Learn about Freya Stark: "As an explorer, Stark was an acute observer, and a connoisseur of people."

Photo credit: The Idle Woman blog.

“To awaken quite alone in a strange town, is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.”

This quote by Freya Stark appeared recently in The Economist. With much embarrassment, it occurred to me that while the name sounded familiar, I actually knew nothing at all about her.

So, I've been reading. When there is time, I hope to read one of Stark's books. Until then, this essay is a good introduction.

EAST IS WEST: Freya Stark’s travels in Arabia, by Claudia Roth Pierpont (The New Yorker; 2011)

Although the British had ordered their wives and daughters out of Baghdad, there were nineteen women among the crowds who found shelter in the British Embassy, in late April, 1941, soon after the Iraqi government went over to the Germans. A pro-Nazi coup had occurred a few weeks earlier, in relative calm, but an increase in anti-British hostility and the sudden appearance of armed Iraqi soldiers had brought tensions in the city to an intolerable level, especially since the British—heavily engaged in Libya and Greece—had few reinforcements to spare. The Iraqi Army had already surrounded the nearby Royal Air Force base when, at dawn on May 3rd, the well-known explorer Freya Stark raced through the deserted streets, arriving just in time to make it through the Embassy’s side door.

The main gates had been locked; sandbags and barbed wire were frantically being placed within; and a mountain of documents was burning in the courtyard. The Persian gardeners, however, continued to water the flowering verbena and, as days and then weeks went by, kept the lawn (despite the number of people sleeping on it) brilliantly green. Living quarters were uncomfortable, with some three hundred and fifty people enduring intense heat, sniper fire, and the not so distant thud of bombs as British planes attempted to retake the airfield. News over the wireless was grim. Yet there was no end of attempts to cheer the trapped and frightened population. One night, there was a lecture, given by Stark; another night, there was a concert. (As a bonus, a cache of rifles was discovered in the grand piano.) Basic provisions were allowed in daily, and Stark, adept at chatting up the Iraqi guards who monitored the prisoners’ fate, boldly requested a quantity of soap and face powder for the women. The extra packages were duly delivered. This small victory for Western womanhood was marred, however, by the policeman at the gate, who remarked that he couldn’t imagine how the harem could think about such things, since they were all to be murdered in a few days.

Freya Stark had come to prominence a few years earlier, with the publication of her first book, “The Valleys of the Assassins” (1934), a study in Islamic history and geography related with the excitement of an adventure story. The book was a popular hit, as were two books that she wrote, along similar lines, soon thereafter—“The Southern Gates of Arabia” (1936) and “A Winter in Arabia” (1940). All these books were about the contemporary Arab world as well. Stark had travelled through Syria, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Yemen at a time when national borders retained a fictive quality, and no one could be sure what political or cultural forces would prevail. British power, just beginning to show the strains of its extended glory, still held firm regional sway—although Stark’s more dangerous explorations were conducted in spite of its warnings and behind its imperial back.

Stark could talk her way into any situation and, most of the time, out again, in a remarkable number of languages. She had just talked her way back to Baghdad from Tehran, when, hellbent on safety among her friends and colleagues in the Baghdad Embassy, she was stopped by Iraqi police at the frontier. All British citizens were barred from proceeding further, and she was officially in custody; others, she learned, had been put in prison camps. Yet she cajoled the station attendant into bringing her tea and her police guard into sharing it, and informed the guard of the sheer impossibility of staying on without a ladies’ maid. Surely he could see her problem and wished to be civilized? His people were not, after all, Germans. And the policeman—no longer guarding a prisoner but protecting a lady—put her on the next train to Baghdad. “The great and almost only comfort about being a woman,” Stark reflected, in a maxim that encompasses many such events in her illustrious career, “is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.”

