The Yugoslav Idea (Blogging Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)

The whole of history since the ascension of Jesus into heaven is concerned with one work only: the building and perfecting of this “City of God.”

St. Augustine

THE ONLY QUESTION in western political philosophy is how people live together.  All forms of government seek to answer this question.  We most often talk about this in terms of thesis and antithesis, examining the differences between republicanism and monarchy, democracy and autocracy, prime ministers and dictators, power and autonomy, pluralism and homogeneity.  These oppositional dichotomies tend to dominate our understanding of politics and distract from the similarities they often share.  I find it much more illuminating to compare like cases than unlike cases.  Which brings us to the idea, and the problem, of Yugoslavia.

The idea of a political union of the western Balkans dates to the 17th century and took its modern form following the 1848 national revolutions in Europe.  During World War I, politicians in exile in London formed the Yugoslav Committee to pursue the project.  As the war ended and the Austro-Hungarian empire dissolved, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes arose more or less organically as the constituent states declared independence and pledged loyalty to the new kingdom to be led by Alexander I.

Proclamation of the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs in Congress Square, Ljubljana, Slovenia, October 1918. (Photo by Fran Grabjec, Museum of Modern History via Wikipedia)

Yugoslavia was one of only two polities that lived and died in the 20th century.  The Soviet Union was the other.  Several imperial regimes collapsed as Yugoslavia rose, but most had existed for centuries, dominating the western Balkans during that time.  Twentieth century Yugoslavia was created to solve a 19th century problem, which was domination and interference from more powerful neighbors, including Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Turkey, Italy, Russia, and Bulgaria.  All southern Slavic populations experienced this but with very different effects and outcomes.  After centuries of being divided and conquered, the historically Slavic states determined they were stronger united.

This was true as far as it went.  While the western Balkans shared history, language (mostly; Macedonian is more related to Bulgarian and Albanian has no peer anywhere), and some beliefs, in reality Serbia with the largest population was the most dominant republic.  So after resolving the problem of external domination, Yugoslavia next had to address the problem of Serbian domination of the union.

Kingdom of Yugoslavia coat of arms

Following Alexander’s assassination, the kingdom was named Yugoslavia.  Germany invaded in 1941, one of the most costly misadventures in the war.  Soviet-supplied communist partisans led by Josip Broz, known as Tito, were the most successful guerilla outfit in Europe.  Tito managed not only to bleed the Germans: he sidelined the Yugoslav government in exile, consolidated power, and won material from both the Allies and from Italian forces stranded in the Balkans after the capitulation.

As the war ended, Tito had a strong hand.  He had won over or coopted every other major political or opposition group in the country.  With this coalition, he held the first election after the war in 1945 and won a majority of seats in parliament.  The parliament promptly removed Peter II (he refused to abdicate and died an alcoholic in Denver in 1970) and rewrote the constitution as a socialist republic with Tito as head of state.  He remained in control for the next 35 years.

Socialist Yugoslavia’s coat of arms

Tito proved adept at driving the middle ground between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies, playing them off one another to the country’s benefit.  He dodged several Soviet assassination attempts and co-founded the Non-Aligned Movement.  Yugoslavia had perhaps the most workable, purely socialist economy in Europe, with factory and farm collectives operating independently in a kind of managed competition.  There were no immigration restrictions so Yugoslavs traveled freely.  The country’s exports (including firearms and Fiat cars built under license by Zastava) permitted foreign imports as well.  For my friends in Warsaw Pact countries during this time, Yugoslavia was a consumers’ paradise compared to home.

There are, of course, many arguments for why Yugoslavia fell apart.  Tito, the strongman, died in 1980.  The parliament then decentralized the government and economy to the constituent republics.  This needless, inefficient multiplication of government functions helped stall the economy.  By the early 1970s, 20 percent of the Yugoslav workforce was employed abroad.  Following the oil shock, the Yugoslav economy began to fall apart.  The dinar cratered and the government soon buried itself in foreign debt to prop up production.

