On The Trail Of The ‘Primitives’

 

New Albanian vocabulary: sera (greenhouses)

 

 

Everyone in Kosovo knows the difference between theory and practice. The paper version of the country’s systems is often unrecognisable from the comfortable chaos of life on the ground. But the paper version makes for interesting reading, and in March I was copied in on a series of slightly nervous group emails from friends in Kosovo alerting one another to new traffic regulations.

For example, from that date onwards, you were required to have your headlights on while driving, whatever time of day or night, and a new scale of fines had been introduced, bringing the price of infringement of even relatively minor regulations to an on-the-spot payment of what would be a few days’ wage for someone like Colonel Xhavit, and an impossible amount for a smallholder like Adem largely outside the cash economy. Enough to get people checking their seatbelts and keeping their mobile phones in their pockets for the first few weeks, at least.

One friend sent round a link to the Kosovo Assembly website where you could find the full text of the law. I thought I might check whether there were any even nastier catches in the small print so I had a brief scroll through the many many pages of the legislation in its English version provided on the website. The first thing that became obvious was the charming – and sometimes unhelpful – translation. I sensed that the translator was perhaps a frustrated poet or thesaurus- compiler. For example, throughout the text, the adjective used to describe illuminated headlights was ‘aglow’. It painted an idyllic picture of the rural roads of Kosovo, softly lit by their law-abiding drivers. It also revealed that there were indeed some extra rules to be aware of; for example, mud on your wheels would cost you an immediate fine, in an extension of the Albanian fetish about cleanliness which has led to the phenomenon of their near-monopoly on car washes, not only in Kosovo but in the countries which host the Albanian diaspora. If you use a car wash in a major urban area in the UK, try saying ‘faleminderit’ next time you’re thanking them, and see what reaction you get…

The Assembly website made available a whole library of legal documentation to me and was another reminder of living in the newest country in the world. Sometimes in Kosovo I felt that I was getting a glimpse of what working life for Thomas Jefferson might have been like in the 1770s.Along with all the excitement about Kosovo’s new flag and new anthem, a new country has to have new laws. Not that this had come as a surprise to anyone – people like Vedat had been working since 1999 on laws to be promulgated by the United Nations Secretary General’s Special Representative for Kosovo. Kosovo now had sovereignty but there was still a long list of laws it needed to develop; the website announced that the country now had a law on blood transfusion and blood products, a law on personal names, a law on organic farming, a law on noise protection, a law on apiculture...

A law on apiculture! I clicked on that.

I learned that enshrined in Kosovan law is the principle that apiculture is ‘an important sector of the country’s agriculture, a source of natural high nutritive, dietary and medical value products’. The law also explained that there should be an annual register taken of beekeepers and the number of hives they have.

It made me wonder about numbers. How many beekeepers were there in Kosovo then? And how would that compare to the UK? Still at my computer, two clicks took me to the British Beekeeping Association and from there to an automated form where I had to enter a verification code (do the BBKA really get overloaded with malicious spam through their automated form?) and type my question about the number of beekeepers and hives in the UK. Within 24 hours I had received a reply from Letitia of the BBKA, telling me that they have11 500 members on the register, and copied to the General Secretary in case he could give anything more specific. Two hours later he emailed me a link to the DEFRA website where I found what is known about Britain’s beekeepers – that they are composed of 200-300 commercial beekeepers but, more importantly, 44 000 hobbyists with about 274 000 colonies who produce the bulk of the UK’s honey. The numbers are approximate because registering is voluntary, but they suggest an average of six hives per beekeeper in the UK. The total production in the UK is 6000 tonnes of honey.

I enjoyed the Kosovan version of information gathering rather more. I happened to see that a Kosovan friend of mine who had worked at the Ministry of Agriculture was online on MSN Messenger. So, despite the fact that she was in America at the time, I was able to send her a message asking who I should speak to at the Ministry. She sent back the mobile number of her colleague, Bajram, the Director of the Animal Production Department, and I called him to ask my question.