As an explorer, Stark could claim no major discoveries, but her acute observations and her surveying skills had earned her professional respect and, for cartographic contributions, a Royal Geographical Society award. She had located unmarked villages and unsuspected mountains, taken compass bearings and photographs. Once, she had re-situated an entire misplaced mountain range to the correct side of a valley. But this was not why people read her books then, or why they continue to read them now. Stark did not even reliably make it to her intended goals: the routes—usually travelled by camel or donkey—were astonishingly harsh, malaria was rife, and a host of other ailments took their toll. Yet for Stark, despite the bitter disappointment of being beaten to a destination, the cliché that the journey is more important than the goal was irrefutably true. She was a vivid describer of scenes and landscapes. More, she was a connoisseur of people: she knew how to draw them out and listened closely when they spoke. Today, one may be able to gain more scholarly and updated history from other authors. Bernard Lewis’s “The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam” covers much of the same material as Stark’s first book (and its subtitle is guaranteed to catch the modern eye), but it would be a mistake to think that she has been replaced.

Readers of Stark’s reissued works—Modern Library offers the two earliest books, and I. B. Tauris is in the midst of publishing nine others—will find a writer who endows everyone in her field of vision with the heightened interest that she felt herself. Peasants, Bedouins, tribal leaders, guides, soldiers, and slaves make up a society that is both impossibly strange and palpably near, in the simple and not so simple human sense. Stark was not an objective observer—how could she have been?—but, far more sophisticated than the surveying tools she carried, she was a finely calibrated recording instrument in a land that was just awakening to the changes being wrought by paved roads, nation-states, and oil ...

12 Days of Slovenia & Trieste (Part 3): Finding my way to Ljubljana in 1987.

The Dragon Bridge, Ljubljana in 1987.
Vienna Secession style (circa 1900).

The following was posted at NA Confidential on May 25, 2017 as part of a series in celebration; it was the 30th anniversary of my lone visit to the country formerly known as Yugoslavia, and an excuse to finally scan those slides.

From May 15 through May 31 in 1987, I visited five Yugoslav “republics” that are independent countries today: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Macedonia.

The sixth republic, Montenegro, wasn’t on my 1987 itinerary and neither was Kosovo (ethnically Albanian but part of Serbia at the time). However, during a day spent in the city of Ohrid, the presence of Albania could be vividly sensed, lying twelve miles away across the stately waters of Lake Ohrid.

Other Yugoslav cities that I passed through were Zagreb, Sarajevo, Mostar, Kardeljevo (now Ploče), Dubrovnik, Belgrade and Skopje. I exited Yugoslavia at the Bulgarian border as the only American on a bus bound for Sofia, somewhere around Gyueshevo.

Even for those with a moderate grounding in European history, these place names still appear mysterious and vaguely eastern. Yugoslavia was a multi-ethnic country made up of Christians, Muslims and Jews, and speaking a half-dozen languages (in two alphabets). Over the centuries, the inhabitants of these regions were the subjects of various foreign empires, including Rome, Venice, Hungary, the Habsburgs and the Ottoman Turks.

The cultural kaleidoscope was calculated for sensory overload, and looking back on these scant three weeks in my life, my time in Yugoslavia seems almost otherworldly. Naturally I wouldn’t trade it for anything, and yet I’m fully aware of how much was missed or only partially digested. In truth, I was still in training, learning the ropes.

However, one thing about Yugoslavia has stuck with me. The people I met were amazingly hospitable, unfailingly friendly and invariably helpful to this flailing American in spite of the many language and cultural barriers.

These pleasant memories made it all the sadder for me during the 1990s, amid the murderous, decade-long Yugoslav civil war, when numerous barroom discussions began or ended with someone asking me if I could see the conflagration coming, all the way back in ’87, when I was there.

No, I didn't. Not at all.

But those men and women who’d been so nice to me – what had become of them? I didn't know then, and still don't. It's a melancholy feeling, indeed.

For a local's guide to Ljubljana in 2019, go here. This story will be continued tomorrow. 

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FINDING MY WAY TO SLOVENIA, 1987

On Friday the 15th of May in 1989, I began the day at a hostel in Perugia, Italy, before embarking on three legs of a single day's rail journey: Perugia to Florence, then to Venice, and finally Trieste.

