The Blue Monkey Review

I felt sure that once I began teaching I would form a special bond with certain kinds of students. The better students, of course, would find me challenging and understanding. I took it for granted that we would find a connection that would remain strong well beyond our relationship as teacher and student, and that these same students would invite me not only to their weddings and the christening of their children, but to their publishing parties and doctoral defenses. That some, at least, would recall our special relationship in a few brief words when they gave their Nobel prize acceptance speeches. Simple naivete would explain this belief, up to the time I began teaching. But I maintained this notion for years afterward, always assuming that in the next year or at the next kind of school or college I would find future great American novelists at my office door seeking not just advice but inspiration.

Consistently, however, since probably my first day teaching high school I have found myself in the company of different kinds of students. These have included charming underachievers, the phlegmatic but earnest, heavy metal guitarists, artists without an audience. Students whose parachute didn’t open. Members of unloved religious, sexual, or racial minorities who were trying to both fit in and bring down the “man.” Students who would become fathers before becoming bachelors of art or husbands. Students who would not be inviting me to the Pulitzer award ceremony but who might need someone to see the principal on their behalf. Or to stand bail for them. Students who would not be taking the straight and narrow or any other known road after graduation, and whose lives after school often contained more than a fair share of emotional car wrecks. They have had in common, I think, a greater than ordinary struggle to find a moral universe to live in, have had to work more than others to overcome the brokenness in their lives. And while it is strange that I continually find these students interesting and appealing, it is beyond strange or any other adjective of the bizarre that they find themselves drawn irresistibly to me.

And, just as in the United States, so in Crna Gora. In fact, three students whose descriptions you can find above volunteered to take me to church last Sunday. I’d made the request to my classes during the first couple of weeks for someone to take up the white Montenegrin’s burden and become my guide through a Serbian Orthodox service. Just before the trip to Belgrade a student made the offer to do it, and we set it up for the Sunday after the Sarajevo trip.

It turned out that I needn’t have set aside a Sunday for this. According to Dragan, who made the original offer, the same service is offered at the local church every day, at 8 A.M. and 6 P.M. Apparently there is a special service on Sunday for communion, but it was probably as well that we didn’t try for that. Instead, we went to a church service that forms part of the daily routine of the Serbian Orthodox Church, a service intended to establish ritual in the lives of its communicants.

As indicated, Ruth and I had not only Dragan but also Ranko and Alexander as escorts. I don’t intend to characterize all of them, but Alexander turned out to be the most knowledgeable about the Serbian church and provided some excellent insights and advice during our time at Sv. Vasily Ostrokh. “It is traditional,” he told us, “that when you leave you walk backward for a few steps. It is not required for you. But it is traditional.” Alexander proved a surprising guide for this pilgrim’s progress. Of the three he looks like the one who most likely knows and appreciates the work of Judas Priest. In fact, he is a musician in what he describes as a “death metal” band, “but the music is very harmonious, very emotionally satisfying.” I keep asking for a CD.

As I’ve written before, church buildings elicit religious ritual here. Each of the students crossed himself repeatedly as we entered. The church is fairly compact and plain, but with several icons in special positions around the church (in the center, near the pillars, near the altar). Each worshiper, upon entering, kneeled and crossed him or her self before the icon of Sv. Vasily and then kissed the icon (I wasn’t doing any kissing last Sunday). In fact, the more usual ritual was for the worshiper to bow and cross three times, kiss the icon and leave some change on the icon, and then repeat that at each of the featured icons. Bowing, in this instance, meant reaching the right hand to the floor, or at least making a good faith effort. And the crossings are the full-body practice of the Orthodox. Rather than the more cerebral forehead-scapula- left-right cross of the West, the Orthodox go forehead to stomach, then right then left.

About forty people gathered for this service, and in spite of what I’d been led to expect by Dragan and others who talked about the Montenegrin faithful, the group was not old. In fact, I was probably well above the average age, with young adults making up the majority of attendees.

Some chairs lined the walls, but most of us stood behind a line that would have divided the church in half. The priest and the cantors stood on the other side, nearer the altar. The altar was more of a marble wall, also covered in images, with doors on either side and in the center. During the service the priest went behind the wall more than once, and also left open the central door for a few minutes so that we could all see an altar behind the altar where, I suppose, the elements of communion sit during a communion service.

The service began when the chanting began. Chanting continued, then, for the entire service. Five cantors took turns with most of the chant, the song going from one to the next without a break, and then sometimes shifting to the priest. The priest moved around quite a bit. As I’ve mentioned, he went behind the altar more than once. Just after one of his disappearances I heard the ringing of bells, like sleigh bells, and he reemerged with a censor. He shook it continually, keeping the jingle bells going as he went around the church spreading the incense (the good kind, not the stuff that makes you gag) and covered all the worshipers with it.

With the other worshipers, we stood silently. Those who were real Serbian Orthodox crossed themselves many times, apparently on a recognizable cue. No one called for “Stand Up, Stand Up For Jesus” although it would have been appropriate in the circumstances. Nothing else was required except that at some point everyone went down on knees, then hands and knees, and then kissed the ground. ( I didn’t want to make myself conspicuous, so I bowed, but as I’ve said, I wasn’t doing any kissing that day.) We did this seven times. I think this is the practice known as the kowtow, a show of obeisance that the Russians took from the Mongols. I’ve never seen anything like it. Turns out, neither had Alexander, Dragan, or Ranko. And next day in class they checked this with Ana, who also worships somewhat regularly, and she had never seen it, either.

Then, abruptly, the chanting ended. I thought perhaps it was time for communicants to go forward and accept Jesus as their savior or take communion or something, but Alexander turned to me and said, “We can go now.” Following his lead, we turned toward the altar at the doorway and gave shallow bows as we went out.

