House Wine and the Family Beesness

This is Borivoj Živanović showing off some of his family's accolades.  His "great, grand, grandfather," Professor Jovan Živanović, is considered the Father of Modern Serbian Beekeeping.  Diplomas are framed and flanked by wine competition awards.  We visited the Živanovića estate in Sremski Karlovci with the purpose of visiting their in-house Museum of Beekeeping, dedicated to Borivoj's accomplished ancestor and the methods he employed.  We had no idea that the family had been (more than) dabbling in viniculture and wine making for over 200 years.  Their family legacy is one of wine and honey.  When we arrived, Borivoj and his father, Zarko, were hard at work in the backyard.  The son spoke English, so he'd be the one to give us a tour - but first he had to go deliver some wine to a restaurant.  Over to a sunny patio we were directed to have a wine tasting while we waited. Who's complaining? 

That familiar smell of fermenting grape hovered in the fresh air.   Chardonnay, Riesling, Merlot, Cabernet and then the wine that most people come to Sremski Karlovci for - Bermet.  It's a fortified wine along the lines of vermouth made only in this town at the edge of the Fruska Gora wine region.  A few local families, including the Živanovićs, have passed the recipe down amongst themselves, giving only a laundry list of 20+ herbs and spices as a hint.  We tasted the white (figs, vanilla and pinewood jolted out - very sweet) and the red (spicier, maybe cinnamon?)  Bermet was served on the Titanic - and while "on the Titanic" may not be the best words to use in an endorsement, it obviously means that Bermet was among the finest wines of its day.  As for the honey - delicious.  One was deep brown and strong, the other was different and stupendous.  "Acacia," Borivoj said returning.  Then, he unlocked the Beekeeping Museum.

Beekeeping is something that has become an interest of ours on this trip - like spelunking.  They're both something we will forever associate with Europe.  There is apiculture in America - Merlin's father kept bees - and caving, but both seem to be more abundant over on this continent.  It was actually in Slovenia that we fell in love with caves and hives.  So, it was fitting to go to our second beekeeping museum ever in another former Yugoslav country.  The museum was tasteful and interesting and presented with love.  Old manuals, diagrams and instruments - a honey extractor from 1876, a steam beeswax melter from 1881 - were all on display.  Our guide had such an easy understanding of the process, an ingrained respect for every item in the museum and what it represented.

Borivoj explained that Jovan had single-handedly brought modern beekeeping to Serbia.  "Modern" meant utilizing removable trays and moveable hives.  Above you have the old way of keeping bees, that gnome-hat contraption made from wicker and covered with clay.  In order to harvest the wax inside, one had to destroy the hive and the colony.  The faux house next to it is Professor Živanovića's creation called "Amerikanka" (American Lady).  This was a nod to the fact that "everything new and modern was coming from America."  In goes a tray with the comb and out you can pull it once all covered up with honey.  The bees survive to live another day.  What's more, it allowed beekeepers to move their hives safely to different pastures.  You want the taste of acacia?  Bring the bees out to feed somewhere they'll have all the acacia nectar they can stomach.  

The reiteration of the phrase "and you no have to kill bees" showed the great-great-grandson's esteem for his ancestor.  The Professor, who came to beekeeping late in life, had immediately contemplated the ethics of the process.  All the intellect and fervor he'd previously lent to academic papers and textbooks about the Serbian language (his career beforehand) he applied to beekeeping.  Yellowed issues of the magazine he started, "Serbian Beekeeper,"  were piled up in a glass case.  This church-shaped hive had been decorating the family garden since 1880 but was now too valuable to keep outside.  Another jewel of the museum's collection was the oldest photograph in all of Serbia.  It was a portrait of Josim Živanović, Jovan's father.  Before he become worthy of his own museum, the Professor's father and grandfather had already made a name for their family with their wine. 

Along with keeping his bees and teaching everyone else how to do it properly, the Professor kept up the family wine business and wound up passing both down to his descendants.  Borivoj is a fifth generation beekeeper and a seventh generation wine maker.  In truth, his father is more into the bees and his focus is more on wine.  It's a busy time right now. The steel contents of their 300 year old wine cellar, the oldest in the town, are in the process of being transferred over to newer, bigger, more modern digs.  The wooden barrels will stay put.  What a family to be born into, what tradition.  Heady and sweet.