Into this crisis and power vacuum stepped recently radicalized ex-communist apparatchiks like Slobodan Milosevic and Franjo Tudjman.  Milosevic, as nominal president of the federal Yugoslavia, first deployed the Serb-dominated national army to corral republics like Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia from seceding.  When this failed, he unleashed his army and irregulars in the Bosnian Republika Srpska to absorb Serbian populations centers and cleanse Bosnian Muslims from their country.  This resulted in the siege of Sarajevo and the genocide of Srebrenica that provoked first UN and eventually NATO intervention to halt the slaughter.

French forces deployed by NATO to Sarajevo, January 1996. (NATO)

The war, it should be said, was not unique at the time.  As the Soviet central government weakened, republican leaders like Boris Yeltsin seized power and legitimacy.  With Mikhail Gorbachev deposed and the special committee dissolved in 1991, the 15 constituent republics of the Soviet Union realized their independence.  That came not without bloodshed, including the prospect of a pitched battle in Moscow between rival Russian and Soviet authorities.  Gorbachev warned he would not intervene in his eastern European client states but did not hesitate to crush national demonstrations in the Baltic republics.  Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova all engaged in civil war after independence.  The object of this violence, as in Yugoslavia, was political control.

But neither was the war inevitable.  It was not the fated result after centuries of smothered ethnic hatreds and foreign domination.  Political power can be shared peacefully.  War is always a choice.  That is why the comparison of similarly structured states and governments are more worthwhile than pitting opposites against each other.  For example, the similarities between Yugoslavia and Belgium are clear to see: a loose federation of three semi-autonomous regions, divided by language and (partially) religion, each triplicating government services.  As unsatisfactory and inefficient as this system of government is, it is impossible to imagine Walloons, Flemish, and ostbelgien taking up arms to destroy the state.

What is left behind in the former Yugoslavia?  As my friend Peter Korchnak has diligently documented, there is much to remember and a powerful nostalgia for that country pervades those who fled the war only to return to a landscape they could no longer recognize.  Yugoslavia made sense of the complex intersection of language, faith, and ethnicity especially in mixed marriages (which depending on the census ranged from 10 percent to 30 percent of all couples).  It stood as an example of united opposition to fascism and genocide.  It rejected as false the dichotomy between liberalism and communism. It meant something.

Yugoslavia was, in short, an ideal – an e pluribus unum in the Balkans – whose death, like the threat to democracy we now face, feels like a betrayal.

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Bosnia (Blogging Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)

“Look,” I said, “the river at Sarajevo runs red. That I think a bit too much. The pathetic fallacy really ought not to play with such painful matters.” “Yes, it is as blatant as a propagandist poster,” said my husband.

SARAJEVO IS ONE of my favorite cities in the world.  I never had the occasion to visit Bosnia for work while living in Brussels so I took a week in the summer of 2010 to make my first visit.  The experience was even more extraordinary than I anticipated and resulted in completely random encounters that made me new, lifelong friends.  I can still hear the muezzins calling my friend to prayer at Salat al-‘isha my last night in the city.

Today Sarajevo is a Muslim-majority enclave in a country half-split by the Dayton peace agreement between a Croat-Bosniak federation and a self-proclaimed Serb Republic.  Once the most cosmopolitan city in the most diverse republic of the former Yugoslavia, Serbs cleansed themselves of Sarajevo and left Bosnia under virtual European protectorate status that endures to this day.

As with many of the cities West visited, Sarajevo survives as an amalgam of the many empires that have possessed it.  The Old Town, which survived the war of the 1990s, was built under Ottoman possession.  Walking the Old Town is a delightful experience, its very human scale a reminder that cities can be beautiful at the street level for pedestrian pleasure.  Rebecca West records the corso in Dubrovnik and during the spring and summer this is true for Sarajevo as well.

Sarajevo corso, 2010. Photograph by the author.

The culverted river and national monuments from that era are mostly Austrian, including the Town Hall, which is done up in a rococo, self-conscious Moorish style. West immediately sees this as a colonial imposition and no genuine reflection of the Islamic or Turkish character of Sarajevo and Bosnia, “stuffed with beer and sausages down to its toes.” She is correct. A feline partisan, West notes the neighboring mosque’s minaret “has the air of a cat that watches a dog making a fool of itself.”