Posted by at 1:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

One of the questions that no one has asked, so far, is, “How do you and Ruth spend your days when you are not traveling?” Probably Blue Monkey readers assume that I’m working non-stop, engaged in such pressing business that even the time spent writing for the thousands (uh, dozens?) of readers on the W W W must require sacrifices to the work schedule. Well, yes, I am glad you assume all that. But, as I heard a little girl tell her friends one evening, Nije tačno tako! [“That’s not exactly the way it is.”]

Since Ruth’s arrival we have fallen into a routine for the morning that takes us into Balkan culture, at least as spectators. About mid-morning we set aside our respective projects. Ruth is working on a fantasy trilogy, and she’s taking advantage of her time here to make some important changes. My workload, of course, would require a whole other essay to describe, so we will pass on without worrying about it. As I was saying, Ruth and I head out the apartment door for our morning excursion and errands.

We greet a couple of the neighbors, usually older guys walking around in the courtyard: “Dobar dan!” “Kako je’? Jeste dobro?” “Dobro sam. Kako ste?” “Dobro.” Even though I have talked at any length to only one of my neighbors (although I have talked to him several times), they pretty much all know who I am, what I do. Just after Ruth arrived I was entering the building at the same time as a young mother with her children. We had some difficulty with the door and key, and after sorting all that out, she turned and asked me, Kako je tvoja čerka?” “How’s your daughter?” I was more than normally inarticulate because I had no memory of ever seeing this woman before, and here she was asking about Ruth. “Dobro,” I said, not very creatively.

As I think I’ve made clear, everywhere I go here requires a bit of a walk. We head to the center of town, about a mile away even though we take shortcuts through apartment bloc parking lots and behind shops and through university property. I buy a paper on the way. I have to check on the weather, even though meteorology here seems to have remained fairly primitive. Also, I need to keep up on developments in world culture. My current favorite paper, Republika has a section called “Life” that follows such urgent issues as the Brad Pitt/Jennifer Aniston divorce. A few weeks ago they reported on the Internet revelation that Jennifer was a lesbian. Make sense. Why else would she be leaving Brad Pitt? But lately they ran a short article on her depression, on the childhood trauma of her parents’ divorce.

And then we are on the korzo. Writing in the mid-1930s, Rebecca West described the corso in Dubrovnik this way: “Ahead runs the main street of the town, a paved fairway, forbidden to wheeled traffic, lined with comely seventeenth-century houses that have shops on their ground floors. At this time it is the scene of the Corso, an institution which is the heart of social life in every Yugoslavian town, and indeed of nearly all towns and villages in the Balkans. All of the population who have clothing up the general standard...join in a procession which walks up and down the main street for an our or so about sunset.”[Black Lamb and Grey Falcon p. 232] That pretty much describes the korzo in Nikšić, except that you need to subtract the seventeenth-century buildings and sunset. Nikšić has few buildings older than the administration building at Seton Hill (and few in as good a shape), and in Nikšić the korzo goes on all day and into the night. And you can also subtract almost all of the other towns in the Balkans. Nikšić remains peculiarly traditional in continuing the corso when most places, even in Montenegro, have abandoned it.

What do you do on the corso? You walk up and down, greeting friends, pairing or tripling up to talk. Women walk are in arm, as usual. Men don’t generally go that far, but they don’t seem to have many personal space issues. The groups are always homoscial, and men predominate. Ruth and I, like many people on the corso, find a cafe to sit at and watch the walkers. When the weather is really fine we have our choice of outdoor venues, including Cafe Hemingway, Cafe Korzo, or, my favorite, Che Guevara. But if it is cold or rainy we usually head to Caffe Dodge, which has an enclosed patio. Jedan cappuccino, molim vas, I tell the waiter, blithely ignoring the changes that Serbian numbers undergo next to nouns. Ruth has hot chocolate. And then we relax and enjoy the corso. We have already identified some favorites. There is the walking man, who seems to join the procession for exercise. The poet has a colorful jacket and a tawny complexion, so he looks like a Roma, but he’s very tall like a Serbian Montenegrin and unlike a Roma. And he always looks a bit hung over and disheveled, as though he’d spent the night outside.

Roma appear on the corso, too, though not to socialize. Usually they are busy trying to separate walkers or cafe loungers from spare change. The specialists are a couple of little boys dressed in colorful but ragged clothes who carry small accordions (and as far as I can tell don’t know how to play them) and walk in stride with adults repeatedly explaining their need for deset centi. Even though Montenegrins seem to have a consistent aversion to the Roma, the walkers tend to treat these boys with indulgence, patting them on the head and sometimes joking with them. I’ve never seen anyone give them any money.

After half an hour or so of this, Ruth and I are calm enough to take care of our business in town. Although this might be anything from changing money to negotiating with travel agents, it’s a safe generalization to say that sometime between 11 and 12 we will be shopping. Only a few days since my arrival have gone by when I did not shop (I went shopping my first day in town), and since Ruth arrived I’m not sure we have spent a day in town when we didn’t have to buy something.

Of course, this requires some careful planning. We have to be sure we have the right money. This is a cash economy here. Generally, VISA and Master Charge are not welcome. [That includes for airfares. That’s right, I have to pay cash for a paper ticket filled-in by hand.] Most of the economy runs on small currency, so if you buy a pair of 10 euro pants, as I did a while back, with a 50 euro note, you will have to stand around and wait while one of the shop girls runs out to find change. Serbian has a separate verb for “making change,” distinct from the words used for “changing currency.” But, if I have some coins, or some 5 or at most 10 euro notes on me, we can shop.