Museum Night in Belgrade

On the main pedestrian boulevard, this young girl waits for her turn at the telescope.  She has probably walked along Knez Mihailova Street more times than she could count.  Just yesterday, her patience may have been tried in almost the same spot, waiting on line for ice-cream or at the check-out of Gap Kids.  But in a moment, she'll look up at the sky and feel like her feet are planted someplace entirely different.  This is Museum Night in Belgrade, an evening when things that are always there - that gallery next to Zara, that museum you maybe visited on a school trip years ago, the stars - take center stage.

This is the 9th Annual Museum Night in Serbia and it's gotten bigger each year.  In the capital, 70 museums and galleries open their doors to the public from 6pm until 2am and at least 100 exhibitions, performances, events happen in and around them.  It's not just a Belgrade thing - about 65 different cities in the country take part in the one-night-only event.  The idea is to promote culture and get people in the doors of museums.  In this part of the world, the best way to get anyone to do anything is to make it an all night party, of course!  It's kind of like the visual equivalent of a music festival (which Serbia also happens to know how to do very well).  

I wish they had something like this in New York.  How many times did a visitor see more of the city's museums in one trip than I had in my lifetime?  My sorry excuse: "When it's always there, it's hard to get yourself to go out and do it" a.k.a. I took opportunities for granted.  That's what I loved most about this event in Belgrade.  That night, everyone had a little "tourist" in them.  People walked around in groups, clutching leaflets and consulting maps.  This was especially nice for us - foreigners in a big, exciting city on Saturday night.  We not only knew what was 'happening,' we felt like we fit right in.

We bought our tickets from the Cultural Center that afternoon and spent a long time staring at the guide that came with it - a little worried about being able to find Museum Night.  But when we stepped out our door, Museum Night found us.  Even though my mom told me never to do this, I got in the back of a stranger's van.  This was outside of Radio Belgrade, which had set up a mobile recording studio (said van) for the festivities.  Where there weren't traditional "museums," other things popped up.  Happenings occurred.  

The theme, this year, was "Neon Lights," so we could only assume that these dancers were part of the festivities.  There really was this blending, oozing of exhibition into the streets between museums.  Instead of the sort of scavenger hunt I was expecting, the whole Old Town was attending "Museum Night" whether they chose to or not. And this was hardly your average required museum tour.

Gallery windows hung on darkened buildings like a painting on a wall.  Streetlamp display lighting and a windowsill frame.  Looking in at a woman looking on at a framed poster, I felt part of this strange  continuum.   Sort of like Norman Rockwell's Triple Self Portrait, except with a viewer instead of an artist.  While I wondered what was happening inside the grand museums all over the city - of which there are many - I preferred this sort of window shopping-gallery hopping.  You really could make the evening whatever you wanted it to be - which isn't usually something you associate with "going to a museum."

All night long, people stood on line outside of the Princess Ljubica house for their turn to get in.  One large man in a suit checked tickets at the gate, another manned the entrance allowing a handful at a time to cross the threshold before abruptly closing the door once more.  It was like the konak was transformed into a club.  Something about the scene just felt so.... Belgrade.  I mean, one of the most famous alternative clubs here is located in the basement of the university's Electrical Engineering Faculty building.  It's a certain, unique brand of cool.

As the evening turned to night into late night into early morning and businesses on Knez Mihailova turned off their lights, the galleries between them looked bigger.  Unmissable.  I can't say I noticed this art museum any of the dozen times we walked right past it.  They became a lot like those stars everyone was taking a turn to look at.  Bright, white reminders of what is always there and always worth exploring.

Author's Note:  In case you were wondering, we'd already titled another post Night at the Museum.

The Crveni Krst Nazi Camp

Crveni Krst is a misleading name.  In Serbian, it means "Red Cross."  So "Cverni Krst concentration camp" might sound strange.  As our guide explained, this wasn't some collaboration between the Nazis and the humanitarian organization - this bloody transport camp took its ironic name from a nearby railroad station.
A young historian-in-training named Ivan walked us around Crveni Krst on a wet, cold day in Niš, meeting us roughly where the barbed wire started and leaving us at the door of the main block.  He explained how the Nazis had painted the windows so that nobody could see outside.  He pointed out a crib that had been used for a baby born in captivity, showed us the solitary cells where men had to lie down on spiked wires, told us about prisoners who would write messages on the walls in blood - anyone caught with a pen was shot immediately.  Cverni Krst wasn't that bad by Nazi camp standards, but it was still horrific.  It's also a place that the citizens of Niš are strangely attached to.

