London Sunday Times on :Serbia's art and soul
MichaelP
(MichaelP)
--
Decani Monastery tel +381 390 61543
38322 Decani, Serbia fax +381 390 61567
The Sunday Times: Culture: Art
London, May 16 1999 ART
To understand the Serbs, look at their art in Kosovo, says WALDEMAR
JANUSZCZAK. These depictions of war and persecution are the focus of the
country's beliefs
Serbia's art and soul
I came across a monk on the Internet last week, broadcasting from one of
the most beautiful of all the Serbian churches in Kosovo and Metohija --
to give the province its full Serbian nomenclature, for a change,-- from
Decani, near the Albanian border.
Metohija means "land of the churches". Which is what Kosovo is to the
Serbs. They also call it their Sacred Land. If you look at a map of the
religious sites in the province you will see immediately why. The
landscape is dotted with so many schematic crosses that you wonder where
the cities might be fitted in. And how could our bombs possibly miss all
these churches and monasteries and convents?
The distressed Internet monk was telling his readers, rather elegantly I
thought, that "history in the Balkans is like quicksand", and he was
urging fellow Serbs not to allow this quicksand of history to suck them
down. "If we cannot move forward now, we will suffer again," he warned.
Unfortunately, the broadcast was dated to the middle of 1998. This was
just another piece of ancient Internet junk, floating uselessly on the
Web.
As it happens, I know the monastery in Decani. I visited it more than 20
years ago as an eager art student trying to acquire a wider knowledge of
Byzantine art. The old Orient Express used to go as far as Istanbul,
uniting, in steam and bumps, the art of the West with that of the East,
and I was able to arrange a hop-off as it passed through Tito's
illusionistically coherent Yugoslavia. What an important service that
bandit-attracting train used to provide as it chugged through the Balkans
and made ignorance more difficult.
It is fair to say, I suppose, that Byzantine art is tough to admire. It
talks down to you like a sentencing judge. There's an intrinsic sternness
to it. You must enter such dark and inviolately serious churches to
encounter it. And then you must appreciate so much repetition.
Nevertheless, tourists flock to magnificent Ravenna happily enough; and
the delights of ancient Istanbul are always being eagerly sampled. But the
glories of Serbian Kosovo remain significantly more obscure. Even today
unbelievably - they appear to us to form a very minor piece of the Kosovo
jigsaw, but to the Serbs they have never been that. To the Serbs they
constitute an indestructible 700-year-old proof of their rightful
ownership of the sacred land.
The monastery of Visoki Decani was founded early in the 14th century, and
I wish I could remember it better. remember that it is approached along a
spectacular wooded valley and that the outside is striped in soft marble
pinks and whites. The interior, as I recall it, is completely covered from
floor to dome with frescoes, executed, I read, between 1335 and 1350.
These are considered to be the greatest masterpieces of Serbian religious
art. But are they still there? Is the treasury at Decani still filled with
those curious golden crosses, so absurdly ornate that they have ceased
entirely to be cross-shaped? Are the hand-painted medieval gospels still
glistening in their dusty glass boxes? And over the crossing, is there
still a giant Christ looking down on you with one of those terrifyingly
accusatory biblical stares that are a Byzantine speciality?
Who knows? It is an ugly irony of this dumb and ever dumber war that, even
though art played such a critical role in its instigation, nobody appears
to have ta ken the slightest bit of interest in it since the fighting
began. Not on our side, at least.
It wasn't always so. That gaseous cultural dreamer and professional
Frenchman, Andre Malraux, looking out across the beautiful Serbian
monasteries of Kosovo, with their dramatic clusters of grapefruit domes
and their huge expanses of floor-to-ceiling fresco, was moved to write:
"Culture, when it is the most precious possession, is n ever the past."