If we want fresh fruit or potatoes we need to arrange to pass through the green market. This is a street with a gate at either end. Before 6 A.M. it opens up to vendors who take over the stalls that extend down the block on both sides of the street. And until 6 P.M. (except on Sundays) the street provides a stunning array of fresh produce. I have my favorite vendors, of course. One woman knows as soon as she sees me to start weighing a kilo of bananas. The vendors are scrupulous about showing you the scales, that it is a kilo or, if more, to ask, Može? and of course you agree to buy a little more and say, Može. [The prices compare favorably to Giant Eagle. Today I bought one kilo each of bananas, oranges, and kiwi fruit for 3.70 Euros.]

For the other shopping it isn’t always clear where to go first. They really don’t have the “A&P” concept here. Imagine a town the size of Greensburg with no supermarkets, only stores the size of large convenience stores. But lots of them. A whole heck of a lot of them. One store carries the cereal we favor, and none of the others have it. Another store, fairly close to the apartment, has most of the usual stuff we need (pasta, chips but does not carry our favorite juice, which is cherry (we have three different fruit juices every day). There is only one store where I have ever bought eggs—they come in plastic bags, bundled in groups of ten. The only regular necessity that all the stores carry is beer.

And of course we only buy bread at the bakery near the apartment. This is as much a ritual as an economic exchange. The young women who work there take some kind of pleasure in conducting the business with a foreigner. Yet they never depart from the script that could have come out of the “Teach Yourself Serbian” book.

And that’s our morning. We return to the apartment, unload the groceries, and then get right back to work.

Posted by at 1:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

When I first found that my Fulbright term would take me to Montenegro, my immediate thought was, “That means I can visit Sarajevo.” Any adult during the 1990s will remember the interminable siege there, the sense of helplessness that attached itself to the name of the city, and finally the relief when the siege lifted and something like stability returned to this region. If Balkan has come to stand for internecine feuds and ethnic hatred, then Bosnia is the Balkans of the Balkans. In fact, Bosnian refers to someone speaking the same language (more or less) that I hear every day on the streets of Nikšić but who worships at a mosque. His neighbor, who speaks the same language but who seeks eternal solace with the Roman Catholic Church will claim to be a Bosnian-Croat. And the neighbor of both these people who plans to be buried in a Serbian Orthodox cemetery will swear he is a Bosnian Serb. But, they probably aren’t neighbors any more. Since the war that added “ethnic cleansing” to the world’s vocabulary, Bosnians of all persuasions have become more separated than they had been for centuries.

I had some anxiety about going on this trip. I didn’t think taking the bus that runs from Podgorica to Sarajevo (the Balkan Express) would really suit the travel that Ruth and I wanted to do. I’d heard that the road from Nikšić to Sarajevo was not too good. But, I thought something like, “How bad can it be?” Just one more piece of evidence (as if I needed more) that life is the schoolmaster of humility.

The night before leaving I told my landlord where I was going and he gave me the good news that the direct road (actually, in this part of the world that should be written “direct road”) was closed due to a landslide. The only alternatives would take us well out of our way, and the best route would take us almost to the opposite side of Bosnia. I made enquiries the next day as I road the bus into Podgorica to pick up the rental car. The bus driver and his assistant jotted down the shorter route, the one that the Balkan Express takes. So, that clinched it. These guys must know what they were talking about. Right?

We made it across the border with no real problem except that we were stopped by police at two different checkpoints. A message? Or just the pathetic fallacy? Once on the road inside the borders of Bosnia and Herzegovina (abbreviated BiH here) I stopped at a service station to ask a couple of older guys just hanging out there if we were on the right road. Yes, just go straight (oops, I mean “straight”): “Da, da, pravo.” But then they advised me to turn off a little further up and take a detour that would go clear across the country (sound familiar?). But, the other way is shorter, right? I said, or something that they could understand to mean that. The other way is longer, said one, but it will take the same amount of time. “Loš put,” they told me, it’s a bad road.

You might think that I would have learned, by now, that when people who regularly drive roads that make Pennsylvania country roads look like the Autobahn give out the judgment “loš put,” they mean something nightmarish. Something, in fact, like what we found a couple of hours later. Not just narrow switchbacks through rugged mountain terrain, but crumbling embankments so that guard rail concrete footings hung in the air. And the signs that warn of falling rock mean something urgent here. We climbed high enough that snow still lay thick on the mountainsides and sometimes took over part of the road. At one point as we crept down a winding road Ruth saw shepherd on a bluff looking at us and then shaking his finger. “What could that mean?” we wondered.

About five seconds later we rolled onto a stretch of road was cracked and, completely dissolving. Just as we left that we rounded a bend and saw a police checkpoint and beyond that what looked like no road at all. The police stopped us, of course, and after going over my documents the officer said to be careful on the next stretch and that I would have to pay a 5 euro user fee because the road had caved in. I was still struggling with the prospect of taking the car down into a dip where an embankment had once been to then climb up the other side to pavement, so I didn’t have time to turn over the concept that I was paying a policeman so that I could drive through something that looked like a construction site.

As everything else I’ve said above indicates, the terrain here is rugged and forbidding. And beautiful, though I didn’t have much time to reflect on that. Whereas Montenegro is one mountain range after another, broken by valleys, until you reach the sea, BiH is a country of steep gorges with narrow, powerful rivers eating up road embankments. It became easy to see how the Bosnian Bogomils held out against both the Byzantine and Roman churches, maintaining their Manichean faith until the 1400s. In that century the Turks, who had just finished off the Serbian kingdom, offered them a modus vivendi,, i.e. call yourselves Moslems and believe what you want.

In the end, in spite of the disintegrating roads and corrupt police and skeptical locals, we arrived in Sarajevo. Of course, I expected that we would see some signs of the siege even though a decade has passed. But within a minute of seeing the first sign telling us we had arrived in the city limits I noticed buildings pockmarked with bullet holes. Throughout the city the signs of the conflict appear everywhere. Some of the shell marks on the walkways have been filled in with red concrete, known as Sarajevo roses. Ruth noticed one directly in front of the Catholic Cathedral.