Nazi camps almost never survived.  They were freighted with too much tragedy and shame to last – often they were destroyed, sometimes they were left to rot, rarely were they preserved.  People didn’t want to remember or accept what had happened in these places.
In Yugoslavia, though, this wasn’t the case.  Crveni Krst was opened to the public all the way back in 1967, and has been a museum (in various ways) ever since.  Why?  Because the vast majority of the prisoners who were processed or killed here weren’t Jews or Roma, they were communists – and the communist government under Tito wanted people to remember.  The camp was (and in a lot of ways, still is) a symbol of the struggle.  Hanging on the wall of a nearby café, shrieking above beer-heavied heads and plates of sausage, an icon of “the party” gives his life, fist raised, body wrapped in barbed wire.  The people who died in town are seen more as heros than victims.

As Ivan walked us around, he spoke in a reverent whisper, his voice sometimes seeming to stray close to tears.  He explained to us how the different buildings worked, which cells housed which groups of prisoners.
Highlighted in the tour was a story about an escape, when about a hundred men made it out of the camp - leaving almost fifty comrades dead on the walls or mowed down by the guards.  Even though most of the escapees were eventually caught, the event seems to capture the hearts of Serbs.  In the imagery of the camp and to the citizens of Niš, it is the men dying as they ran that are important - there is a kind of valor given to them, a legacy of courage and action.  Instead of submitting to their fate, they died helping others go free.  They're given almost as much space as the thousands of other prisoners the Nazis killed in the city and surrounding area.

One of the most astounding things about the holocaust is just how large and far reaching the infrastructure was.  In a few short years, the Nazis set up scores of camps over most of Europe, in regional hubs and along transport routes.  Examples like the one in Niš weren’t extermination camps, per se, but taxonomy isn’t really important – the holocaust didn’t just happen in one or two places, it was an all-encompassing network.  Officially, these peripheral stations were waypoints and gathering places that served to funnel prisoners toward the larger bases in Poland and Germany, or towards work camps in other parts of the world.  Most of the 30,000 prisoners processed through Crveni Krst were sent to Sajmište – the Belgrade camp - before ending up in Auschwitz, Dachau or Buchenwald, but a sizable number were also shipped to labor depots in Norway.  Almost a third, though, never made it anywhere.

According to Ivan, “not many” of the prisoners at Crveni Krst were killed on site.  Several hundred people were shot or beaten to death at the camp, but in terms of scale the numbers are almost insignificant.
Almost 10,000 people were killed nearby, shot on a deserted hilltop called Bubanj.  They were chosen at random – in the grim mechanization of the holocaust, people became numbers to be added, subtracted or grouped into shipping orders.
One cell of the camp is plastered with children's pictures showing various scenes of violence - figures hanging lifeless on barbed wire, families lying on the ground, men being beaten.  The work was very good in a lot of cases - when we complimented their skill, Ivan said that the children were mostly ten years old, as if that automatically made them better artists.
It was fascinating to see the works and to think of the local children drawing them - it's interesting because the town seems to really own the camp, in a way that other holocaust towns don't.

The sad, often ignored fact of genocide is that the groups that are targeted aren't usually around afterwards to remember.  In places like Germany or Poland, the people who remained had the stain of guilt - where Nazi camps survive, they exist as badges of shame.  In Niš, though, the persecuted became the population.  Soon after their occupiers left, Yugoslavia became communist and the victims of Crveni Krst became a part of the local identity.  To them, it's a painful memory but not one they feel responsible for.

Crveni Krst is an eery place to walk around, and the stories are horrific, but we felt ready for the experience in a way.  This is our fourth Nazi compound of the trip (after Auschwitz, Dachau and a smaller one in Leipzig that we never wrote about), and the stories and spaces have become more familiar.  A better way to say it, maybe, is that we've become better able to steel ourselves for what we'll find.
But still, the experience is somewhat unique.  It serves as a reminder of how far-reaching the holocaust was.  Just because other peripheral camps have been destroyed or aren't open to the public doesn't mean that they didn't once exist.  It's hard to remember that, almost everywhere you go in western, central or eastern Europe there were concentration camps.  Traveling here is to always follow in the footsteps of Nazis, which is a chilling thought.