To this day I can't explain why I didn't spend the night in Trieste before crossing the frontier to Ljubljana, capital of the Slovenian republic in the federation called Yugoslavia. Trieste later came to be a bucket list destination, but my first time was a wash, with barely time to walk a bit and grab a bite of street food (pizza, or something like it) before making the decision to press on.

I returned to the train station in early evening slightly glowing from some cheap Italian table wine scored from a shop, and promptly suffered the first noticeable lancing of an otherwise hopeful seaside mood.

Rounding the litter-strewn corner to an isolated side platform, I saw the rusted, elemental Yugoslav train waiting for the ride to Ljubljana. There were only three passenger cars, and they had no frills left to give.

In 1985, my first brief glimpse of communism had come from the vantage point of a sleek Finnish tour bus. Now this unadorned vintage Balkan rolling stock hinted at what was to come during the next few weeks roaming southeastern red-starred Europe.

A port and border town, Trieste’s geographical resting place was much in dispute following World War II. Yugoslavia's Marshall Tito (Josip Broz, a Croat by birth) eventually acquiesced in his demands, and Trieste remained Italian, which it had been for only three decades after forcible detachment from the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire at the close of the previous war.

Consequently, a sizable population of ethnic Slovenes living in Trieste's suburbs and hinterlands became Italian citizens overnight. Their descendants appeared to be my fellow outbound weekend passengers, probably visiting relatives on the other side.

They began boarding the so-called "express," many encumbered with multiple bags, bundles and boxes. No one was speaking Italian. It was almost as though the dilapidated Trieste rail siding was an extension of Yugoslav sovereign territory.

The train finally began rumbling slowly to the east. We lurched uphill toward the border, into Trieste's famous karst hinterland (that's a limestone topography) with those darkened mountains ahead for which the Balkans are both celebrated and feared. It all seemed less imposing when brightened by a setting sun.

At the border, my passport merited little more than a cursory glance. The visa inside was duly stamped by the youthful, uniformed guard with the rifle slung over his shoulder. It all seemed unusually relaxed, a condition not always to be repeated in the Bloc during my journeys later that summer.

The locals had it somewhat harder, and their packages were inspected closely. Once inside Yugoslavia, the train began emptying as we stopped in one small town after another. After three and a half hours, just shy of 22:30, the express that never was shuddered to a halt at Ljubljana's central station.

Excited, I bounded down the worn metal steps into a warm and humid night, hoisted my pack, turned to follow the crowd, and was greeted by a full-scale reprise of an Animal House bacchanal, minus the togas.

---

Unsteady chorus lines of drunken young men were chugging bottled beer, the liquid streaming down their faces as they stumbled across the rails singing verses of unknown songs, with nary a female in sight.

To my right, a group of them were merrily urinating on a rail yard wall. Some were shirtless, half-heartedly wrestling. Others were projectile vomiting.

Although obviously harried by the mayhem, train station personnel looked on it with remarkably equanimity, as though the performance had been seen many times before.

And so it had.

Two days later while in route to Zagreb, a seismologist from Skopje explained that what I’d witnessed was a semi-regular occurrence throughout Yugoslavia. The revelers were the latest cohort of military draftees, celebrating their final night of freedom before shipping out to serve the motherland for two years.

Upon arrival in Ljubljana, I didn't know any of this.

Rather, standing on the platform transfixed and appalled, watching the crazy party, a question occurred to me.

Why the hell had I come here?

As throngs of thoroughly inebriated future Yugoslav soldiers milled through the debris in Ljubljana's otherwise unoccupied train station, I found myself an object of curiosity and attention, perhaps the lone western backpacker.

It must be said that the scrutiny wasn't threatening, and the general mood remained one of revelry. Gingerly picking my way gingerly through the ranks of the fallen, taking care to avoid evil smelling puddles, I scanned the strange directional signs in an effort to locate a safe path into the station's nerve center.

Two of them stood out: "Informacija" (information) and a pictogram of bank notes and coins.