God, but he was right. Malraux died in 1976. He had been a liberal, but he
died a Gaullist who loved the sound of his own conservatism, and certainly
wrote too much. In most modern situations I would rank him as one of the
century's most eminently skippable cultural commentators. But in his few
sad thoughts on Kosovo, published a quarter of a century ago in one of
those impressively convoluted studies of the Slavs that are a Gallic
speciality, Malraux revealed himself to be an excellent reader of the Serb
mind.
Being French, and of the old school, he understood perfectly the power not
only of culture but also of history. Today, in new Britain, it seems to me
we no longer understand the power of either. Which is why we have
attempted so childishly, in Tony-talk, to reduce the complex Balkan
scenario in to a simple fairy tale about a nasty dictator leading his
people astray. It is why we have ignored, so fully, the art of Kosovo, and
failed, so entirely, to appreciate the part it has played in shaping these
grim unfoldings. It is why the first battle of Kosovo of 1389 - in which
the Christian Serbs were defeated by the Muslim Turks, ushering in 500
years of astonishingly stubborn Serbian cultural resistance to Islam- is
written ab out, in the few instances that it is written about, as if all
that it provides is some minor proof of chronic Serbian old-fashionedness.
And it is why we have ended up blundering so violently into a game of
space invaders in the skies above the Balkans. Because real history means
so little to us, we have forgotten how much it continues to mean to
others.
And please do not deny that our appreciation of history has shrunk into
dumbness. This year was the 350th anniversary of the beheading of Charles
I. All year long I have been staggered by the so-what? responses this
anniversary has encouraged in New Britain. The Queen's Gallery put on a
half-hearted display of royal portraits. A show of Stuart prints popped up
at the British Museum. And that's it. A nation that found its rightful
monarch guilty of crimes against the state, then somehow found the black
determination to try him and behead him, can no longer be bothered to
remember why. It couldn't happen in Serbia, believe me. In fact, I do not
think it could have happened anywhere east of Dover. Yet, over here, the n
ational memory of the execution of a king has been discarded as easily as
last year's flares.
I have been remembering Malraux a lot recently, as I sit here worrying
about wh at has happened to the great torehouses of Byzantine art that are
the Serbian monasteries of Kosovo and Metohija, about the fate of which I
have been unable to find a single informed word among the millions of
others that have been pouring out of reporters and opinion-formers since
our bombing began.
That extraordinary three-in-one church, The patriarchate of Pec, for six
centuries the headquarters of the Serbian Orthodox faith, set in another
spectacular gorge, close to Decani, close to Albania - is it still intact?
During those 500 years of Muslim rule by the Turks, Pec and the other
monasteries of the Sacred Land provided an obvious and reliable focus for
Serb nationalist dreams.
And what about Gracinica? A strange church, as I remember it, with too
many does crowded above too small a nave, located a few miles outside
Pristina, and started in 1313. The Turks burnt it down a few decades
later. So the Serbs rebuilt it. Burnt down and rebuilt, burnt down and
rebuilt - the famous ecclesiastical sites of Kosovo kept the Serbian
embers glowing, for century after century, with remarkable success.
So. When the Bosnians converted to Islam, the Serbs didn't. When the
Albanians converted to Islam, the Serbs didn't. For 500 years they
believed themselves to be fighting a Christian jihad on behalf of the
civilised West against the invading eastern Muslims. When the Turks were
finally expelled, in the false dawn that preceded the G reat War, in came
the Bulgarians. And the Austrians. And the Italians. Then the Nazis. Even
more clearly than my people, the Poles, the Serbs have had to define
themselves through their opposition to their neighbours. And their
churches, packed to the rafters with so much stern and rousing and ancient
religious propaganda, have been the chief artistic focus of that
opposition.
So. When the Croats sided with Hitler, the Serbs didn't. When the
Albanians sided with Hitler, the Serbs didn't. Until, finally, in about
1960, under the wonky tarpaulin of Tito's communism, the Muslim population
of Kosovo, swollen by wholesale illegal immigration from the mightily poor
and pseudo-Maoist Albania, and fattened by the strict Muslim forbidding of
birth control, finally overtook and outnumbered the indigenous Serb
population. And 40 years of recent history began the process of attempting
to outweigh 700 years of historic struggle. Monasteries had stones thrown
through their windows (many had already been converted into mosques).