Repurposing Turkish Leftovers

Welcome to Skull Tower.  This is not a ride at Six Flags Great Adventure, it is a very important Serbian monument located in the city of Niš.  Its name gives it a spooky, Halloween feel - its actual presence is a lot more unsettling.  Around 50 decaying skulls, implanted in the remains of a tower.  The tower used to be bigger, the skulls used to number 952.  The structure used to stand in the open air and poems recount the sound of the wind whistling through the cavities, the bones shining under the moon like marble.  In 1809, at the Battle of Čegar Hill, Stevan Sinđelić ignited his gun powder stock, killing himself, his remaining troops and 10,000 Turks that were about to defeat them.  The Serbians honored him as a hero for not raising the white flag.  The Turks, still in power, collected the Serbian skulls from the battlefield and raised this. 

There are heroes and villains throughout history, with the roles often reversing depending on which side is telling you the tale.  For Serbs, Skull Tower is not just a perfect, engrossing tribute to fallen heroes, it is also so strangely gruesome that the other side seems downright sadistic.  Nowadays, the directions to Skull Tower (Ćele Kula) are pretty specific - walk out of town this way, turn here, go over a small walking bridge, find a simple white chapel, go inside.  The street that passes in front, though, used to run from Istanbul to Belgrade to Sofia.  You were going to see this thing whether you wanted to or not. The message of the tower: Don't try to oppose the Ottoman Empire.  At night, families of the fallen soldiers would come to remove the skulls for proper burial.  It was probably pretty successful at spooking and scaring people traveling through Niš, but the locals embraced it as a monument - a tribute.  Which is why it still stands today.

Skull Tower isn't the only leftover from Turkish rule in Niš that's been redefined as a celebration of Serbian history and culture.  Niš Fortress, large and restored, sits on the river Nišava.  We could see through the arched Istanbul Gate, that it wasn't your average historical monument inside.  All the tell-tale signs of summer weekend fun could be spotted.  Umbrellas sporting ice cream brand logos were propped up over popcorn carts.  Kids held balloons affixed to thin, plastic sticks and couples canoodled in fancy leisure wear.  A man told us repeatedly not to take a picture of him and his pony-for-hire.  We'd exhibited no interest in doing so.

The oldest Turkish building in the city is right inside.  Predictably, it's a hamam, which has been turned into a traditional Serbian restaurant.  Even more predictably, the restaurant's name is Hamam.  We never got a good look at the inside, but all traces of the bath - which dates back to the 15th century - have been washed away.  I can see why people would be saddened by the loss of the historic interior, but I can also see why preserving a symbol of Turkish culture may not be on the top of Serbian Niš's priority list.  As we ate, a quartet of waiters began to play instruments and sing.  They talked to each other as much as they sang, seeming to improvise most of what they were playing.  A nervous teenage couple came in for a date, loosening up only when they both began to laugh at a recorder-playing drunk outside the patio entrance.

Niš was finally liberated from Ottoman rule sixty-eight years after that Battle of Čegar Hill.  In 1878, it was officially part of a Serbian state once more - after about 400 years under the Turks.  The city's history after that was no less bloody or turbulent.  It's a little difficult to visit these landmarks that tell the tale of a time when Serbs were the little guy, the oppressed, and not have thoughts of much more recent history.  In a lot of ways, Skull Tower is the perfect tourist attraction for this vibrant, pleasant city in this polarizing country: historic, dramatic, violent, important.  

The Oldest Place You've Never Heard Of

Lake Ohrid is one of the oldest lakes in the world, right up there with Lake Titicaca.  Most lakes come and go in the span of about 100,000 years, filling up with sediments or drying out from some other cause.  Its depth and the plethora of natural springs that feed into it have kept Ohrid from such a fate.  Plenty of water for a long life, that's what they always say, right?.  Lake Ohrid's birth is estimated to have taken place around 5 million years ago and it has never once dried up. It is beautiful and vast with water that is incredibly clear.

Basically an enormous drinking well and seafood buffet, Lake Ohrid attracted seaside residents pretty early on.  Prehistoric times.  With at least 7,000 years of continuous human habitation, the town of Ohrid is considered one of the oldest ongoing settlements on earth.  Exploring the town feels like finding a memory box in an attic, a collection of heirlooms and evidence of the past that were deemed special and important enough to be saved.  Rifling through such a collection, you can't help but feel like what you're really doing is getting to know the person who owned the box and marveling at how long and full their life seems.

