Kosovo’s Chequers: Honey In A Recipe For Social Success

 

New Albanian vocabulary: thes (hessian)

 

I had never received an invitation from a Prime Minister before. Rob had now had six months of working for the man and was blasé about these things, but our invitation to Prime Minister Agim Çeku’s house in the country for lunch one weekend put me in a social spin.

Neither had I ever received an invitation from an ex-guerrilla general before. Agim Çeku’s past didn’t make me feel any more at ease.

To start with, what is the etiquette for a gift to take for the war hero premier of a Balkan country when he is hosting you for lunch? A box of Ferrero Rocher didn’t feel quite right.

Eventually I hit on the idea of taking some honey. Decanting a generous but not vulgar amount of the honey made by my bees into a new jar, and with some fancily-scripted Albanian announcing it to be ’Elizabeth’s Kosovan honey’ I felt that I had created the ideal personalised, patriotic luxury item.

My next worry was about what to wear. I went through my wardrobe, looking for something that would combine paramilitary chic with diplomatic cool, and yet be practical enough for a country weekend in December. Does Albanian Vogue have an advice page for this kind of thing?

Until we went into the house, I was very pleased with the outfit I’d finally chosen. At a crafts fair earlier that year I had met a young designer who makes clothing and accessories from old coffee sacks. If there actually is an Albanian Vogue then they should do an article on him – the clothes are funky, with their stencilled export destinations running down one side of a skirt, or along the pocket of a jacket. I have one of these hessian skirts with accompanying bag, stencilled ‘Kosova’. The playful jingoism of this felt just right. And I had a chunky knitted long cardigan to keep me warm, and a fancy silk scarf, plus some boots that co- ordinated with the scarf. I discovered that I didn’t have any tights without holes in them, but I found two pairs with holes in different places, which I could wear together – no bad thing anyway in these freezing temperatures – and I was pleased to discover that the small revealed stretch of tights between bottom of skirt and top of boots was entirely hole-free. I was ready for lunch.

We arrived at the PM’s house and he strode out to greet us. He was familiar, of course, from television and newspaper articles – the long legs, shaven head, ears that you could always pick out in a crowd. He’s an imposing man, but by no means an intimidating one, especially here in jeans and jumper.

His house shares a site with houses belonging to other members of the family. It’s set in fields, and chickens pecked alongside the drive as we walked up together onto frozen mud. It is not quite Chequers; a long way from Camp David. As he would later tell us with genuine pride, the Prime Minister is from a very simple family, and before he won his scholarship to the Yugoslav Military Academy in Belgrade as a teenager, he was looking forward to a career consisting of taking the family’s surplus vegetables to market every week. After that scholarship, things changed for the family in so many ways. He was based in Croatia when the war began there between Serbs and Croats, and he deserted from the Yugoslav army to offer his services to the Croatian army. When violence broke out in his own country, his professional soldiering was indispensable to the KLA with whom he became Chief of Staff. The position cost his father his life – unable to hunt down the son, at the height of the conflict in Kosovo, Serb police came to the family home here, where the chickens were pecking around us today, and took the father.

This prime minister is not an uncontroversial figure. When I told a friend in England who it was that Rob was to be working for, she said, ’isn’t that the war criminal?’ Some internet research showed me what she was referring to – actions in the war in Croatia which the Serbs allege to be war crimes. But googling ‘Agim Ceku war crimes’ also brought up an article about General Jackson, the British general I had only heard of with respect; the man who had ignored the NATO HQ order to engage the Russians at Pristina airport, and who was therefore credited with having avoided World War III. (I had heard of him, too, because of the oft-repeated family story of how my father had once acted alongside him in a school play.) The internet article declared Jackson a war criminal for his actions on Bloody Sunday. My internet research shook my clear sense of right and responsibility. I was less bothered by the possibility that these apparently good men might have done terrible things, but by the sense that if these men could do – or could even come close to doing – these things, maybe anyone could. It reinforced a sense of the luck I had to be sheltered from such experiences, my civilian ignorance and inability to understand, let alone judge, the way decisions were made in the heat and fear and confusion of battle – bone and blood, smoke sifting over unfamiliar landscapes, men far from home, isolated in their bivvies and in unnatural systems – so far from Radio 4, from Google, from the terms by which they would be judged.