The Director’s response to my question about how many bee- keepers there are in Kosovo wasn’t the suspicion at being asked such a question by a foreigner (is someone checking up on me? Why?) that I’d feared.

’Hajde,’ he suggested. ‘We can have a coffee tomorrow and talk about it.’ I thought about the BBKA’s verification code to stop malicious spam.

When I arrived at his office I was introduced to his colleague who is responsible for the bee register in Kosovo. He seemed pleased to show me the results of his work which are a truly impressive and apparently comprehensive reflection of beekeeping in Kosovo (or at least in those parts of Kosovo to which a Ministry of Agriculture official would have access – Serbs did not accept the legitimacy of the Kosovan government so the bee-counters hadn’t ventured to the Serbian-speaking bees north of the River Ibar).

Their data on the bee population of Kosovo, even given its significant geographical limitations, is strikingly more accurate and practical than the equivalent data available on the country’s human population. Kosovo’s last useful census was in 1981.This was followed by a census in 1991 but as that was boycotted by Albanians it is almost useless as a tool for determining population size. So you would have thought that it would have been pretty important for the international community to organise a census here as soon as possible after they arrived to administer Kosovo in 1999.At the very least it would have been useful to have a census at the time when it would have been expected in the normal cycles – i.e. 2001.

But the issue of the census has got bogged down in politics. There are some ethnic minorities in Kosovo who don’t see their interests being served by having their exact numbers known. So nobody does.

Nor does anyone know how large a population to plan schools for, to plan medical services for, how much sewage to expect to be accommodating, how much water, what the likely spending power of the population could be…

The best guesses for population information are based on primary school registration, but working out how large the Kosovan population is from looking at primary school enrolments is like trying to identify the number of bees from the number of pots of honey on sale in the shops. Bajram’s colleagues had done a much better job.

Their findings tell us that there are 6453 beekeepers in Kosovo – as a proportion of the population this is four or five times the level of beekeeping in the UK. The beekeepers have an average of eleven hives so it is also a hobby carried on more intensively here than in the UK. And I was thrilled to think that of the 1774 hives recorded on his list for the wider Pristina municipality, two were my little boxes at Adem’s.

But production here was 708 tonnes in 2007, so on average these hives are half as productive as the UK’s. Curious about why that might be, I started looking at the data on the type of hives that are used in each municipality. I had assumed that they would all be the Langstroth-Root, filing cabinet type that I have on Adem’s farm. But seven per cent of them are the ‘Dadant-Blatt’ hives about which the only information I’ve had is that they ‘open like a book’ which has given me a great desire to hold one and learn to ‘read’ honey. And there are still four per cent of Kosovo’s bee colonies housed in the wicker skeps, called here ’primitives’, of the kind that I’d bought and seen stored in Adem’s barn for emergencies.

I asked Bajram about this; how might I get to see a skep that’s in use? Bajram paused. ‘Would you and your husband like to come to my house tomorrow, and we could go and visit my neighbour, Rexhep, who has these hives?’

For all the swift click-throughs to data provided in the BBKA’s online service, I don’t think they can beat Kosovo.

The next morning, Saturday, Rob and I set off with Bajram’s hand- drawn map. He had assured me that with the map we couldn’t fail to find his house, but I was extremely uncertain. The map showed four landmarks – the word PRISHTINA, the name of the village before which we were to turn off the main road from Pristina after 25 kilo- metres, a set of three greenhouses, and a child’s-style drawing of a yellow house. Bajram had taken his highlighter from the pot on his desk specially to colour this house in. Reviewing these landmarks, I had taken his mobile number too, considering that we would have a better chance of finding him with that.

We were approaching the village of Komoran, before which we were supposed to turn, but only once we’d seen the three greenhouses. Greenhouses may be rarer in Kosovo than in the UK, but even so I couldn’t see them being a useful distinguishing feature.