The residents of Ohrid didn't really want to save the Ancient Theatre of Ohrid at first.  Built in the Hellenistic period as a dramatic theater, it was utilized during the Roman era as a gladiator ring.  Once that empire fell, Ohridians (I've made that up) wanted to get rid of this massacre ring in which Christians had been executed.  So, they buried it.  This wound up being fortuitous, as it preserved the bottom level of the theater incredibly well.  Dug up in the 1980s, it was put to use once more - though, seasons ticket holders no longer get their names carved into the seats like the ancient theatergoer whose signature you can kind of make out above.

Legend has it that, as recently as the 15th century, there were 365 churches in Ohrid.  Supposedly, it was one for each day of the year, which probably made it extremely difficult to nab a seat for mass.  They have not all remained, although you see small white crosses lit up amongst the stars and street lights when night falls.  Above, Sv Jovan Kaneo sits in one the prettiest look-out points on the lake.  Built in the 13th century, it's just a baby compared with the ancient body of water it looks down over. Many of the churches were turned into mosques during the Ottoman era and then destroyed after that empire's fall. 

Such was the case with Sv Kliment at Plaošnik, near the castle.  This monastery had so much historic significance, though, that it was completely rebuilt in the 21st century.  The building only dates back to 2002, but the excavated foundations in its front lawn are from a 5th century Basilica.  It is also the site of what could very possibly have been the first university in the Western world.  St. Clement started the school himself, in 893AD, and it rivals only the University of Salerno in Italy for the crown. 

During those same Ottoman years, a Turkish neighborhood was built in the lower part of Ohrid, below the fortified walls in which the Christians were kept.  Their community, in Mesokastro, grew up around this plane tree, which is now 900 years old.  The trunk must have split ages ago.  People say that a barber shop was once housed in the crevice, which is possibly the most Turkish thing I've ever heard.  (See: Things Turkish People Like).  Later, it became a cafe.  Now, it simply sits at the center of the town square, bolstered by support slabs which give it a monumental look.

The old Robevi family mansion, they were one of the richest families in all Macedonia, is now the Archeology Museum.  Findings from Plaošnik and the Ancient Theatre are housed here and the house itself is a lovely site.  We visited with the hope of seeing one of the Golden Masks.  Near Ohrid, in Trebenište, five golden masks from the 1st millenium BC were found in 1918.  They are said to be worth around 20million euros each and are housed in Belgrade, Serbia and Sofia, Bulgaria.  A 6th was found in Ohrid in 2002, by a man named Pasko Kuzman who simply put the relic in a cigar box on his mantle and called it a day.  We read in an outdated guidebook that it was to become the first mask to be exhibited in Macedonia in 2008 - in this museum - but this doesn't seem to have happened.  Maybe he's moved onto using it as an ashtray?

At the center of it all is still the lake, sitting pretty and watching the views around it change hands, change faces, change centuries.  Beneath its surface are sunken jewels, a treasure chest for a history buff.  There are the remains of a Bronze Age stilt village, still sticking up from the sand.  The lake has grown up and over it in the 3,500 or so years since it was built.  There are sunken World War I tugboats and a coastguard boat and airplane from World War II.  Of course, there are also living species rare in this world covering the deep, lake floor. 

But for Albanians,  Lake Ohrid is simply the seaside.  Families come here to swim, tan, dine and stroll.  Through the old cobbled streets they walk in colorful summer clothing, even in the late Spring.  Some things haven't really changed since prehistoric times.  The shores of Lake Ohrid are still prime real estate.  Unfortunately, some of the oldest residents of the lake are being fished out of existence - but more on that later.  After all these years, the deep, clear water of Lake Ohrid is still providing humans with life-giving sustenance - beauty and relaxation. 