As anyone who knows the city will tell you, Sarajevo is an interesting place. The close and, until the 1990s, mainly easy coexistence of Catholic, Moslem, and Orthodox Bosnians makes the city unique in the Balkans. Ruth and I arrived just as a late afternoon call for prayer began, and we heard the sound of Muezzins from several sides. At a leisurely pace you can visit the Catholic and Orthodox Cathedrals and then look in on the Gazi Husarev-Bey Mosque in 10 minutes. Young women and mothers with the distinctive headscarves share the pedestrian areas with blond girls in leather jackets and jeans. Sometimes you see girlfriends walking arm in arm, one demurely wearing the headscarf and the other letting her hair go free to drive men wild with passion. Rebecca West wrote in the 1930s of the “tranquil sensuality” of Sarajevans. Headscarves in Sarajevo tend to be very stylish or colorful. I noticed, also, that young men took less care to conceal their appraisal of passing young women than they do in Montenegro.

Yet in spite of the city’s exoticism, I never felt easy there. I was tired from the drive and felt uncomfortably claustrophobic in the city. Clouds and fog had backed into the gorge where the city sits by the time we arrived, so we had to walk around in mist or drizzle or dreary rain. The city makes no effort to tuck away its cemeteries with white stone spikes marking graves, all the same age, all more or less new. In the gray, misty weather these seemed to stand out all the more.

And our hotel turned out to be a disaster. Although advertised at a reasonable price, after booking I was informed of other charges—a hotel tax, a fee for linens (?). And then we found out about the charge for towels. I felt like I’d fallen for some kind of con. When would Peter Lorre show up to tell me there was no escape? I ended up paying for a merely adequate room the same amount that I’d paid for the excellent accommodations we had in Kotor two weeks ago. We also ended up buying our own toilet paper, and of course they don’t sell that one roll at a time here (I think we now have 12, apparently manufactured in the Communist era).

The route that we had taken had been so bad that I couldn’t even think about repeating it. We took the long way, the good road. [Here a good road means a decent road, one that, like a decent human being, does what it is supposed to without egregious virtue.] And the unexpected benefit of this was that we had a chance to visit Mostar, to see and walk across Stari Most. The bridge had been the work of the Moslem architect Hayrudin, and lasted from 1566 until it was purposely destroyed by Croatian gunners during the war. It has been reconstructed, using many of the original stones. We also had an excellent lunch in Mostar, felt more at ease there than we had since crossing into BiH.

We had the chance to see a lot more of BiH. A lot more. For all our driving in unknown terrain, though, we only got lost once (This contradicts Ruth's claim on her journal site, which otherwise is quite accurate. Ruth did an excellent job with map-reading and directions and was a great partner.) More like we got confused. We were on the right road, but we kept going up and down looking for our turn. Throughout the trip my directions-asking Serbian (eh, Bosnian) held up very well. The only misdirection came from a member of Eufor (EU force in BiH to keep an eye on the feuding religions). And in this case, the soldier only spoke Spanish. I was delighted. Although he didn’t know where our road was, he told us the wrong direction with such authority that it took us another 20 minutes and two conversations with locals to realize what we had to do.

And, just for the record: the long way around takes longer.

Posted by at 2:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I adore Belgrade. -- Goran

Ruth and I had met Goran in Podgorica two days before we flew to Belgrade. Although he is from Podgorica and lives there now, Goran did his doctoral work at the University of Belgrade. So I asked him about the city, what we should see and do, and generally how he felt about it. His typically restrained Montenegrin answer came immediately.

It’s easy to see why Goran, Ivana (the faculty Spanish teacher), Janko, and the other Montenegrins who have studied or spent much time at all have such affection for the city. During our three-day visit, Ruth felt pretty enthusiastic about Belgrade by the end of the first day. I have to admit that I wondered just how different my Fulbright experience would have been in Belgrade than it has been in rustic Nikšić.

First of all, Belgrade is a real city. Its population of at least two million makes it almost four times as big as all of Montenegro (though I have heard more than once that there are more Montenegrins living in Belgrade than in Montenegro). And it is a fine old European city, with majestic buildings, hotels, public squares, pedestrian streets. It won’t remind you of Berlin—the decades of Communism and the subsequent troubles with the breakup of the country have left Belgrade a little rough, a little gray. It gave me the impression of an Eastern European city like Budapest at the end of the Communist era. Fascinating, busy, and quickly opening to the world. But not too quickly.

Our hotel, Xasima, had a good location in the older section of Beograd. We only had a short walk to Knez Mihaila, a pedestrian street lined with shops and cafes. We were never far from the next book store or the next cappuccino. Knez Mihaila runs from Trg Republika to Kalemegdan Park that overlooks the convergence of the Danube and the Sava rivers. “Ever since there were men in this region this promontory must have meant life to those that held it, death to those that lost it,” wrote Rebecca West. “Its prow juts out between the two great rivers and looks eastward over the Pannonian Plain….” She then offers a paragraph long history of competition for this site that begins with the Illyrians and extended into the 20th century. Monuments commemorate some of the grief seen on this bluff, but today these stand in tree lined walks and are surrounded by flowers. The park and fortress with its spectacular views is understandably popular with people in Belgrade. There are restaurants here, and a zoo, plus nightlife for the younger crowd. Ruth and I enjoyed the views from the walls of the fortress and we visited the military museum. (Click here for a photo essay that features Knez Mihaila and Kalemegdan.)

