Bosnia Trip (VII)

FROM HERZEGOVINA
We spent pretty much a whole day going to see the old Tekki.  [“Tekki” = dervish monastary]  This touristic site COULD have been "efficiently" consumed in a couple hours but less consumption and less efficiency are what I want lately and luckily my two Milanese companions were of the same mode.  And Bosnia in general seems to discourage rapid consumptive experiences anyway, both from lack of post-war infrastructure and from a lack of urgency about things in general.   

Barbara and Giuseppe, whom I met the previous week up at the Sarajevo pension had now rejoined me down here in the south.   With them, a walk down the Tekki road was (happily) not very fixated on "getting there".  We played a lot, lingering by a broken bus, watching local kids fighting over a small motorcycle, slipping behind some no trespassing signs (indeed, climbing a few ladders too) to get inside the trout farm and watch the trout farmers.  We found a dripping cave that looked like a good setting for mythological tales.  We filed through a very old flour mill ruin, the first mill I'd ever seen that featured HORIZONTAL water wheels (four in all, though only the grindstones remained).  We sat quietly near a Bosnian teen with his creel of 4 modest sized trout.  He was still angling for one more and gave us the briefest of smiles. 

The Tekki road followed one of those extremely cold, clean rivers that are common here.  For much of the way a strange stone fortress was visible above the cliffs.  It was unattainable by direct climbing (inadvisable anyway to off road it like that in a former war zone) but intriguing to look at.  Arriving at the tekki we all enjoyed a simple experience:  an elaborately embossed tin cup on a chain sat  there at the spring, a source of a mighty river.   Rivers in this country emerge full blown from the bottoms of mountains, millions of gallons a minute erupting from a boat worthy flooded cave in the cliffside.  It’s really something.
And the water in Bosnia-Herzegovina tastes delicous. 
"Wow, and I thought all water came from bottles!" noted Giuseppe.  He produced a Volvic bottle and emptied it on the ground "This," he joked in English, "this is shit."  We filled bottles and drank many times from the tin cup on its chain.  Later we further experienced the river contents as we ate some trout at a small restaurant.

The Tekki at Blagaj was appropriately austere.  Barbara was assigned a headscarf by the guard to wear.  We were the only people there on this January day and we idled there quite a bit, seperately and together, passing among the upstairs rooms of this wooden house, looking at holy objects, closing eyes and trying to conjure images of who'd been there during the Ottoman times.  The gift shop had excellent eastern music (I bought none), books about the conflict in Palestine, books of general spirituality, calendars with daily spiritual thoughts to meditate on, postcards, prayer mat keychains, and the primitive toothbrushes that seem to be in all the mosque giftshops.  Are these toothbrushes Arab?   They are a finger-wide twig that one whittles and soaks in water to obtain a stiff fibrous teeth cleaning tool.  They come vacuum packed to ensure sterility.

Part of the lengthiness of our tekki daytrip was from our roundabout travel logistics.  The Mostar city bus # 16 supposedly goes out there but nobody in Mostar knew much about any of their buses (this was the opposite of New York, where vigorous arguments arise on the relative merits of different public transit options).  Later, finished at the Tekki, we were pretty stranded.  the city bus wasn't going back to Mostar until after dark.  Hmmph!  But a remedy: Barbara impulsively tapped a man on the shoulder as he was getting into his Black VW Golf (the favorite car here).  His face lit up, he gestured the three of us in, and soon we were flying along on the twenty minute trip back to town.  Speaking no English whatsoever, our host entertained us with stories and jokes, communicated with body language and a bit of German.  He had a trick horn that was a police siren and he'd blow it at everyone we passed.  The twenty minute conversation was a strain but his enthusiasm and the Italians comprehension of German (as well as a generalized European attitude to contextually guess what someone is saying) carried the day.  We were all to be guests at his house it turned out. 

Initially his wife was a little confused as he brought us all in.  "My Dad brings home foriegners all the time," explained his teen son, Elvis.  Around here, the young generation speaks English, so it put Elvis (that is a nice name) in charge of the entire dinner conversation, a position of authority he enjoyed, although the urgency of the speakers (esp his dad) overwhelmed him at times. "Excuse me; I must step outdoors for a moment and clear my head.  It's a little confusing for me."
Coffee was poured (Turkish) and some beers were opened so each of us had a cold beer and a steaming coffee in front of us.  Sugar wafer cookies were offered and eventually the wife heated up some spinach borek (the filo dough was excellent).  When it got chilly his wife, Blagina, knelt down to split some birch sections with a tiny hatchet, against the concrete floor, throwing them into what looked exactly like the stove at my home in Brooklyn.  She just put the kindling into the broiler drawer and slammed it shut.  I forgot to look closer at the stove because we had a spontaneous dance party next, first our host, then me, then everybody jumping around however they felt like. I'm no coneiseur of this region's tunes so all I can report is that the music sounded Turkic to my ears. 

The couple keeps a TV tuned to Deutsche Welle cable.  They lived in Frankfort for 12 years and Elvis was born there ("My German is probably better than my English", noted Elvis.  "I play CounterStrike online with my Frankfort cousins still and we chat the whole time while we play."  The news of the stroke of Ariel Sharon came on the TV and the room got attentive to the newscast.  Our conversation then turned political.

The dad started telling us, via the son's translation, about a strategic Balkan island that Nixon wanted and that Tito drove a hard bargain for.  "Tito was going to make the US President trade California and Texas for this little island," at which point the son apologized, noting "The history is getting a little mixed up-- my dad is drunk a little so the story doesn't make sense." 

The son had a respect for his parents that a Western teen would not have.  I found it heartwarming.  The boy was 18 and looked absolutely "new generation" head to toe and was very fast with jokes and grasping a point.  His parents had the slowness of older generations and his dad was certainly silly (and absolutely kind).  But the boy showed enormous respect for his dad, no impatience at all.  The dad in turn radiated kindness and pride toward his son.  We exchanged addresses when leaving.  I was commenting on a box of potatoes and the dad impulsively shoved one potato into my hand as a gift.  I carried it until the next day and left it near the train station on someone's hood I think.   

The whole day had been pretty slow and satisfying. 

As a final note on national temperaments and how some people really appreciate taking things slow, I offer an observation by Barbara the Italian about how the local dialect word for “work” changes as you move south in Italy:
1.  In the north, “Lavoro” – a job to do.
2.  In Napoli, “Tatica (fatica? I can’t read her writing now)” – a painful thing
3.  In Sicilia, “Travaglio”  - birthing a child.

Comments

[Albert Wu]

I love that story. Stories of hospitality and kindness like this gives me faith in the future of our species.

[Josh]

And they play CS! =)