The Holy and the Profane
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’ve been in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia (and once-upon-a-time, the capital of Yugoslavia) most of this week. It’s a big European city, albeit a bit less renovated than some. Tomorrow we’re heading into the countryside, to spend a few days in a smaller Serbian town, before we continue our Balkan exploration in Bosnia-Herzegovina. (I’ve been jotting notes for this essay for a couple of weeks, as we have wandered through the region.)
The Holy and the Profane
In my first semester of college, I had a Western Civilization professor named Thomas Parramore. I’ll never forget him. Our final exam had one question: trace the impact of Christianity on western civilization, up to 1789.
I used up every minute of the allotted time, and filled a stack of those flimsy blue exam books (yeah, I’m that old).
That was in 1985. Here I am, thirty-seven years later, trying to dredge up and understand all that (literal) ancient history in my head. Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Ottomans—and remind me again where the Holy Roman Empire fit into all that?
We went to Ravenna in April because I wanted to see the Byzantine churches, with all their glorious mosaics. They were gorgeous. But now we’re in Ohrid, in North Macedonia, a city that once had 365 Byzantine churches, and the architecture is the same. The interiors are all painted with frescoes, rather than covered in mosaics, but then there are icons—so many icons. And apparently there’s some bad blood here with Greece, but maybe also with Istanbul, and of course there were the Balkan wars of the 1990s, and that’s a snippet of history that I actually remember (yeah, I’m that old, too). I just started reading yet another book to try and make sense of where I am and what I’m seeing.
But I’m not sure whether any of that matters. We had lunch yesterday in the oldest restaurant in the city, an absolutely fantastic spread of local specialities, and the young man who waited on us beamed when we told him how delicious it was. The man who was collecting fees in the public parking lot roared with laughter when Lee figured out how to bridge our language divide with a joke.
What is world history, Dr. Parramore? It’s battles and dates and power plays, yes, but when you boil it down, those are all just ways to organize the messy story of people. The kind and the crotchety, the innocent and the devious, the holy and the profane, the sad and the gregarious, the privileged and the desperate.
The Balkan wars of the 1990s were brutal and ugly. I remember hearing on the news about massacres, and accusations of genocide and war crimes. But it was far away, in a region I knew nothing about. The words slid over me, part of the background noise of my days. I had young children in the 90s, and their lives inscribed the outer limits of mine.
Scattered around the countryside of North Macedonia, there are (recent-looking) monuments to those lost fighting for ‘Mother Albania.’ A few miles away across the border, Serbia still doesn’t recognize the fledgling nation of Kosovo; we met some Americans, stationed there as part of the ongoing NATO peacekeeping mission. Then we had a fantastic lunch, in a little family-run restaurant; as we were leaving, an apron-clad granny poked her head out of the kitchen. I don’t know if she understood my words, but I’m pretty sure my smile and body language got the message across.
History in this region is alive and well, and it’s the stories of that granny and what she has lived though, that middle-aged parking lot attendant (did he fight? did he suffer? what was it like?), that young waiter, trying to make his way in a tiny tourist town, far away from the typical tourist trail.
One day, like the Balkan wars of the 90s, today’s news will be history, and I hope future generations realize that behind our chapter in the textbook were seven billion real individuals, just muddling through.
Take care,
Lisa
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