Even though I’m not overly fond of museums, the military museum was well worth the 100 dinars we each paid. It has authentic weapons from all of the periods of western Balkan history and it exhibits them with thoughtful and useful interpretive materials. Unfortunately, the museum makes no concession to foreign visitors since the language of the exhibits is entirely in Serbian. And the historical narrative ends at World War I, with only one room given over to the NATO intervention in Kosovo. That subtracts from the history of the region WW II, the Communist period, and the civil war. From the point of view of the museum, Serbs go from being victimized by the Turks to being victimized by the Austrians to being victimized by the western alliance.

Our explorations took us into other parts of the city. We went to Sv. Marko’s church, a Serbian Orthodox church built over several decades in the early 20th century. Orthodox churches seemed to share a quieting severity. Interiors lack decoration, except for the abundant icons. Yet the icons, even with all their gold and color, also seem severe. At Sv. Marko we stood in the entryway as faithful bought candles to kiss and light and set into sand in one of the several stands around the church. Four huge pillars dominate the interior, and a circular steel candle frame hangs from the dome. Smoke hung heavy in the air and rose slowly into the dark above. I couldn’t tell if the scent that pervaded the room was from incense or candles.

We also visited the largest Serbian church in the world, Sv. Sava’s Temple. It is massive and impressive with its white marble exterior. At the moment it is undergoing restoration, so we could not go inside. Yet even church buildings hold a place in the practice of religion here. Worshipers walk backward before leaving an orthodox church, and cross themselves before turning to walk out. At Sv. Sava we saw people stop, turn toward one of the entrances, and cross themselves. (I’ve occasionally seen people on the bus cross themselves when we pass the monastery of Ostrog which is barely visible from the bus.) (Both churches and other points of interests in Belgrade are here.)

I could hardly resist visiting a different kind of shrine, the grave of Marshal Tito. “It was better under Tito,” one of our Taxi drivers told us. He couldn’t have been more than 35, so only a small child when Tito died. But Serbia and the rest of former Yugoslavia has suffered bitterly since Tito’s death. Nostalgia for Yugoslavia crops up in Serbia and Montenegro. Even Goran remembers the period of Tito’s rule as one of harmony among the various nationalities. Tito’s grave gives some sense of what an atheist shrine should look like. The entrance to the building looks like the entrance to a funeral home from the 1960s, but inside there are large ceiling to floor windows on all sides to give ample natural light. You walk down a short marble walkway to a white rectangular marble box. Tito’s name and dates appear in gold on the grave.

And that’s all. No imagery, no pictures, no statues. Certainly nothing religious. In a separate building you can take a tour of gifts given to Tito during his rule. All kinds of things line the walls, from ornamental weapons to handmade lace from grateful peasants to dolls and costumes. My favorite piece was the costume of a Bolivian shaman, given by the Yugoslavs of Bolivia.

Our motivation for going to Belgrade was to attend a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Senator J. William Fulbright who established the Fulbright scholarships. The event was sponsored by the Fulbright Alumni Association of Serbia and Montenegro. Our first night in Belgrade we attended the opening session. Something of this nature in the United States, at Seton Hill, for instance, or Rutgers, would have taken place in a restaurant ballroom or a university auditorium. Here we met in the showroom of a computer store. Traffic noise from the open windows at the back distracted a bit from the seriousness of the event, and we had just enough space for the seated alumnae who attended and the choir that provided the opening part of the program. It quickly became clear that the session would be conducted entirely in Serbian. Entirely. So the discussion given by two alumnae of Senator Fulbright’s book, Arrogance of Power, lost some of its impact for us. Senator Fulbright was a man of great vision, said the one, and then blah blah blah. The second speaker did more to place Fulbright into his historical and cultural context. Even so, it was mainly Serbian words I understood in a river of Serbian unknowns. We did not attend any more of the sessions.

But, we did attend two social events connected to the conference, including a reception at the ambassador’s residence. This allowed me to become acquainted with a few of the Fulbright scholars from Serbia and Montenegro. I had discussions differing in length from minutes up to most of an hour on a variety of topics.

“Is there adequate transparency in the stock offerings?” I asked the president of the struggling new Montenegrin stock exchange, who had studied at Columbia during his Fulbright term.

“Not enough,” he told me. “There is such corruption. Montenegro is a lake, and the lake is full of crocodiles.”

On the bus back to the hotel I sat next to a young woman I took for a graduate student. No, Ana Đurđevic is a physician who had taken her Fulbright term at Johns Hopkins, studying substance abuse. We talked about the myth of marijuana as a gateway drug and the horrible record of U.S. drug policy.

And I spoke with several people about Serbian identity and the recent past. The 90s hang over this country in a way that would be perfectly easy to anticipate but difficult to appreciate without visiting here. Radmilo Pešić, professor of economics at the University of Belgrade, had studied at Texas A&M before the troubles began. We lost so much time, he told me. And many educated Serbians left the country. “We lost 300,000 or our best men and women. We are missing them badly.”

Of course, the showstopper for everyone came when I said that we lived in Nikšić. “How unfortunate,” said Radmilo in his measured way, referring to my inability to meet many colleagues from the university. But most responses betrayed more surprise, if not shock. I can’t swear that the former Yugolsavian ambassador to Cyprus actually stepped back when I told him, but he did say, “You’re living in Nikšić?”

But of course, these were academics, people with the best educations available in Serbia and Montenegro, and with the advantage of having lived abroad. So naturally they expressed themselves with some reserve. We had different responses from some of our cab drivers. I managed to exchange a bit of cab chat in Serbian with one, but when he learned that Ruth and I are living in Crna Gora he asked, in English, “So do you like living in Montenegro? No” he immediately answered for us. “It’s horrible!” Another cabbie had even better English skills. The topic turned to the referendum that will be held in Montenegro to determine if they will remain in a union with Serbia. “No one is holding referendum if we want them to stay with us. If they do, the answer is ‘no!’”