Suddenly three hove into view, and right by them was a turning. We screeched round it and continued along the track for some way, looking for the highlighter-yellow house.

’There it is!’ And there was Bajram coming out with his son to greet us. We pulled up, and after introductions and greetings, the two of them got into the car, and directed us further along the road, as it deteriorated considerably. They explained that they were taking us to Rexhep’s house where we could see a primitive hive in use.

After twenty minutes of driving roads bordered by fields and the occasional farm, we stopped.

The main reason for this was that we had just seen something extraordinary in a field: a Serbian tank.

 

 

It was a rather old Serbian tank, and a very burnt one. Apparently it had a KLA grenade thrown into it during 1999; when I asked, the people who came out to look at us were coy about telling me whether there had been anyone inside it at the time.

’Why is it here?’ I asked, rather naively. The answer to that question could go on a long time. But the man standing nearby who I’d asked answered me very simply, ‘Once it was burned, the Serbs didn’t want to come to take it away.’

’Didn’t you want it gone?’ He shrugged and smiled. He seemed rather proud of it.

This is the kind of sight I’d expected to come across all over Kosovo – a war-scarred country with military hardware rotting in its fields. But despite the casual references to armed conflict I had got used to in Kosovo’s urban landscape: the sign that said ‘discharge your weapon here’ on the way into the post office, schools I’d visited that were named after heroes fallen in the 1990s Albanian liberation campaign, the photographs of the missing hung up outside the government building which I saw whenever I went to meet Rob at work, this was the first time I’d seen anything as blunt as this as a wartime souvenir.

When we arrived at Rexhep’s house, he was bemused but hospitable. He took us round his hives, which were stacked up on the slope near his house. I got out my protective clothing and he sneered a little in the most polite way. He himself was walking round in casual black clothes – the colour I had been told bees are most likely to attack; his jumper was made of wool, apparently a material which also incites bees to sting. He offered to open up a hive, and from behind my mesh hood I accepted happily. But I couldn’t see his smoker – the tool that with Adem I’d learned was so invaluable to beekeepers for calming the bees enough to be able to study what’s going on inside their hive. As he got out a pack of Marlboro, I discovered that Rexhep’s was the open- necked, cowboy approach to beekeeping. Lighting up, he puffed some of the cigarette smoke out over the bees. A bit of fag ash dropped into the honey cells at the same time, but he wasn’t bothered. The smoke seemed to work, and nothing flew out on the attack as we looked at the bees busy inside the hive.

Thinking about the burnt-out tank near his house, I was interested in knowing what happened to the hives during the war. ‘What happened to them during the war?’ echoed Rexhep ironically. ‘Some Serb soldiers just got a lot of honey.’

He and the family had left their home and fled to Turkey. His wife had been heavily pregnant at the time, and gave birth while they were away. His silent nine-year-old daughter was standing watching us from a distance, and he explained that the name they gave her was the Turkish for ‘refugee’. It’s a hell of a start in life.

I didn’t like to seem rude to either him or to Bajram who had so kindly arranged for us to come here, but in our tour of the bee farm I hadn’t seen any skeps around; all the hives were the box type. I asked tentatively, ‘and are all your hives Langstroth-Root?’ He answered that he did have some skeps but they weren’t in use this year. With Bajram standing next to me, I tried not to look disappointed.

Perhaps Rexhep felt he had let someone down; he took me over to see the skep that had been used last year. Turning it upside down you could see the remains of honeycomb.

’Where did you get the “primitive” from?’ I asked.

’I made it myself,’ he answered as if it was obvious. I took a freshly respectful look at the work that had gone into the weaving – one strong stick spliced and then each of the splinters used to structure the conical shape with other withies woven as a weft around the whole structure. Then it had been plastered with what looked like mud, or cow dung.