The Houses of Gjirokastër

"When (the city) was first built, the wood had cunningly had itself hoisted up top, leaving the stone to the foundations, cellars and cisterns. Down there in the half-darkness, the stone had to fight the rising damp and the groundwater, while the wood, nicely carved and carefully tended, adorned the upper floors. These were light, almost ethereal: the city's dream, its caprice, its flight of fancy. Now the fancy had met its limit. After giving the upper floors such privileges, the city seemed to have changed its mind, and hurried to rectify the error. It had them covered with roofs of slate, as if to establish once and for all that here stone was king." - Ismail Kadare, Chronicle in Stone

The 19th century houses of Gjirokastër are a lot like the Ottoman architecture in Berat. Here, though, they aren't as uniform or clumped together. They are spread throughout the old part of the city and come in all shapes and sizes. Because no two are alike, it's easier to really notice the things they do have in common. Their walls are stone until the top floor, which are white-washed wooden frames. So, they sort of look like women wearing high-waisted grey pencil skirts with a white blouse. The windows are narrow and tall and become more numerous toward the top of the houses. In Albania, people live on the top floor - it's been true for centuries. Even now, driving through the country, half finished houses look like cottages on stilts. One completed floor atop beams and exposed staircases. Of course the third floor is built first, it's where they will live! When the whole city moved into their cellars to seek shelter from constant bombing during World War II, Kadare's young narrator quips that "these were hard times for the upper floors of the city," abandoned as they were.

We're staying at Kalemi Hotel, one of the few traditional houses that have been elegantly restored. The Kalemi family, no doubt, attracts guests wishing to see the interior of one of Gjirokastër's famous Ottoman houses. I recognized things from Chronicle in Stone right away- the curtains with white lace at the ends, the low couches lining the room on which the old women who visited sat "sipping their coffee and making sage pronouncements." "Windows as tall as my father, and a grainy, mottled ceiling of carved wood." This is the dimerorja ("winter room"), where families traditionally spent most of their time in the colder months. The ceilings are elaborate carved wood, but the furnishings give the comfort of a home, not a museum.

And this is a dimerorja in an actual museum, the Ethnographic Museum. It's easy to see the Turkish influence in the traditional furnishings. Most of the large houses of Gjirokastër were built by Muslim landowners and officials during the Ottoman rule. When we arrived, we were let in by a cleaning woman with a comically large key. She just happened to arrive minutes after we had. Inside, spring cleaning was in full swing. The couches along the perimeter of every room were being uncovered, the white curtains were being taken down. Carpets that ran through the house like a line in a maze were being vacuumed. The house itself is significant for an entirely different reason - a faithful reconstruction of Enver Hoxha's family house, built on the same site. Our guide told us it had burned down accidentally in the 1960s, but another source I read said that it was blown up by protestors in 1997. Who to believe?

The Ethnographic Museum may give a little bit of insight and the Kalemi Hotel may be as pleasant as can be, but the real tour de force of traditional houses in Gjirokastër is Zekate House in the Palorto quarter. It is an enormous estate, with two wings. Mr. and Mrs. Zekate sat in their courtyard under a Heineken umbrella and simply walked wordlessly and unlocked the front door when they saw us approach. It was everything I'd imagined and more. After the Ottoman Empire lost control of Albania in 1913, the wealthy families that built these mammoth houses couldn't necessarily fill them completely anymore. The bottom floors are mostly empty, used for storage. A couch here, a rug there, just to make the experience of walking through a little more pleasant. The space between stones in the floors and walls were filled in with red paint - something we'd noticed at Kalemi, too. As we moved upwards, stone gave way to wood and the living rooms became cozier. Sheepskin was dyed red and used to cover the couches, looking exactly like 70s shag. 

Then, at the tippy top, we found the glorious oda e miqve, traditionally the most beautiful room and reserved for visits from guests. Frescoed walls, elaborate ceilings. The large rug made all the thin, red runners that guided us up until this point look like dying flower petals, left in a trail to lead us to a poppy field. Here, the chimney-shaped fireplace (the oxhaku) was not draped in white lace, but rather covered in painted designs. To quote Kadare again: "It was easy to see why the other rooms...were jealous of the main room." 

In the highest part of the Zekate house, up on a loft looking over the grand room, we were almost eye level with the magnificent ceiling. Dark, painted, it looked solid and indestructible. The wood beneath our feet, however, creaked and bent. We were careful to walk on the floors' joists, here and everywhere else on the top floor. The decaying planks really felt like they could give out at any time. The staircases creaked loudly. Visiting his old house as an adult, Kadare wrote: "What's wrong? Where does it hurt? It seemed to be complaining of aches in its bones, in its centuries-old joints." His home was just two blocks or so away from the Zekate House, but it was ruined by a fire in 1997. Old man Zekate is probably about the same age. I wonder if they knew each other. (As you can tell, I've got a serious book-crush). 