Money was the first priority, as I'd passed from lira to dinars. In pre-Euro times, every border crossing required exchanging the previous nation’s currency into the next one. In 1987, there were few ATMs even in Western Europe, much less the East Bloc. Similarly, the credit card in my neck pouch would be almost useless in socialist locales outside of special "hard currency" shops.

Back then, you changed money the old-fashioned way, with actual dollars or American Express traveler's checks. The man behind the only populated window miraculously spoke a bare minimum of English, and was able to answer my questions.

Yes, he would cash a traveler's check.

No, he could not help me find accommodations.

No (gesturing at the cacophony), the baggage check room was quite full.

Bureaucratic scribbling followed, and he began slapping down those one thousand dinar notes, again and again, until the pile was at least two fingers high.

Not a bad exchange rate: $100 per inch.

Public transportation had shut down, and so my search for lodgings commenced on foot. There was a chronic scarcity of streetlights, but I managed to navigate a half-mile to the first university-affiliated youth hostel listed in the guidebook.

There were cobwebbed padlocks on the door.

The second hostel defied all navigational efforts. It was dark, the streets were deserted, I was soaked with sweat and it was well after midnight. Reversing course back toward the train station area, I made for the first standard hotel.

The night clerk eventually responded to repeated buzzing, sleepily offering non-negotiable terms of one night in a single-bedded room for roughly a quarter-inch of my hard-earned dinar wad, or three times the rate I expected to pay in a hostel. Exhausted, notions of showers and naps were cheering. It was a splurge -- and a deal.

On Saturday morning, flooded in blessed daylight, the youth & student travel bureau was easily found, and a less inexpensive bunk booked in a three-bed student hostel toward the city center. The day was free for exploring Ljubljana -- sister city of Cleveland, Ohio -- and drinking a few delicious Union lagers.

University in Ljubljana. I was a
philosophy major in college, remember?

ON THE AVENUES: Trieste, New Albany and the meaning of nowhere.

"Melancholy is Trieste’s chief rapture. In almost everything I read about this city, by writers down the centuries, melancholy is evoked. It is not a stabbing sort of disconsolation, the sort that makes you pine for death (Although Trieste’s suicide rate, as a matter of fact, is notoriously high.) In my own experience it is more like our Welsh hiraeth, expressing itself in bitter-sweetness and a yearning for we know not what."
-- Jan Morris

Somewhere around 17 or 18 years ago I read Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, "a meditation on the crossroads city of Trieste" by the Welsh journalist and writer Jan Morris (born in 1926 and still very much with us).

Trieste is an Italian city bordering Croatia and Slovenia, on a finger of land on the northern shores of the Adriatic Sea. Once, it rivaled Hong Kong as a great commercial port, a crucial outpost of the Hapsburg Empire where Italians, Slavs, and Austrians met to do business. Trieste’s cosmopolitan character kept it from being dominated by any one religion. The city is pleasant visually, but was too commercial ever to become a center for art or architecture. Morris argues, in essence, that Trieste is a good place but not a great one: the food is excellent but not ethnically distinct, and the people themselves are gravely courteous, but undistinguished. Trieste is almost nationless, thus its appeal to exiles like Morris, who has traveled the world in search of an identity.

The key words for me are cosmopolitan, nationless, exiles and identity.

Actually I'd been in Trieste once, very briefly, passing through the city from points west in route to Slovenia, then a constituent element of communist Yugoslavia. I allowed nowhere near enough time in Trieste to indulge my quirky Hapsburg fetish, evidently so eager to cross the border to Ljubljana that I didn't take a single photograph.

Perhaps I purchased Morris' book fifteen years later as a form of exculpatory penance, or some type of rearview mirror perspective. I can't really comment because quite little from the book lodged in my memory, perhaps because I drank quite a lot back then.

Consequently I've just finished rereading it, which is something I seldom do. Self-interest is my primary rationale, seeing as we'll be visiting Trieste in November, but at the same time a determined Europhile's work is never done. Happily, significant portions of the narrative came back to me during the second reading.

Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere pleases and instructs both as meditation and memoir. Morris first came to Trieste in the Queen's service at the end of WWII and became enamored of the area. She wrote the book while in her eighth decade, taking stock of the city's changing fortunes; what Trieste had meant to her, and how both writer and city had aged, changed and in some cases stayed the same.

The book is history, travelogue and social commentary all at once, canvassing Illyrians, Austrians, Italians, Slovenes and Jews; long-term expatriate resident James Joyce's fondness for whorehouses and ill-fated Emperor Maximilian's unfortunate career choice in Mexico; Karst limestone topography, native Bora winds, the Glagolitic (old Slavic) alphabet and young Sigmund Freud's failure to determine how eels copulate; mediocre opera, excellent coffee and various movable landmarks; and not to exclude robust viewpoints about racism and nationalism (unsurprisingly she's decidedly against them).

Morris herself offers a summary.

“There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own. They are the lordly ones. They come in all colours. They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists. They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor. They may be patriots, but are never chauvinists. They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humour and understanding. When you are among them you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically. They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean. They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion or political correctness. They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it. It is the nation of nowhere, and I have come to believe that its natural capital is Trieste.”

That's incredible. Morris has not ever visited New Albany, and yet she knows exactly what it feels like to exist here amid the reign of the mediocre charlatans.

---

The city of Trieste and its many faces through the years obviously move the aging author deeply, as informed by her personal experiences, and this is why a 25-year-old simply cannot write a book like this. Youth is capable of combustion, stamina and other great feats, but it cannot conjure elegiac prose like this, finely book-ended with melancholy on one side and and as-yet undiminished joy for living on the other.

Threading this expository needle can be done only with age and accumulated wisdom, and in like fashion I read Morris' book the first time when I was in my early forties, still far too green to grasp it. Now at (almost) 59 years of age the tone cuts deeper. As an example, Morris as veteran travel writer confides that she has undertaken to look at Trieste in the same way she'd look into a mirror, which is what travel is all about in the first place.

Morris quotes Wallace Stevens.

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw

Or heard or felt came not but from myself

So it has been, with her and with me. She then returns to the concept of exile, applying it to our journey into old age.

For years I felt myself an exile from normality, and now I feel myself one of those exiles from time. The past is a foreign country, but so is old age, and as you enter it you feel you are treading unknown territory, leaving your own land behind. You’ve never been here before. The clothes people wear, the idioms they use, their pronunciation, their assumptions, tastes, humours, loyalties all become the more alien the older you get. The countryside changes. The policeman are children. Even hypochondria, the Trieste disease, is not what it was, for that interesting pain in the ear-lobe may not now be imaginary at all, but some obscure senile reality.

Chronologically a mere fifteen years separate me from Morris's age at the time she wrote Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, and yet at no point in my life have I felt emotions like these as keenly, whether pertaining to mirrors, exile, melancholy, uncertainty or plain bewilderment about why I'm here and what it's all supposed to mean.

It's actually not a debilitating frame of mine, just introspective. My head is clear, and there has been no temptation to climb back into multiple bottles. Yet the Welsh concept of hiraeth, this bittersweet yearning for an indefinable something referenced by Morris, nips constantly these days at my conscious existence.

Round and round we go, and where it stops -- well, we already know.

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Only as a postscript, here's a bit more about Jan Morris. Perhaps she knows better than most of us what the search for self-identity really means.

Jan Morris, CBE, FRSL (born 2 October 1926) is a Welsh historian, author and travel writer. She is known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy (1968–1978), a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, notably Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong, and New York City. A trans woman, she was published under her birth name, James, until 1972, when she had sex reassignment after transitioning from living as male to living as female.