Sarajevo Town Hall along the Miljacka River (Wikipedia)

In retrospect this judgment feels unjust.  The Town Hall was converted into the Bosnian national library in 1945, housing the earliest documentation of the nation.  For that reason Serb gunners laying siege to Sarajevo in the 1990s shelled it without mercy. Incendiary rounds gutted the structure and burned it from floor to ceiling.  (Happily, it has been completely restored with international help during the last 15 years, although the documentation is a total loss.)

Vedran Smailović playing the cello in the destroyed City Hall, 1992. (Wikipedia)

Historically Sarajevo has been a true mix of the Abrahamic faiths, including Catholics and Orthodox, Muslims, and Jews.  It is known as the city of 100 mosques but also hosts cathedrals, churches, and synagogues.  West’s account is sympathetic to the Muslim community, but here she sets them aside along with the Christian community to spend ample time with Jewish artists, bankers, and intellectuals who called the city home.  The intent of this focus becomes more clear in retrospect.  Fortunately West provides an individual touchstone who foreshadows events to come.

The reconquista of Spain in 1492 included the expulsion of Spanish Jews, who scattered across the Mediterranean, including the Balkans. These Sephardim brought with them their unique faith practiced over centuries in Iberia, which included their language of Judeo-Spanish, sometimes called Ladino, an Old Spanish dialect incorporating Hebrew vocabulary and syntax.  West spends time with a colorful figure she calls the Bulbul (“nightingale” in Persian), a beautiful Ladino singer whom she met on her first visit the year before.  Lingering on the Bulbul is worth some additional time, not least for the impression she made on West:

“The Bulbul was not as Western women.  In her beauty she resembled the Persian ladies of the miniatures, whose lustre I had till then thought an artistic convention but could now recognize in her great shining eyes, her wet red lips, her black hair with its white reflections, her dazzling skin.”

The Bulbul is a real person, a Sephardic Jewish Sarajevan named Natalia Šalom Vučković, known as Nina.  The Canadian ethnomusicologist Dr. Judith R. Cohen identified her almost by accident in 1984.  A scholar of Sephardic music, Cohen met Nina while participating in a concert that included Flory Jagoda, another refugee Sarajevan Ladino singer who only died in January 2021 not far from where I live in Virginia. (You can hear her singing in the YouTube link below).  Cohen had read Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and after learning Nina’s story quickly put two and two together. “‘Nina,’ [Cohen] said quietly, ‘you must be the Bulbul!’  Tears filled her eyes.”

(Cohen asserts that West got a detail wrong about Nina, ascribing to her proficiency in the gusla, a traditional string instrument, instead of the guitar which she actually played.)

Nina was at that time living on the Kahnewake Mohawk reserve near Montreal, where her doctor husband was administering to the First Nations community.  She fled the German occupation of Yugoslavia during World War II, first with Jagoda to Korčula in the Adriatic and then to the United Nations refugee camp at El Shatt in the Sinai, where she joined 20,000 displaced Yugoslavs.  There, a Red Cross nurse introduced Nina to Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.  Opening the book, she immediately identified herself in the pages.

This is a photograph of Nina in 1951 taken for her identification card issued by the International Refugee Organization (IRO) in Bremen, West Germany. The IRO was the precursor organization for what would become the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. To my knowledge this photograph is previously unpublished.

Used with permission of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which also assisted in this research.

The Bulbul’s story is even more astonishing than that.  A refugee narrative written by Mira Altarac in 2008 corroborates Cohen’s research to fill out Nina’s biography.  Before the war Nina had been married to her own uncle, Isak “Braco” Poljokan (whom West names as Selim while missing the fact that he was Nina’s blood relation, describing him approvingly as “a god sculpted by a primitive people…”) before fleeing the Nazis.  They were divorced in Zagreb before she fled Split. A separate refugee narrative by Dr. Jacob Altaras reports that Poljokan was part of an Emigration Committee set up by the Jewish community of Split to help refugees flee Nazi occupation and later died in partisan action in 1944.

Dr. Vukasin Vučković, IRO identification card issued 1951 in Bremen, West Germany. Used with permission of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which also assisted in this research.