They were issues that dogged me for months in Kosovo. Rob and I stayed up late arguing: what – who? – was Right for Kosovo? We never found a resolution. In the end we just got on with now, and with the future. It was the approach that most Kosovars seemed to have taken – the dead were dead; whether that was the dead they had killed or the dead they had had taken from them. I couldn’t decide whether it was cowardice or bravery to move on like that.

Çeku led us over to where one of his brothers, or maybe his cousin, was making grape raki at a still in one of the barns. Raki is a national tradition, dating back to the time before Kosovo’s Catholic or Orthodox inhabitants were converted to teetotal Islam by the Ottomans. The extent of that conversion was debatable even in the fifteenth century – many heads of families converted ‘for tax purposes’ (non-Muslims were liable for a hefty tax) while the rest of their families continued worshipping more or less openly as Christians. Today, the standard raki drunk for breakfast by many men combines with the pepperoni on pizzas offered in Pristina’s restaurants, and the uncovered heads of its fashionable and often scantily-dressed young women as evidence that Kosovo is not as you might imagine a Muslim country to be.

The common epithet for a good raki seems to be ‘clean’. To my mind, raki is clean in the same way that bleach is clean. So to my limited imagination and palate this raki did the only thing it was fit for, and warmed us up wonderfully in the sub-zero December chill. The complicated process by which it was made was explained to me, and I tried several times to understand it, before the Prime Minister, his brother – or cousin – and myself all gave up, embarrassed.

And then it was suggested that we should go inside. We didn’t initially go in to the main house, but to a room that seemed to be a common entertaining area, shared by all the family houses. It had a little bar in it, and a roaring fire. In common with all homes in Kosovo we were gestured to take off our boots before we went in. I had forgotten that this would happen.

The usual hospitable muddle of slippers lay just inside the door for us to replace our footwear, but the slippers only covered my feet, not my lower legs as the boots had done. To my squirming discomfort, I there- fore spent my day with the Prime Minister of Kosovo showing off not one but two pairs of holed tights, and dangling at the end of my inelegant legs some enormous carpet slippers that had been offered when my boots were off. I was only slightly comforted by the fact that the Prime Minister of Kosovo himself was sitting in a pair of enormous carpet slippers – but he could carry them off better than I.

In the end there was only one part of this extraordinary day where I triumphed. Despite their vegetables and their cows and their raki still, the Prime Minister’s family doesn’t have any beehives of their own. As we stood drinking, and Rob was coaxing his favourite war stories from his boss, I had found it hard to know what to say to this man whose life had been so different from mine. Even if the Prime Minister had never won that scholarship to the military academy, my conversational topics would have been limited. I am not easy in small talk with subsistence farmers.

But I had just taken a tiny step into this unfamiliar fraternity. When we all moved into the Prime Minister’s house to eat, I was able to present him with his jar of personalised honey. What’s more, he and I had a brief discussion about beekeeping – the kind of year it had been for the flowers, for the honey stocks. I knew some of this routine from having listened carefully to Adem; I had learned some of the formulae that he had used in his conversation with Mr Velija.

And then we were invited to sit down at the table for lunch, and I sank gratefully into a chair from which my legwear was not visible to anyone.

 

Lunch included delicious bread, and I subsequently got the recipe for this pogaqe:

 

Ingredients

A cup of set yoghurt

1.5 teaspoon salt

4 tbsp oil

3 cups flour

1 tbsp baking powder

1 egg

Sesame seeds

 

Put all the ingredients except the white of the egg and the sesame seeds in a bowl and mix with a spoon until you have a compact dough.

Put the dough on an oiled baking sheet and with oiled or floured hands flatten it a little. Make two incisions on the top and cover with egg white and sesame seeds.

Put in a 190 degree oven for 30 minutes.