Honey For Sale At The Ethnological Museum, Pristina
New Albanian vocabulary: zanatli (craftsman), krabëz (knitting needles)
I had been making regular visits to the Ethnological Museum where I had held my birthday party. Sometimes I took guests from England, sometimes I went alone, just to soak up its colours and its peace. Rob came to draw in the gardens, and we got to know the guides. The relationship had been forged with them as we coaxed candles to flickering flames in the fog and cut up the cakes together at my birthday party. They were an inspiring group of young Kosovars, with diverse reasons for working at the museum: Alisa, the artist, inseparable Valon and Bekim the serious young ‘etnologs’, quiet Ilir who brought me his mother’s quince jam recipe when he heard I had never cooked these strange subtle fruits before, pretty, bright Arberita, and Besnik who had been the late President Rugova’s bodyguard, and thus had impeccable party connections.
They taught me about Kosovo’s history and traditions, glossing the ethnology I had first tasted at Shpresa’s family home, a study I had developed in Adem and Xhezide’s sitting room. But I had begun to realise how unusually privileged I was in these glimpses of Kosovo. Many of my friends who, like us, were part of the international com- munity in Kosovo would grumble regularly that Kosovo had no culture, that there was nothing to do here. It hurt me for everyone’s sake to hear these kinds of complaints: I felt sad that friends were missing out on the wonderful experiences that Kosovo had offered me, and frustrated for Kosovo that it was misrepresented.
I had talked to the guides about what more could be done in the face of this mutual misunderstanding. They felt it too – the low visitor numbers at the museum were both a professional and patriotic challenge to them. ‘But what can we do?’ they asked. ‘There’s no tradition of museum-going in Kosovo. Especially if you’re not a Serb, you feel that museums have always shown other people’s history in other people’s language.’ It was perhaps ironic to set up a museum of Kosovo’s traditions, when those traditions excluded museums. And of course there were still challenges in representing the varied multi-ethnicity of Kosovo’s history in the museum. The collection did include Serbian, Gorani, Bosnian artefacts, but there was no escaping its Albanian emphasis, or the Albanian ethnicity of all of its guides, despite the fact that some of them spoke Serbian and they told me how groups from Serbia had come and been welcomed at the museum.
One idea we came up with was a programme of promotional events on summer Saturday afternoons. As my own introduction to Kosovo’s hospitality had done, the programme started off with that fli being prepared outside in the typical way over an open fire. The dark haired smiling young woman who cleaned the museum was known to be a good fli-maker and she had been invited to come and wear some of the clothes in the museum’s collection while she cooked. English Heritage would no doubt have had a fit at the impact of such an approach on conservation, but when Shuki was dressed in the outfit we knew we had a photo opportunity that the newspapers and TV stations wouldn’t pass up, and which would attract visitors hungry for culture– and traditional carbohydrates – to the museum gardens.
Shuki literally brought life to the clothes which were usually laid out in the museum. The woven loose cotton shifts seem unfeasibly long when they trail like ghosts in the museum display cabinets; it was only looking at Shuki’s outfit that I understood that the shifts are designed to be hitched up over a belt. Seeing the clothes worn also made sense of the ornate little waistcoats I’d seen pinned like exotic butterflies inside the museum. The waistcoats are so small that when they’re on display visitors often take them to be children’s clothes. But Shuki wore the waist- coat unfastened so it came scarcely further than her armpits, skirting the bust entirely, but this meant that the intricate design on the back was fully displayed across the shoulder blades when you looked from behind.