Posted by at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Although in thinking about my teaching here what interests me most comes under the rubric of culture—values, attitudes, the way ideas are translated into life—in order to discuss my teaching I have to take a detour into an area that might seem distressingly procedural, administrative, even economic. How is my course organized?

To begin with, I have two classes, two sections of American Civilization. The first “section” has just over 100 students, and the second has about 60 students. That is more students as I would have in a regular schedule of classes in a full year at Seton Hill University. I received an outline of the topics covered by the last teacher of this course, and I tried to match my readings and topics to the topics listed in the pre-existing program. But I also sat with my department chair, Janko Andrijesevic and worked out the details of the course “program,” that is, what assignments and assessments would shape the class.

I should say, here, that I teach first year students and that these students are the first to enter a system undergoing reform. So my course represents an important move toward a new approach to teaching here in Montenegro. I have already written about European reform, but I need to give a bit more background for this to make sense. In the past, students here have earned degrees by passing exams. Courses prepared students for exams, I suppose, but students could sit for exams apart from the courses. And if a student did poorly in the exam, he or she could repeat the exam, with no limit. My predecessor in this Fulbright position, Robert Sullivan, has written to me of a student who took his American literature exam five times.

The new system that I work under makes courses the primary means of earning a degree. Students still have a chance to repeat a final exam, but if they fail they must repeat the course. Janko and I developed a course that contained even more student work and assessment, so that everything would not depend on a single exam. I had the sense when we discussed the course that I was taking advantage of every new innovation. Yet the course that resulted gives the following weights to its various assessments:
Two quizzes: 3% of the course grade each
One homework: 4%
One mid-term: 40%
One final: 50%
The mid-term may be repeated and the final may be repeated (but students cannot repeat both).

Given this raw numerical material to deal with, you can make several assumptions about student work in the course. This provides students with very little incentive to do the work necessary for either the quizzes or the homework, and certainly does not provide motivation for hard work. And the possibility of repeating the two major exams can give students a very casual attitude toward them, especially the mid-term. This should provide a good guide to student behavior, but I apparently didn’t do this analysis prior to the beginning of the course and assumed that students here would work about the way students in the U.S. do. Now, of course, I have the blinding clarity of hindsight.

I only began to see these attitudes at work when my homework fell due a few weeks ago. I had assigned students to write a paragraph on one of the documents we had used in the first half of the course, discussing its relevance to either civil society or individualism. Students did well on this, with a strong majority receiving 3 or more per cent out of 4 per cent possible. I have posted some of the better papers on the American Civilization site as examples for others to follow. A surprising number chose to write about “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” a text that I think is extraordinary, but even someone whose middle name is Calvin would find Edwards’ theology strange if not republsive. I expected my Orthodox students to see the text as totally bizarre and ignore it. Instead, many wanted to grapple with God’s anger. The least popular document was Alexander Hamilton’s “Report on Public Credit.” One student told me flatly in class that it was the least interesting document.

But I’m writing here about the students who actually did the assignment. On the day that I collected the papers I had two or three students ask if the due date could be extended. I pretended that I’d never heard of such a thing in my life and said I would have to think about it (and in the end decided that extending the deadline would reward procrastination). But when I collected the papers I realized that less than half of my students had done the assignment.

Another light bulb of realization turned on when I sat down to record the grades for the mid-term. The grades had the usual bell-shaped curve, with three students making perfect papers and a healthy number doing very well. But as I put grades into my spreadsheet I noticed that a fair number of names were new. These were students who not only didn’t do the homework but also didn’t do the first quiz. And, on top of that, I had a significant group who didn’t do the mid-term, taking for granted that they would do it later, on the make-up date.

So now, even though I have given three graded assessments, probably only a small majority of my students have three grades. But in reflecting on this I realized that a student cost-benefit analysis would determine that most of his/her time and energy should go into one of the two big tests, reserving less energy for the exam that will be repeated, and giving little or no attention to the relatively minor exams and assignment.

I had another wake-up call to rouse me from my cultural hibernation when I handed the tests back. I admit at the outset that the trauma a few weeks ago of giving the quizzes back by calling out student names changed me. For the larger class this job took far too long, and I garbled so many names even the students stopped thinking it was funny after half an hour. This time I put the exams in alphabetical order and told students to come up to look at their exam. [I know, totally illegal and unethical in the U.S.A. But when I asked Janko how I would inform students what their grades were on the final, he said to make a list of names and post the grades.] I’ve already talked about the absence of “standing in line” behavior here. Combine this with a weak notion of the concept of alphabetical order (one girl was looking through the first pile until I discovered her last name began with “R”) and with the common practice of having a friend find out your grade for you. The result looked like a crowd at Macy’s on black Friday converging on the Cabbage Patch Doll display.

The real eye-opener, though, came from student responses. Students who had earned high grades, B+ or higher (a small minority) were understandably pleased. But many students who received scores just slightly above passing were visibly thrilled. Clearly this came from having their negative expectations confounded. “I only studied an hour and a half,” one girl confessed. But she was giddy with delight that she had a grade that probably qualified as a D.

There is more. We discussed race in a recent class. But that has to wait until a later posting. Keep reading The Blue Monkey Review.

Posted by at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Road to Ratac

Ruth arrived this week. She didn’t fly directly to Montenegro, because that would have made too much sense. The travel agent in Greensburg could find no reasonable flight to Podgorica that didn’t cost a small fortune and/or involve an overnight stay somewhere in Europe. Montenegro Air didn’t inspire much confidence with my arrival experience, and they also don’t accept credit cards for travel arrangements (that couldn’t have anything to do with my posting on Commerce, I’m sure). I finally found a flight into Dubrovnik, one that still cost a lot but was hundreds less than anything else.

