The Bees And The Gurabies
New Albanian vocabulary: grabitje (robbing)
No-one in Kosovo quite understood this book. I told people that I was writing about bees and beekeeping, about honey and the people who’d led me to it, but it was losing something in translation. Despite my protests to the contrary, people saw it as a technical book about bee- keeping, even though they knew that I had first seen a hive up close less than 18 months before. I suppose this isn’t so surprising given that the international missions which ran this country were mainly staffed by people who first saw Kosovo up close less than 18 months previously. If you treat these people as experts, then perhaps you’d accept a begin- ner lecturing you on how to mind your own beeswax too. I’m not just being snide – there really is a sense that any given member of the inter- national community is likely to know better about any given subject than their Kosovan counterpart. It’s most frightening when this view is articulated by Kosovars themselves.
So people thought that I was writing a ‘how to’ manual for this arcane and complex art and science of beekeeping; and unreservedly they seemed to want to help me get it written. Valon, jashtëzakonisht i mirë Ethnological Museum guide and friend, had been suggesting for a while that I should come and speak to his neighbour who was a bee- keeper of some thirty years experience. So we finally fixed a time, and I turned up at Valon’s village, soon to become a Pristina suburb as new building infilled the precious few green spaces between the two.
Muharrem, whom we visited down the road from Valon, shares his name with the Bektashi Muslim month of fasting (similar to Ramadan for other branches of Islam). When we arrived at his house we were shown into the garden where he sat in the shade of a spreading tree, with a younger beekeeper taking advice from him. The ascetic connection made by his name was reinforced when he reminded us that one of the most famous of his beekeeper brethren was Gandhi. I took my place near the other beekeeper, and listened to Muharrem talking.
He was a natural lecturer – and did not welcome interruptions. He had heard that I was writing a book about beekeeping and told me what should go in it. He started with a history of beekeeping, taking in India and the ancient Egyptians (who apparently kept a species of bee that doesn’t sting); he talked about different hive designs, sending his daughter off to bring out as visual aid a ‘primitive’ hive he was given by a beekeeper in Turkey. From this he explained about the ‘Dadant- Blatt’ hives I’ve never seen, and the modern Langstroth-Root versions that his bees are in, like mine. All the time he was gesturing with his packet of cigarettes – first it was Asia, and around it he mapped the world and the spread of beekeeping. Then it was the frames of the Langstroth-Root hive. As he outlined his personal method for organising the frames within the hive, he used it again, explaining that the bees fill their honeycomb from right to left ‘like Arabic’.
I tried to stop him to explain what kind of book it was that I was writing, but he just put up a hand. I wondered what it would have been like to have attempted interrupting Gandhi.
Luckily a natural break in the conversation came when his daughter came out from the house with some little scone-like cakes. She told us they are ‘gurabie’ which I presumed was a direct translation of ‘rock cakes’ given that the word ‘gur’ is Albanian for stone. My etymology turned out to be wrong, but the idea was right, and the ‘rock cakes’ were tasty.
While Muharrem had his mouth full, I sneaked in a hurried explanation of my book. I wouldn’t presume to write a technical book on beekeeping; only been a beekeeper for 18 months; interested in learning more about the story of beekeeping in Kosovo now and in the past.
I think he was pleased by this, and he relaxed into the story of his own bees. He used to have more than a hundred hives, but at the time of my visit was down to something less than forty. During the war in 1999 he and his family left as refugees for Turkey (where he introduced his personal system for organising the frames in a hive to people he met there, and was given the ‘primitive’ he had shown us earlier, in thanks). When he came back he had only nine hives left. I asked why that was: were they ransacked by Serb forces like Rexhep’s, or stolen, or did they die from neglect?
He explained about his neighbour’s son who was being attacked by Serb forces in the house next door. The boy ran away from them, escaping into Muharrem’s garden where he tried hiding between the hives. A helicopter overhead – Muharrem’s cigarette packet came into action again as visual aid, though my imagination was working quite well anyway – saw him, and started firing, wounding him, as well as damaging some of the hives. In his panic and pain the boy thrashed out and knocked over several more, leaving the honey accessible to the bees from others of Muharrem’s colonies.
In a situation like this, bees have a short-term strategy for success which is disastrous in the long term: if other bees’ honey is left exposed, they will abandon the regulated harmony of their own hive for a ‘robbing’ spree when they will gorge themselves on the free honey – until it runs out. Their own hive will by this time have been neglected past redemption and they die. This is what happened in Muharrem’s garden when hives were abandoned for bees to raid the spilling honey, and he lost the majority of his colonies.
It was a powerful, poignant story to hear on this sunny day, sitting quietly under the tree by Muharrem’s hives, and it seemed like the story of the Kosovo campaign in miniature – the damage, the injury, the looting and economic devastation.
But Muharrem wasn’t depressed. He was telling me now how much he loves his bees, how he takes his coffee down to the hives every morning and sits there sipping it and watching them going about their business. I was jealous. I have never yet found a way to explain to Adem that I would like to pursue my beekeeping apprenticeship like this occasionally. I wondered whether Adem ever even does this himself. Does he sit watching my bees swirling round those from his own hives on their endless mission for flowers and sweetness? I would love to think so.
It’s an image of peaceful cohabitation. I had no idea of Muharrem’s politics, and from his implacable hand in the face of my attempted interruptions earlier I could imagine he could be a fierce defender of the way he thought things should be. But maybe his Gandhism might extend to an acceptance, a promotion, of the idea that with ‘an eye for an eye, the whole world ends up blind.’ Maybe. After all, it’s a sunny day in a beautiful garden.
His daughter reappeared from the house. Following my praise of her gurabie she had written out the recipe for me. For me, the cakes will always have the memory of the garden where a boy tried to shelter from gunfire among the beehives; and where homes and families then built themselves up again, so you can now sit there in the mornings with a coffee and feel at peace.
Gurabie
To make 15-20
Ingredients
70ml oil
1 egg
140g sugar
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
70ml yoghurt*
500g plain flour
Preheat oven to 220 degrees. Mix ingredients together to make a stiff dough (the instructions I was given here say that it should be ‘thick as dough for making pite (see p.109. Test your earlobe again). Form the dough into balls of 5-8cm diameter and coat with egg yolk.
Bake for 15 minutes until golden.
* I had wondered at the repeated use of yoghurt in Kosovan baking where milk would be used in English recipes. I had assumed it was related to the difficulty of keeping milk fresh, making a virtue of necessity. It was only one day when I wanted to make a basic cake recipe from the UK and wasn’t able to find baking powder in the shops that I realised why yoghurt is so important.The gas which makes cakes rise is produced by the combination of acid and alkali; both these are present in baking powder (or self-raising flour) but another way to achieve the same raising agent is to combine alkaline bicarbonate of soda with yoghurt’s acidity.