I had offered to help with whatever I could, and having set up tables in the garden, when the first visitors arrived on the first promotional Saturday afternoon I felt an adrenaline rush. I was really part of this! Over the course of the summer, subsequent Saturday afternoons attracted hundreds of people. The expats who filled the UN and EU missions, the international liaison offices (they still couldn’t be called embassies) and aid missions, came. The few dusty and intrepid back- packers who made it to Kosovo as an original twist on an inter-railing summer found their way to us. Our friends joined us, and friends-of- friends, and people who became friends as we talked together – about Kosovo, about the food. Every Kosovar had a fli story to tell – about cooking it in the park on the 1 May holiday, about whose was best, how modern oven-baked fli didn’t taste anything like the properly-prepared, open-fired traditional dish. There would usually be someone from Gjakova and someone from Pristina arguing over the name for the tool used to lift the lid in between layering’s of batter.
For the first few weeks of the programme everyone got a plate of fli and honey with their entry ticket. But as we realised that people were coming back Saturday after Saturday we changed the programme slightly every week, offering the sights and smells of different dishes being prepared, added traditional music and crafts. I took responsibility for sending out an email to the mailing list we had built up of people interested in culture in Kosovo so that each week they were alerted to what would be happening at the museum that weekend.
The media had enjoyed the days as much as anyone – during the summer low season for news, the appeal of a story celebrating the national dish of Kosovo prepared by a beautiful woman in national costume was a no-brainer; motherhood and apple pie. The journalists had relished the fact, too, that so many non-Kosovars had come to eat and learn to make these quintessentially local dishes. On one Saturday we had realised that we were going to need two tepsis of food in order to keep up with the sixty or so visitors needing feeding during the afternoon, so we made an arrangement with the nearest bakery that they would bake one tray for us while the other cooked in the traditional way over the open fire outside. In the end it was me who had gone to collect the tepsi and as I had walked through the wide wooden gates of the museum compound bearing the large steaming tray, the television cameras had caught me. The story that night on the news was ’foreigner thinks fli delicious’ along with sound bites from others of the multi-national group of visitors all agreeing that this odd dish dripping with honey was a wonderful treat.
It was part of the special treatment frequently offered to me and other foreigners by Kosovars. When I went shopping, of course people recognised that I was foreign. As far as I ever found out they didn’t charge higher prices – if anything, they were likely to throw in an extra nectarine, and thank me for everything my country had done. What does one do in a situation like that? Throw back the nectarine and say you don’t want any kickbacks? Accept graciously. One day I was at the post office when it suddenly started raining, in one of those angry showers that make it impossible to travel more than a few steps before feet start slipping inside shoes, clothes chafe, hair sticks to your face. On my way out of the post office I found a gaggle of perhaps fifteen Kosovan men and women, most older than me, sheltering under the entrance and waiting for the weather to pass. I took my place among them when the woman who had sold me my stamps came hurrying out from behind her desk. ‘Take this,’ she offered, holding out an umbrella.
Why should I take it? Why not the seventy-year-old man who looked arthritic? But it was not mine to pass on. I gestured at the others. ’Take it, take it,’ the woman insisted, so I mutely accepted it and set off through the storm, leaving the others waiting, with guilt squelching at my every step home. It was a literal representation of a layer I felt being imposed between me and my experience of Kosovo.
What were the reasons for this excessive care shown to me? Respect? Hope of some return? Gratitude to my country, of which I was the only ambassador the stamp-seller had perhaps ever spoken to? A lack of understanding of the kind of engagement I would prefer? Shpresa suggested that it was because of my attempts to learn the language. This is depressingly rare – at one point I was invited as studio guest to a Kosovan TV show whose theme was ‘foreigners who have learned Albanian’. There were three of us on the panel.
The guides shrugged when I complained about the photos of me with food at the museum. ‘At least it’s publicity for us.’ But despite our work during those summer Saturdays, the museum remained Pristina’s best-kept secret. I’d read in the ESI think tank’s report, A Future for Pristina’s Past, about the socialist era determination to ‘destroy the old, build the new’, creating a brave new capital, and removing the rough edges of natural material, the fussy details of history. From the stall- holders selling second-hand books outside the grim 1970s Grand Hotel I had bought books from one or two generations back, their garish Technicolor showing off a migraine vision of Modernity. The concrete manifestations of that vision now stand skid-marked and stained on the ruins of former Ottoman-era elegance, and the Ethnological Museum is the only place in the capital where you can see what an eighteenth- century Kosovan home would have looked like. But still people didn’t know about it.