When look at your map of Montenegro, you will quickly see that Dubrovnik isn’t in Montenegro, though it is in a nearby part of Croatia. And you will also note that the shortest route from Nikšić to Dubrovnik is through Bosnia Hercegovina.

That meant renting a car and driving, something that will almost always appeal to a Californian. The road in that direction is a minor road in a country of minor roads, but it had hardly any traffic. I had some difficulty dodging farm equipment and rocks on the road. It goes over a mountain ridge, up where snow still covered the ground, but the sun shone and the air was warm. And the scenery continues to surprise me in a good way. Just above Nikšić sits a huge lake. And just beyond the Bosnian border lies a valley so shocking in its size and beauty that I could hardly believe what I saw.

During what people here still simply call “the war,” Bosnia was invaded by forces both from Serbia and Croatia for the not very good reason that both Serbians and Croatians live in Bosnia. (Slobodan Milosevic, then president of Serbia, now stands trial at the Hague for atrocities committed in Bosnia. Dr. Franz Tudjman, Milosevic’s counterpart in Croatia, would be sharing lock-up humor with Slobo if he hadn’t conveniently died. So instead he is memorialized with a modern bridge just outside of Dubrovnik. And, since I’ve already made this detour, the Milosevic trial is broadcast on TV here, every morning.)

Bosnian Serbs managed to force de facto partition of the country. So, when I entered Bosnia I really went into a political Twilight Zone known as Republika Srpska. Crossing Bosnia meant crossing the border out of Montenegro and about 100 meters later crossing a border into Republika Serpska. About an hour later, of course, I drove up to the border of Republika Srpska to exit and then managed to find the border of Croatia another sprint down the road. And, strangely, there was a border to cross somewhere in between all of that, for what I cannot say.

The crossings were everything you could want from border crossings in the Balkans. Suspicious men in uniform took my passport, and my car’s passport, and went into dilapidated guard houses where they did God-knows-what and returned to hand the documents back to me—sometimes stamped, sometimes, mysteriously, left unaltered. Then they raised, by hand, the flimsy gates that protected their nations from illegal immigrants and smuggled cars. How flimsy? These are the gates you see in movies that get rammed through by cars (not trucks) driven by Steve McQueen. At Croatia the border guard (the only woman guard of the day) had trouble keeping the gate from bouncing back up when she lowered it.

Once in Croatia I felt odd, as though I’d driven into a strange new world. A world very much like Europe. Better roads, no litter, signs that made it easy to find my way around. In fact, it was a pleasure to drive in Croatia, even though the roads crossed unforgiving mountains and then hugged the sides of the mountains along the Adriatic. Sorry to get repetitive on you but (ho hum!) the scenery was spectacular.

Still, I had a bit more scenery than I bargained for when I discovered that my hotel was half an hour beyond Dubrovnik. Once I finally reached the place where I needed to go, there was a startling lack of a hotel—just a bus station on the side of the road. I parked, got out and started to look around. Since my cell phone wouldn’t place a call I was pretty much on my own. I walked down the first driveway I would find to a gate, then looked over a fence down into someone’s backyard. People live close to the vertical here, with front stoops perched over the Adriatic. An older woman tending her garden became the first, final, and only nominee as someone to get me out of my mess. I called down to her and after she recovered her balance she only slightly grudgingly took on the task of helping me locate my hotel. And, if you had to ask, she spoke no word of English.

Villa Ratac, where Ruth spent her first night in the Balkans, looks like a dream of a seaside villa. Buildings, furnishings, appliances are all new, all designed for guests. The buildings are faced with white stone, and every room has a huge balcony looking out onto the Adriatic.

When I finally showed up the only other person there was Lukša, the son of the owners, and he quickly showed his excellent training from the American School in Dubrovnik by taking me down to the seaside stone bench and treating me to a beer or two (“It would be impolite for me to drink if you don’t join me,” he told me more than once.) We sat for an hour or more talking as the sun sank into the Adriatic. Although Lukša betrays none of the pessimism that I often find in Montenegrin young people, he shared some views with my students in Nikšić. “Our professors at the American university found it very unusual that we cheated. But here it is natural that if you have the answer you will help your colleague.”

Dubrovnik

I spent the next two days becoming acquainted with Stari Grad (the old city) in Dubrovnik. This is the magnet for tourists, with its wide squares and its placa that runs from the Onofrio Fountain at one end of the city to the clock tower and Orlando column at the other. It’s a city of marble squares and walks, and the best preserved and most impressive city walls in Europe. Ruth and I spent an hour walking around the walls on our day together in the city, helping a woman with vertigo along one scary stretch (but, unfortunately for her, not the only one). The views available both of the city and of the Adriatic are, well, you know, spectacular.

But from the city walls you can see just how extensive the reconstruction in the city has been. Although some rusty looking old tiles still cover some roofs, most of the buildings in the city have new orange red terracotta tiling. During the war Dubrovnik was shelled intensively by forces from Serbia, including forces not only from Montenegro but specifically from Nikšić. When I planned to come here I had more than one warning not to take a car with NK plates. Lukša advised me to park my car and its SCG (Serbia Crna Gora) plates in the family parking area, off of the main highway. “Because you never know—some drunk might come by and who knows?” I was happy to comply. I probably attracted a few hostile looks. The only time I was aware of this was when Ruth and I stopped on the winding cliffside road to look down on Dubrovnik. A health nut walking the narrow verge of the road happened to walk onto the turnoff about this time and ran a very hairy eyeball over the car and us as well. As the three of us ascended the steps at the rear of the turnout he turned on me and started asking about the car. I quickly replied that it was a rental and that no, I wasn’t from Montenegro, that we were “ iz Americke.” He didn’t seem completely satisfied, but whatever language I was speaking it clearly wasn’t Montenegrin.