In El Shatt, Nina met Dr. Vukasin Vučković, whose own wife had just committed suicide by throwing herself into the Suez Canal, leaving him with their two small children.  They married and after a few years wandering Europe seeking asylum, the new family finally settled in Canada.  Vukasin died in 1974 while Nina lived on the reserve and in Montreal for 30 years before her death in 1986.

West lingers in Sarajevo and visits Ilidža, Trebević, Travnik, Jajce, and Jezero.  These smaller towns serve as backdrop for her dramatic retelling of the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie by Gavrilo Princip—the most consequential individual act of the 20th century. 

Rebecca West’s travels in Bosnia (Google Maps)

The result of the chance encounter between a minor royal and a consumptive teenager drove Europe into the abattoir of the Great War that killed some 22 million people, not including an additional 100 million during the resulting Spanish Influenza, which spread after the war as tens of millions of men demobilized.  It destroyed the Austrian and Turkish Empires, precipitated the Armenian massacre, gave rise to Communism in Russia, Nazism in Germany and their genocidal regimes leading to World War II, created the modern Middle East, established the United States as a great power, and formed the League of Nations.  Every major geopolitical crisis in the last 100 years is the direct result of World War I and its accelerant: two shots fired by Gavrilo Princip.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand and wife Sophie board their motorcade for the last time, Sarajevo City Hall, June 28, 1914. (Wikipedia)

Modern observers express horror at the cascade of poor political decisions and battlefield blunders that led to the slaughter.  The outcome appears inevitable in retrospect, but the reality is war is a choice.  It is not foreordained.  European leaders chose poorly.  It is possible to imagine a different course of human events if wiser, cooler, and smarter heads were involved.  But likewise it is also impossible to imagine the war breaking out at all if it weren’t for the assassination.  There were tensions and competitions, of course, but no underlying casus belli to spark a major conflagration.  Gavrilo Princip was the match.

Rebecca West makes clear, if not explicit, that this almost random encounter in recent history was populated by characters least likely to star in a modern drama.  Archduke Franz Ferdinand was an entirely representative noble of the age, the personification of the mediocrity and rot that populated the ruling class of Europe.  He was a thoroughly disagreeable man with an extremely morbid pastime: he hunted, or rather, shot game virtually point-blank as they were flushed into range for his ease and pleasure.  He killed hundreds of thousands of animals on four continents.  West’s documentation of this baleful, unslakable thirst for animal carnage fills out an unnerving psychological portrait of the archduke.  It also foreshadows his own death, as West concludes:

“Long ago he himself, and the blood which was in his veins, had placed at their posts the beaters who should drive him down through a narrowing world to the spot where Princip’s bullet would find him.”

Franz Ferdinand held no real power in the dual monarchy.  The ostensible reason for his visit to this provincial capital was in his official capacity as Inspector General of the Army.  He was restricted by the abstruse rules governing monarchies from siring an heir to the throne of the Austrian empire because he married a not-noble-enough Czech noble woman, Sophie Chotek.  Their morganatic marriage was nonetheless a happy one and possibly the only good thing to say about Franz Ferdinand is that he genuinely loved his wife and three children.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Sophie, and their children in 1910. (Wikipedia)

Gavrilo Princip was also an entirely unremarkable young man who only took his place in history as a result of official incompetence and blind luck.  West describes him as “physically fragile,” a poor boy of uncertain parentage from the mountains.  He attempted to join the Serbian army but his constitution collapsed and he was discharged.  He was 19 when arrested for the assassination, a minor for purposes of Austrian imperial justice.

What brought these two parties together at that fateful moment would be considered an absurd farce if it had not resulted in such calamity. Reports of plots and intelligence were ignored. The archduke’s ruler-straight motorcade route and lax security are a remedial course for bodyguards in how to get your principal killed (see below). The motorcade drove down the left bank of the Miljacka, which alone drastically limited escape routes as a right turn would end up in the river. A failed attempt by Nedeljko Čabrinović to explode a bomb under the motorcade did not alter the route in the slightest. It continued to the City Hall, where Franz Ferdinand held a brief, strange, and strained audience, complaining about his explosive reception in the city. Despite this, he boarded his open car, which returned the way it came, that is, straight back into the kill zone.