Clearly, we needed some new strategies. And the people who visited the museum seemed to be our best ambassadors. I thought about the ‘waggle dance’ of bees – the sophisticated language of dance used by bees to share information about sources of nectar they have found. I’d noticed the strange movements of bees at the entrance to my hive and had looked up some information about what the motions mean. The waggle dance is a figure of eight; its angle from the sun indicates direction while the duration of the dance, which can be repeated over a hundred times, shows distance. In a well-networked place like Kosovo where one person links to an extended family, often in the same house or compound, we needed to give people a reason to communicate about the museum with one another, to do their own tongue-waggling information-sharing about us.
When people do come they are always impressed. I have never seen a visitor leave after a cursory glance; never heard any criticism of the museum – other than how difficult it is to find. The visitor’s book is covered in comments from people for whom a visit has clearly been an epiphany:
‘I am so pleased that I came here and that you have managed to explain Albanian culture and traditions, even more so for those of us në gurbet [this word means something between emigration and exile]. Enormous significance for me. Thank you very much from an Albanian Swedish soldier.’(In misspelled Albanian)
‘This day will stay in our memories for a long time because of what we’ve learned about our centuries-old traditions’ – class 8 (the 14-year-olds) from a local school.
‘The most beautiful museum in the world... oh, how wonderful it is to be Albanian.’
‘I am proud to belong to this people – who could not be proud on coming here? Protect our cultural treasures and values; this will make us civilised and European.’
We liked the idea that the museum could be seen as an inspiration for on-going creativity in the worlds of art and design, and not just a closed display case of things created long ago and no longer used. So the guides and I wrote a proposal and got funding for a creative ‘residency’ week. Craftspeople were invited to come to the museum during the week, to demonstrate their work, and then on the final day to sell their products in a fair that was to take over all the rooms of the museum.
The week brought us more than 600 visitors. Women’s groups from communities across Kosovo – Serbian, Roma, Bosnian, Albanian, Gorani – sat among the exhibits and created new and beautiful things. They knitted, they crocheted, they sewed, they did something called ’oia’ which magicked fine edging and fragile flowers from knots in simple cotton thread. Watching them, I felt like an illiterate might do observing people writing. They seemed to be simply looping and twisting, knotting and stabbing with some very basic tools and raw materials. These loops and knots hold no meaning for me, even though I understand that the finished product has meaning. And when I tried to replicate them, I was left with loops and knots but no meaning or finished product at all. I sat in awe to watch them work in the sun-filled çardak as their predecessors must have done before them.
Men came, too – woodcarvers, hat makers, filigree jewellers, potters. And on Saturday the accumulated production of the week’s creative profusion was displayed. This was the chance for honey to have its day. I had recently found skeps being sold in Pristina and asked the shop whether they would be able to come to the museum on Saturday to sell them – both full-sized, and a small ornamental variety. I suggested that they might bring honey too. So as the throngs of people left the museum that Saturday with hand-knitted socks, pots, earrings and the typical white felt plis hats, many also had tucked under their arms a traditional teardrop hive. Even more of them carried honey. As they buzzed off home, I hoped that they would act as pollinators for us themselves, carrying the news of the museum, sharing out leaflets – doing the more decorous human equivalent of the bee dance to show the location of the best nectar, the richest flowering.
Ilir’s mother’s recipe for quince jam, reçel
Wash and peel the quinces.
Cut into small pieces.
Put into a heavy-bottomed pan 1.2 kilograms sugar for every kilogram of quince, and enough water for it to be wet through.
Slowly add the pieces of quince (note: quince spatters as it cooks so you might want to consider using a long spoon or wearing rubber gloves to protect your hands as you stir).
Boil until the quince has turned to amber and softened.