Graves were desecrated. Churches were torched. It is to the defence of
those churches that the Serbs clearly believed they were rushing when they
invaded, so brutally and quickly, Kosovo and Metohija.
The coverage of the Kosovo conflict has, time after time, struck me with
its high-tech ignorance of these powerful lo-tech causes. Not a word is
ever uttered about the great church art of Serbia. Not enough has been
devoted to the deep historical roots of the war. A few brief references
have been made to the historic Battle of Kosovo of 1389, but not with any
deep ambition to take it seriously. Not a line, that I have read, has been
quoted from the marvellous cycle of epic Kosovo poems with which the
Serbs, "a nation of bards", have been indoctrinating their children, from
birth, since the victory of the Turks. I suppose, in new Britain, you feel
like something of a berk reciting the famous curse of Stefan Musich
:
If any Serb, or man of Serbian birth,
Or any man of Serbian kith or kin,
If any such a man comes not with me
To battle on the field of Kosovo -
Never shall he know a son or daughter.
Whatsoever he may touch shall wither:
Vineyard, field of wheat - his sweat and labour
Fruitless, and his generation barren!
Date: Thursday, May 27, 1999 12:59 AM
Subject: THE ART HISTORY OF KOSOVO AND METOHIA
MY DEAR FRIENDS,
I AM SORRY THAT I DO NOT SEPARATE INTRODUCTION TO THIS TEXT FOR EACH OF
YOU. I WILL TRY TO THIS WHEN EVER I FOUND TIME, BUT THERE IS ALSO ABOUT
FIFTY SO FAR ADDRESSES ON MY YUGOSLAV LIST FOR WHOM I TRANSLATED THIS VERY
WELL WRITTEN TEXT ABOUT VERY RARELY MENTIONED ASPECTS OF THE KOSOVO WAR. I
BELIEVE THIS WILL HELP YOU UNDERSTAND BETTER THE SITUATION WHICH SEEMS SO
MUDDY AND FOGGY FROM THE AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE.
AS A MATTER OF FACT AS SOON AS I FINISHED TRANSLATION OF THIS ARTICLE IN
SERBO-CROATIAN I HAVE RECEIVED THE MESSAGE ABOUT THE DAMAGE OF ONE OF THE
OLDEST CHURCHES IN KOSOVO. THE REFERENCE IN THAT MESSAGE ON THE JUGOVIC
(ENGLISH - YUGOVICH) BROTHERS GRAVES RELATES TO THE EPIC POETRY MENTIONED
IN THE ARTICLES. THERE WERE NINE BROTHERS OF YUGOVICH WHO LOST THEIR LIVES
IN THE BATTLE OF KOSOVO ALONG WITH THEIR FATHER . SO THE VOICE OF THE
DRAMATIC POEM THAT I USED TO LEARN IN SCHOOL COMES FROM THEIR MOTHER WHO
IS STANDING ON THE FIELD COVERED WITH THE CORPS WITH BLACK BIRDS ABOVE
THEM AND SHE CALLS FOR HER SONS TELLING US THROUGH TEARS ABOUT EACH OF
THEM.
SINCERELY YOURS,
MAIR
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HERE IS THE FRESH NEWS:
Pristina, 26 May, 1999 (Tanjug) - "Sveti Nikola" church in Gornja
Brnjica was one of the oldest temples in Kosovo and Metohija. Yesterday
it was endangered by the NATO aggresor's missiles.
Two NATO missiles fell in the church yard near the Orthodox graveyard.
There were no military or police objects near that holy place.
According to the tradition, there are the graves of nine Jugovic
brothers near this church.
The donations from Gornja Brnjica villagers enabled the repairing of
that dilapidated church and returned its old glamour.
Fortunately, the icons and biographies of saints in the church were
undamaged.
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