There was a crew of five would-be assassins who lined the motorcade route. Each failed in their initial attempt.  Armed with a bomb and pistol, Muhamed Mehmedbašić (notably a Muslim member of this mostly Serbian conspiracy) and Vaso Čubrilović failed to act.  Following Čabrinović’s bombing attempt, Gavrilo Princip, Cvjetko Popović, and Trifun Grabež all missed their opportunity as the motorcade sped past them to the City Hall.

The conspirators in the dock, June 28, 1914, including Gavrilo Princip (front row, center) and Nedeljko Čabrinović (second from left). HISTORICAL ARCHIVES OF SARAJEVO via Wikipedia

Princip had given up on the plot when the motorcade appeared again on its return down the quay.  It made a wrong turn trying to reach the hospital where the injured from the bombing attempt were being treated.  This mistake brought the archduke’s car directly abreast of Princip where it stalled.  Princip stepped forward and fired and fired again. He did not miss his targets.

(West makes an error of fact here, describing Princip’s murder weapon as a revolver.  It was a FN 1910 semi-automatic pistol.  The difference is important because a balky revolver in the hands of this bumbling conspirator – a bad shot who washed out of army basic training – could have easily allowed Franz Ferdinand to escape, again, and the world to avoid the mass slaughter to follow.)

While not captured by motion picture as King Alexander’s assassination was 20 years later, the incident in Sarajevo is the most comprehensively documented act of terrorism prior to Sept. 11, 2001.  An official tribunal investigated the chain of events and released a detailed report of its findings. All 15 plotters survived and were arrested, tried, and sentenced—the adults to death, the minors, including Gavrilo Princip, to prison terms.  Not that this early manifestation of tender mercy mattered.  Tuberculosis killed Princip in prison three years later.

Franz Ferdinand’s route through Sarajevo. Source not known.

In Jajce, West unexpectedly meets Čabrinović’s sister Vukosava, herself a dentist and also an accomplished folk singer.  Unusual among West’s unnamed characters, Vukosava Čabrinović is fairly well-documented.  David James Smith in his book One Morning in Sarajevo details her sympathies, including a relationship with Princip and her correspondence with her brother, who like Princip also died in prison.  She is portrayed by Vera Veljovic-Jovanovic in the 1990 film “Last Waltz in Sarajevo,” not incidentally the last film produced in Yugoslavia before its breakup.

It is important to consider one more thing. Princip was a Serb born and raised in Bosnia. The Young Bosnia organization he joined was pan-Slav in agenda and furnished weapons by the secret Serbian Black Hand organization. In 1914, the Kingdom of Serbia was sovereign while Austria-Hungary possessed the Central European Slavic states as well as Bosnia, Slovenia, and Croatia. For the catastrophe that followed it is easy to miss something extraordinary in the assessment of the assassination: that this least likely, most fated individual in fact achieved his political objective. In 1914, Princip espoused a union of south Slavs free of Austrian domination. By 1918 the Austro-Hungarian empire was destroyed and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the predecessor of Yugoslavia, was a free, unitary state.

West also documents the sad afterlife of Franz Ferdinand and his wife. It is hard not to be sympathetic despite the fact they were simply bodies in boxes that had to be repatriated to Vienna. Emperor Franz Josef felt their death had corrected the wrong of their morganatic marriage. The emperor’s chamberlain used his position to delay their arrival to the capital. There he placed Sophie’s coffin lower than the archduke to indicate her inferior rank. No public respects were paid. The coffins had been moved by train to Pochlarn, Austria, arriving without reception at one o’clock in the morning. There, a deluge forced the coffins and mourners into the train station terminal to ride out the storm. In the morning they were transferred to a river ferry, but the continuing storm terrified the horses, and Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were spared just barely from being pitched bodily into the Danube.

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Postscript: This story was updated on Dec. 8, 2021, to include additional information furnished with the permission and assistance of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. I would like to thank the Memorial and in particular Susan Evans, Ed.D., for their help.