I loved this object – I loved its shape and efficiency and history. Evidently Rexhep sensed this and he offered the skep to me. Then I felt awkward that my cupidity or envy had been so obvious. He insisted, I said again how lovely it was, but how I wouldn’t want to take it when he could use it. In the end I offered some money, hoping that this wasn’t offensive. Rexhep refused once politely but on the second attempt at giving it to him he accepted, and I picked up my large, shitty, wicker bee trophy with a grin.

He continued showing us around his land, a typical Kosovan small- holding with some chickens, vegetables, a cow and calf, and a hambar (another traditional form that I have grown to love in Kosovo – a distinctive wooden construction built particularly for storing corn cobs). His was old and I asked to take a photograph of it. It was propped against the boundary fence to his property, and across the fence the neighbours stood staring at me. Fair enough.

 

A hambar for storing corncobs, a long thin shed seen on every Kosovan smallholding

 

We were offered drinks and some intense spoonful’s of honey, and then we started our farewells. Rexhep was clearly uncomfortable about something, and I wondered whether it was the lack of a working skep – or maybe it was the money I’d given him. I thanked him again for the handmade hive and explained how precious it was to me. ‘Thank you for your time and your hospitality.’

But he was darting off, into the shed where the hens laid. He brought out three warm white eggs. A present for us. We were extremely grateful.

We thanked him for everything again – for his time and his hospitality.

Still Rexhep seemed uncomfortable. He darted away once more, and this time came out of the shed with a chicken. To my horror I realised he was offering it to us and I panicked – we wouldn’t know what to do with a chicken. We had nowhere for it to run, and my vegetarian principles wouldn’t allow me to let it die of anything other than old age. And how the hell would we get it home? And how to explain any of this without seeming prissy, ungrateful, foreign city-types?

I tried to explain about not having anywhere for it to live, until Rexhep offered to break its neck there and then. Hastily, I moved on to explaining about vegetarianism but then ran out of any vocabulary to do so. Reverting to the only theme I seemed to be able to master in this unfolding social disaster, and wondering how we and the chicken could get out of this alive, I thanked Rexhep again for the eggs and made movements towards the gate. To my relief, Bajram stepped in at this point. He would take the chicken, he quietly assured me, and I could keep my eggs. Some twine was found to wrap the chicken’s legs, and as a party we thanked Rexhep again – for his time and his hospitality, for his extraordinary generosity. Everyone relaxed a little bit (even, perhaps, the chicken) and we made our way out to the car.

The chicken was placed in the back of the 4x4 and we all set off along the bumpy track to Bajram’s house. This is what the Land rover sitting in our city carport must dream of, bouncing along challenging roads with livestock in the back. What an adventure for all of us – even, perhaps, the chicken.

I was overwhelmed by what I had received from and through Bajram. And I thought of the poor, efficient staff at the BBKA who didn’t have the chance to work like this.

Bajram was enjoying himself too, I think. After all, he had got a free chicken out of the day. And just as Rob and I were doing some slightly bizarre tourism among the farms of western Kosovo, he was taking the opportunity for some cultural exchange. He was a nice, respectful man, and seemed almost out of his depth on this one. But I liked him even more for trying. He cleared his throat. ‘Elizabeth? I have heard of vegetarianism of course, but can you tell me a bit more about it. About its rules?’

I dread this question, even when it’s asked by people who I think might have the cultural context to understand my answer. And I don’t have a clear answer. My vegetarianism is composed of squeamishness, habit, concern for health, something about humanity which I can’t articulate properly because I’m not an animal lover, and some sound environmental science about methane and trophic levels and the number of calories it takes to produce a kilo of beef compared to the number of calories it takes to produce a kilo of cabbage. And I didn’t think Bajram was going to understand any of it, certainly not in my Albanian translation.

But I gave it a go. I explained that I am not a Hindu, I explained that I do eat fish, that I don’t eat chicken, that I do eat eggs and I do wear leather. He didn’t understand. But I had increased respect for him for trying. I didn’t think I’d even scratched the surface of the reality of rural life in Kosovo either, but I hoped people might give me credit for effort.