These houses are only a small protected part of Gjirokastër. The protection offered to buildings deemed 'historic' prevents any sort of alteration of the original architecture. However, it doesn't do anything to prevent weathering and disrepair. Most of the historic houses of Gjirokastër are uninhabited and in steady decline. People that do live in old houses can't help but go against the rules and re-patch their leaky roofs with terracotta or plastic shingles. Restoration according to the preservation rules would be more expensive and take longer. When you look at the Museum Zone from above, you can see patches of orange and red. Sill, you can imagine what the whole thing must have looked like. I bet it was something like looking down at New York on a rainy day, when it becomes a landscape of open umbrellas. With the new buildings in view, the slate roofs described both as "scales" and "a hard shell," by Kadare, lose that cold edge. It's the big, ugly modern architecture that looks menacing now, I think.

The Silver City's Castle

Gjirokastër is a city that looks beautiful at any time of day, from any angle.  A timeless sort of gorgeous, it is curvaceous with mountains and celebrated for its cascading mane of stone-roofed houses.  Its unique beauty mark is its castle.  Its birth mark. Sure, all by itself it's just a solid, harsh mass, but it makes everything around it more beguiling.  You can see the castle from basically anywhere in Gjirokastër, which is particularly helpful when trying to navigate your way through the jumble of streets in the Old Town.

Someone way better at metaphors than I, Albanian-writer Ismail Kadare, grew up in Gjirokastër and described the city and its castle in his book Chronicle in Stone.  The story takes place during World War II, when all the houses of the town were still topped with stone roofs and tumbled down the steep terrain with haphazard uniformity. Of the fortress, he writes:

"It had given birth to the city, and our houses resembled the citadel the way children look like their mothers." 

Having just finished that book, I was extra excited to arrive in town and see Mama Castle with her silvery stone offspring huddled close by. 

Castles are lovely to look at (usually), but my favorite part is seeing what people have decided to do with the place.  Will the museum inside tell the story of the fortress or will it depict castle life with recreated furnishings?  Will there be a torture museum in the old prisons?  Staff in uniform? Mannequins in guillotines?  We knew that there was a Museum of Armaments inside, but found that it was closed.  Still, we were met with guns-a-blazing, a collection of cannons from the First and Second World Wars.  Our pamphlet called them "trophies," nabbed from the Italians (displayed along the right) and the Germans (along the left).  The arched galleries and large guns served to make each other look bigger and more imposing.

The castle was protected and turned into a cultural landmark in the years of Albanian Communism.  So, obviously, the curatorial slant is going to be Albanian Supremacy, Power and Victory! (Or something along those lines).  There isn't any propaganda involved anymore.  In fact, the large populist leader sculpture, strong-jawed and draped in ammo, is pointed out as "communist propaganda of the time" of the museum's construction. The collection still speaks volumes, though.  Here we have a Carro Armato Fiat tank of which there were only 243 made. This was captured from the Italians in Port Palermo. Operated by two people, it runs very slowly and can only be used for short distances, because it is run on coal. How crazy, a coal-powered Fiat military tank from the 40s.

If that tank is a head in a hunter's lodge, this plane is the bear skin rug. The aforementioned brochure lists this as "American Spy Plane," but the posted orientation map adds a question mark. "American Spy Plane?" Either by force or at the decision of the pilot, this plane landed at Tirana's airport in 1957 and may or may not have been carrying a spy from the USA. The Communist government's anti-western sentiment was, probably, mixed with fear and this plane was displayed as a warning to any other enemies. (Though, this prize catch really may have been more like roadkill. Some people say that an impending engine failure may have forced the landing).

In 1968, to celebrate Enver Hoxha's birthday, the first National Folk Festival took place on the grassy field atop the castle.  From below, you can see this spherical pink stage ornament within the citadel's walls.  We thought it was some sort of jungle gym.  Every five years, this mainstage hosts the competition.  Folk singers, dancers and musicians come from all corners of the country and perform for hundreds of spectators.  It must be quite the venue.  There are the guns, tank and plane - and then this stage, which is just as much of, if not a truer, expression of national pride.

 

Amazingly, even after Gjirokastër became a Museum Town and the castle had begun to be used for cultural events, the prisons remained in use.  These predictably dank places with special punishment chambers had been expanded and widely used by King Zog, used "with zeal" by the occupying Nazis  and then employed right up until 1971 by Hoxha's communists.  Maybe in a decade or so, there will be information in the pamphlet about that third stage of the prison's life.