Croatia (Blogging Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)

“Politics, always politics.  In the middle of the night, when there is a rap on our bedroom door, it is politics.” (Croatia/Zagreb VII)

ENDING THE JOURNEY of the previous chapter, Rebecca West and her husband arrive in Zagreb proper. Three friends, standing in the rain, greet them on the railway platform. One of them is arguably the most important character of the book besides West and the other two play rhetorical archetypes to set up an argument that will weave its way throughout the book: the nature and benefit of Yugoslavism, the Yugoslav idea, and Yugoslavia itself.

Rebecca West’s travels in Croatia (Google Maps)

West calls the three men Constantine, Valetta, and Marko Gregorijević.  These are pseudonyms and eccentric ones at that.  Valetta is described as a young Croatian from Dalmatia, 26 years old.  He lectures in mathematics at the University of Zagreb.  Gregorijević is an older Croatian journalist and critic, 57 years old.  Based on the little biographical information West provides us, I was unable to determine the true identities of these two men (although Valetta may have been Stanko Bilinski, a mathematician of some renown, who matches Valetta’s profession and approximate birthdate but not his region of origin).  I do not have access to West’s papers and the men are not described in her Selected Letters.  They are not identified by even Croatian language references and sources I have searched.

Stanislav Vinaver, aka “Constantine”

Constantine, however, is much better documented, possibly because he is such a dynamic character in the book.  He accompanies West throughout most of the journey she documents (and his wife, to appear later, will provide an archetype in another argument West sustains throughout the book.)  Constantine’s real name is Stanislav Vinaver.  West describes him as a poet, a Serb, an Orthodox, and a Yugoslav government functionary (as a censor). On the first page we meet him, she writes:

“Constantine is short and fat, with a head like the best-known satyr in the Louvre, and an air of vine-leaves about the brow, though he drinks little.  He is perpetually drunk on what comes out of his mouth, not what goes into it.  He talks incessantly.”

West relates that Constantine’s heritage is Jewish; his parents immigrated from the Pale of Settlement, at the time Russian Poland.  He was born in Serbia and converted to the Serbian Orthodox Church.  He is a Serb patriot in word and deed; he fought against Austria during World War I as part of the Serbian army.  His father, a physician, was a medical officer during the war but died in a typhus outbreak in 1915.  Constantine later fought in the royal Yugoslav army against the Germans during World War II.  Captured, he was held as a prisoner of war but survived and died in 1955.  His mother was less fortunate.  She was murdered as a Jew by the Nazis during the occupation.

While compelling as a character in the book, Vinaver as an individual was more unnerving.  In a letter to her sister during her first, unaccompanied visit, West recounts a harrowing experience with Vinaver in Ohrid, Macedonia.  There, he attempts to sexually assault West in her hotel room not once but twice.  Twice she fights him off, literally.  But he is her official government minder and interpreter, she does not speak the language, has little money and no way to return to Skopje, so she is obliged to maintain his company until they return to the capital.  On the return trip, she contracts a strep infection of the skin and runs a fever.  She is confined to her hotel room, miserably ill.  But this does not keep Vinaver from accosting her a third time. “For 3 hours,” she writes, “he stamped and raved and blustered beside my bed.”  As a government official, he may have been unavoidable on her subsequent trips. But it also explains why West made this second trip accompanied by her husband.

In Zagreb, Constantine is the third leg on the uncomfortable stool that supports the political debate over Yugoslavia.  Constantine is a Serb by adoption with the aggressive patriotic fervor of a convert.  Gregorijević is an old Croat (West describes him as a dour version of Pluto, Mickey Mouse’s dog) who fought Hungarian domination of Croatia by the Habsburgs and sees Yugoslavia as a bulwark against imperial imposition.  Valetta is too young to remember a time when Croatia was not part of Yugoslavia and views this political construct as a vehicle for Serb domination of its neighbors.  (Yugoslavia’s King Alexander I and his issue, Peter II, who ruled Yugoslavia during this time, were Serbian by birth.)  Although West finds their bickering tiresome, the debate personifies the political dynamics of the Balkans.  I will discuss the idea of Yugoslavia in a later post.  For now, you can see here the paradox of the Yugoslav experiment: individually, Yugoslavia’s constituent nations are too weak to defend themselves against their larger neighbors, but together Serbia dominates the union.

