out- buildings, flowers glowed in the hearth of the old kitchen and tables of food stood ready, including eight sponge cakes which Rob had smuggled in, nervous lest any of his former KLA fighter colleagues should get to hear of his baking prowess.

The weather was foul with a freezing fog that made it unappealing to be outside. However, we lit candles to show the way from the museum’s high wooden gates, and they flickered entrancingly through the haze and led people up the dramatic path, through the frozen gardens to the house itself. Despite the fog, people came – many seeing the museum site for the first time – and laughed, and ate and drank. It was a perfect evening and the photographs show me always smiling and always a little pink, in the giddy warmth of new friendships.

In Kosovo’s strange slow courtship of me, that night marked a significant stage. I have a theory about making home in new houses – that they won’t feel completely yours until you have done five things in them: prepared a meal, used the toilet, had sex, returned there after a break away, and hosted guests. Hosting so many warm, generous people in this most Kosovan of settings, whatever else I did not do there, was a powerful experience. I was beginning to feel like I belonged some- where at this end of Europe. And thanks to my birthday present from Rob, I now felt a meaningful connection beyond Pristina, with one small corner of a foreign field that was really mine, busy with my bees.