Remembering the Balkans

Creative Fiction is a relatively new classification given to writing that is entirely factual, but not written in a narrative or journalistic style. This piece describes some of my experiences while working in the Balkans in the late 1990’s.

Night time drops fast and hard in the Balkan winter. A cold, concrete block, the night snuffs out the dim, lifeless light of day. One minute it is simply dreary. The next it is dark, with a hard cold that leans on you like a crumbling wall.

During the day, the wind is formed in the soft and sophisticated winter of European skiers. Layers keep you warm and deflect this western winter coming down from the forests and mountains of northern Italy and Austria.

Suddenly you shiver. You look up. You check behind you. Something is different. Something has changed.

It’s the wind. It comes from due east now… from the ancient steppes it blows across the Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria. Unhindered, the wind gathers the cold as it sweeps across the fallow plains and frozen waterways of eastern Hungary and Serbia. Cold needles from the east penetrate your winter layers, freeze your skin and chill your bones.

The eastern cold is here. This is a night when families huddle round a fire that never seems to be quite big enough, quite bright enough, or quite warm enough.

I am somewhere in Bosnia i Herzegovina, also known as BiH, or just Bosnia, driving down a small two-lane road. At irregular intervals my headlights illuminate uninhabited villages that still show prominent evidence of the battles fought here recently. More often than not, the village or town is inhabited, with only the most badly damaged homes and businesses still abandoned. Other villages are modern ghost towns.

Even with the windows up, my truck’s heater strains valiantly, but I still need my layers, my jacket, my gloves.

This is a part of the world where countless generations of hard-fought history lie close below the surface. In daylight, the path the Yugoslav army took through these idyllic villages is obvious. The depressions in the fertile soil left by tank treads and trucks. A path of young trees forming a stripe through old growth forest indicates where the army broke through the woods. Gaping holes in the eastern walls of homes indicate where the tanks came from. Deep scars from machine guns ring bedroom windows, the only testament to some local villager who stood their ground for a few desperate minutes.

The scene becomes darker and more sinister in the Balkan night. I catch brief glimpses of destruction as my lights pan across roadside buildings. A peek into an abandoned living room through a hole left by a tank. Splintered door frames stick out of the rubble of a demolished home. Bullet holes trace an upward arc along a wall. These are only the most recent marks of history on this well-traveled path between Europe and Asia.

The nightfall brings the single most disturbing thing to see. This countryside is littered with cemeteries. Some official, next to a church, and others stand alone in fields or at the edges of villages; cemeteries built according to need. Some with graves in neat rows, others hastily dug or jammed in tight along a bend in the road.

In each of these cemeteries, families and friends of the deceased come out every night and light a candle in front of the grave markers. I see a stone marker capped with the crescent moon and star of Islam. Another with the Star of David. Another with a cross. And others with the double-bar cross of the Serbian Orthodox church. All these graves, side by side, and most of them illuminated by a single candle.

Each candle is shielded from the wind with a red glass globe like you find on the table of a cheap Italian restaurant. The flame casts an eerie flickering red glow onto the grave marker.

Coming around a bend in the road in the utter darkness of a Balkan winter, and seeing a clearing in the trees with hundreds of these red flickering tombstones is a memory that will forever cause a tightening in my stomach and shoulders. As I write this, years after the experience, goose-bumps rise on my arms.

The sight itself is enough to leave an indelible impression… but when you think about it, there is more. Much more.

Every day, people go out there and light candles at these graves. Every day, they plan their trip to the cemetery. Every day, they check if they have a candles for tonight, or if they need to go by the shop on the way home from work. Every day, these people kneel in front of the grave of a friend, family member, loved one, and remember them. Their life. Their vibrancy. Their times together. It impels these people to make their daily pilgrimage to the graves.

During that Balkan winter the chill needles of the eastern wind, the wind from the steppes, the wind like icy concrete, cold and gritty on your cheek, the wind from the Ukraine that has been gathering the cold like a mother gathers a frightened child to her breast, the wind blows across the memories in the Balkans. The cold headstones and their religious ornaments scream of the death they represent. Scream to the deaf wind.

And another person kneels down, lighting a candle for the dead.

By Christian Jacobsen. All rights reserved.