Church of St. Mirko, Šestine, Croatia (Wikipedia)

West and company visit St. Mark’s Church in Zagreb and another church in Šestine, in the mountains north of Zagreb.  She does not name St. Mirko’s Church, which sits on a small rise at the town crossroads.  But here again West’s description is so perfect that there is no doubt this is the church: “full to the doors, bright inside as a garden, glowing with scarlet and gold and blue and the unique, rough, warm white of homespun, and shaking with song.”  I found this description of a Catholic mass bracing since good music has been thoroughly driven out of the Church in the United States.

They visit “Two Castles” that West also does not name.  It is unclear why.  They take government motorcars through heavy snow, which delights her and the locals who occasionally have to dig the vehicles out (“doubtless anxious to get back and tell a horse about it”).  The castles can be found as she describes them.  For example, she writes about the Trakošćan Castle as “something like a Balliol,” that is, the Oxford college (coincidentally Christopher Hitchens‘), which turns out to be perfectly apt.  It dates to the 13th century but is stuffed full of Austrian cultural detritus – “a clutterment of the most hideous furniture…walloping stuff bigger than any calculations of use could have suggested, big in accordance with a vulgar idea that bigness is splendid….”  This may appear frivolous – is there anything more poncy than English critique of interior design? – but it serves West’s larger argument that imperial imposition destroys and displaces local cultural expression that is delightful when left alone.

Trakošćan Castle (My Radiant City)

The second castle they visit was built by the same house that owned the first.  A large hilltop fortification, it served during West’s visit as a tuberculosis sanitorium.  Happily, today, Klenovnik Castle is a modern hospital treating pulmonary diseases.  It remains the largest castle in the country.

Klenovnik Castle (source not known)

“[T]he place was clean, fantastically clean, clean like a battleship,” she writes, noting that might be the only thing it had in common with English hospitals which she knows too well. West admires the hospital, its patients and doctors, and its methods precisely because they were un-English.  The doctors are doting but forbearing with their patients, whom they treat in what we might call a holistic way.  The food is excellent, grown on the castle grounds, and ample enough to send patients home several kilograms heavier.  “[The patients] sometimes fall in love, and it is a very good thing,” the superintendent remarks.  “It sometimes makes all the difference, they get a new appetite for living, and they do so well.”  West approves.  She writes:

“These people hold that the way to make life better is to add good things to it, whereas in the West we hold that the way to make life better is to take bad things away from it. … Here a patient could be adult, primitive, dusky, defensive; if he chose to foster a poetic fantasy or personal passion to tide him over his crisis, so much the better.  It was the tuberculosis germ that the doctor want to alter, not the patient….”

West delights in good things that give pleasure and she sees those things in the sanitorium.  This is the soft edge of a sharper argument she makes more explicit later in the book: that good things are good on their own, they exist for our pleasure, and don’t require sacrifice, pain, or the prospect of death to enjoy.  This almost feels like moral philosophy but as we might apply it to tangible things like the embroidered homespun, strong plum brandy, or “sucking-pig so delicate that it could be spread on bread like butter” that she enjoys while in Croatia.

West ends this chapter with a miniature social comedy.  She, her husband, and Constantine visit the Gregorijevićs, husband and wife both described as long and melancholy as Great Danes.  They have a small dog who expresses its outrage at these strangers by defecating on the living room rug.  The Gregorijevićs are mortified, even more so as West and her husband try to defuse the situation with humor, a very English trait.  The family’s maid, “in peasant costume,” comes to clean up, “grinning from ear to ear at the joke the dog’s nature had played on the gentry.”  Constantine rescues the Gregorijevićs’ dignity by solemnly taking up the piano to play a Bach motet and then a Mozart sonata.  This may appear to be simply an amusing endnote to her visit, but again West manages to weave her themes through it.  Gregorijević takes Henry aside “to murmur in a voice hoarse with resentment that he had owned both the poodle’s father and grandmother, and that neither of them would ever have dreamed of behaving in such a away.  ‘Nothing, man or beast, is as it was.  Our ideals, think what has happened to our ideals…what has happened to our patriots.’…” 

For some, the country has literally gone to the dogs.

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