Dubrovnik was a republic, that is to say an independent city governed by a narrow elite of nobles (only 22 families qualified). It maintained its independence from Hungary, the Turks, and even Venice, and grew rich by trading grain from its hinterland and goods from all over the Levant. As befits a wealthy and Catholic city, it has many churches. I don’t make a practice of visiting every church I see, having filled up my lifetime’s quota for Catholic churches during my study trip to the Holy Land fifteen years ago. I was not particularly impressed with by St. Blaise Church or by the Cathedral, though I’m happy to report that the Cathedral is not packed with Baroque wares and that it even contains some contemporary art. But neither had anything to compate to the retablo at the Mission Inn, in Riverside.

[There is a Serbian Orthodox church in Dubrovnik. Since Rebecca West wrote in the 1930s at some length that the city authorities had managed to exclude Orthodox churches in spite of pressure from their Russian allies, I have to assume the Serbian church was built during the Communist era. If so, that would have to count as high irony.]

There is an ethnographic museum in what had been the city granary. I can’t urge you to part with the entrance fee to see the collection of early 20th century traditional garb. What I found more interesting was the building itself. Grain was dried on the top floor and then poured through holes in the lower floors into huge storage bins below.

Ruth and I also explored the Rector palace. The nobles had such a fear of losing their status to a single ruler that the leadership of the community went to a nobleman elected by the city senate, but the Rector served for only one month. And during that time, he had to remain in the palace (which also housed the city prison), leaving only for ceremonial functions and with the permission of the senate.

The Montenegrin Riviera

We returned to Nikšić (“home”) by driving south along the coast. It isn’t far until you are leave Croatia and return to Montenegro. The roads deteriorate immediately, and what had been a difficult road in Croatia becomes a tortuous one in Montenegro, winding along the coast with nary a culvert or tunnel to straighten the stretch. When we finally did come to a tunnel, just outside Kotor, it turned into an ordeal all its own. I know that my associates living in the Northeast U.S. will think “Squirrel Hill” or “Lincoln” when I say tunnel. Better to envision something from Journey to the Center of the Earth. This one looks to have been carved from the rock and then left unfinished, though the tunnel had so little lighting I couldn’t be sure. And it didn’t just leak in places from the melting snow and porous rock—water poured into the darkness and made it all the harder to tell if we were about to drive over rough spots in the road or into the mother of potholes. Since drivers in front of me swerved into the opposing lane to avoid some of these spots, I swerved behind them.

We also made a little detour finding our hotel, the Bokeljski Dvori in Prcanj (recommended by a friend who teaches German here in Nikšić, and quite a good value with fantastic views of Kotor Bay). We passed our turn, and in what by now should make my hair stand on end and my throat contrict to choke the sounds, I uttered the words, “It looks about as far on the map to go the other way as it would be to turn back.” I’m sure the distances were comparable, but the new route put us onto a road that snaked around blind hairpins and squeezed between the bay on one side and front doors of houses on the other. In Greensburg, PA, it would have made a narrow alley or a decent sized bike path. Need I add that traffic ran both ways?

We spent the next morning in Kotor, once a Venetian city and at times an independent city. It sits on the bay that bears its name, also the only fjord in southern Europe. Here the geography is more unforgiving than even at Dubrovnik. To remain independent the city built fortifications up the hill behind the walled city, probably as much to protect it from the Montenegrin tribespeople as from attacks by sea. You reach the fortress of St. John by walking to the rear of Stari Grad and find the stairs. And then you just keep going up. We climbed for about an hour to reach the top of the fortifications, the place where you can look out the back window of the fort and see that what runs behind the city is a ridge and not the side of a mountain. The ravine would also be a fjord if it had filled with water.

It surprised me how unreconstructed the fortress was. Many parts of the wall that runs alongside the path have crumbled away, and there are lots of areas that would make a mother with a small child more than a little anxious. In one or two places you see relatively new concrete, and there is a decades old steel bridge that crosses into the main part of the fortress. For the fortress, this bridge counts as more or less up to date. Parts of the bridge plates have fallen off and we both assumed that we would not see if it could hold both of us at once. Nothing about the fortress had been redone to make it tourist friendly or attractive. In other words, it was a great place to poke around in. Ruth and I had the place to ourselves.

The fortress makes Kotor special. Thecity also has some beach areas, though nothing to compare with cities further south. In other respects, it is a nice tourist getaway, and we saw lots of tour groups and independent tourists. Only in Kotor (so far) have I seen the kind of overpriced objects that you might want to take away with you as a memory of your time here. Souvenirs have a kind of charisma, and as it happens some of the most attractive objects were small icons available in the Serbian Orthodox church in Stari Grad.

From Kotor we took the road back to Nikšić, following the coast to Budva then east over the mountains through Cetinje and finally turning north at Podgorica. Early in the afternoon we stopped at Restoran Ognjište, one that I’ve seen from the road many times. A friend had recommended it. I need to reconsider that friendship. The restaurant was a kind of Montenegrin theme park in miniature, what the owners of Texas Roadhouse might do with a Confederate-themed restaurant if they had complete freedom of design and lacked all sense of taste. The restaurant evoked (I guess) the rugged Montenegrin spirit in a cave-like setting. Construction materials included brick, stone, timber, woven wood, rope, iron, and I’m sure other things I couldn’t catalogue. It is the kind of place where menus are handwritten on leather pages. It sits next to a small river with a boat-like building at “anchor,” and just generally looked like a complete mess. Prices were high (for here anyway—about what you might expect at Olive Garden), service extremely attentive though stuffy.

So, the adventure continues. For Ruth, it is just beginning. She keeps a journal of her own online, so you can check there for another source of the truth.

Posted by at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)