Morris has joked that in spite of a successful career in journalism and dozens of books, her obituaries will be headlined “Sex-change author dies.” Wikipedia continues:

In 1949, Morris married Elizabeth Tuckniss, the daughter of a tea planter; they had five children together, including the poet and musician Twm Morys. One of their children died in infancy. Morris began a sex change in 1964. In 1972, Morris travelled to Morocco to undergo sex reassignment surgery, performed by surgeon Georges Burou, because doctors in Britain refused to allow the procedure unless Morris and Tuckniss divorced, something Morris was not prepared to do at the time. They divorced later, but remained together and on 14 May 2008 were legally reunited when they formally entered into a civil partnership. Morris detailed her transition in Conundrum (1974), her first book under her new name, and one of the first autobiographies to discuss a personal gender reassignment.

Tuckniss,now suffering from dementia, has said that she always knew about Jan, even when Jan was James; it was merely something to be gotten through together. The raw power of a 70-year-long love story like this has even am inveterate Grinch like me reaching for the hankies when he reads the last line.

At the same time that Jan was transitioning from male to female, she was also moving from being thoroughly English (Oxford, the army, the Times) to thoroughly Welsh. Jan and Elizabeth bought a big house in the far north-west of Wales, where they still live, and Jan began to embrace a Welsh republicanism that has become one of the great passions of her life. When Jan and Elizabeth die, they will be buried together on an island in a stream near their home, beneath a stone bearing an inscription in both English and Welsh that says: “Here lie two friends, at the end of one life.”

“Here lie two friends, at the end of one life.”

We should all be as fortunate.

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Recent columns:

July 4: ON THE AVENUES: The 2019 remix, "You want some fries with your redevelopment?"

June 27: ON THE AVENUES: Mourning (and alcohol) in America, circa 1984.

June 18: ON THE AVENUES: Let's lift our voices for another verse of "Talking Seventh Inning Blues."

May 28: ON THE AVENUES: Challenges are forever, but downtown New Albany's food and drink purveyors keep on keeping on.

More about Patrick Leigh Fermor, travel writing and a lost European world.

This documentary about travel writing on BBC Four is Travellers' Century, Episode Three: Patrick Leigh Fermor, with Benedict Allen. Previous episodes were devoted to Laurie Lee and Eric Newby.

The ostensible aim of this 2008 segment is to recall Leigh Fermor's walk across Europe as a teen and the books he wrote about it, but there's ample biographical information as well -- and at the time of filming, Leigh Fermor was still very much alive.

If you read this week's column, you know why I'm here.

ON THE AVENUES: From Baltic to Mediterranean, the diary of an unrepentant New Albanian Europhile.

... Hence my current serendipitous choice of reading: Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, written by Patrick Leigh Fermor. My friend Ken loaned me two of Leigh Fermor’s travel accounts some months back, and last week my internal alarm clock serendipitously reminded me it was time to begin, Gdansk or no Gdansk.

Regular readers will recall that Greece was a prime motivation for my first trip to Europe in 1985 ...

For further exploration of Leigh Fermor's colorful life, there remains a blog devoted to him.

Patrick Leigh Fermor

He drank from a different fountain

The purpose of my blog is to bring the life and work of Paddy, and his many friends and colleagues, to the attention of a wider audience, and to create an archive of on-line material that can be used for research and enjoyment. He and his friends deserve to be recognised and remembered in a world that changed much during their lives, but would be the poorer without them.

For more on Leigh Fermor's home in Greece on the mysterious Mani Peninsula, there's this.

Patrick Leigh Fermor: The legendary writer and his Greek hideaway, by Stav Dimitropoulos (Adventure)

 ... Leigh Fermor was the consummate wordsmith. “His favorite activity was forming phrases and cutting them into pieces, a process lasting for hours,” recalls Elpida Belogianni, Leigh Fermor’s long-standing housekeeper.

Belogianni is showing me around, six years after the author left his beloved home for the last time. I imagine him as a tall, dapper gentleman, seeking inspiration gazing at the Ionian waters, chatting with Joan over tea, mingling with socialite guests, or even dancing ‘zeibekiko’ [Greek folk dance] with local builders on the terrace.

Finally, a 2005 article in the London Review of Books goes considerably deeper into cultural attitudes about travel, with the author concluding that when reading Leigh Fermor's accounts, first appearances can be deceptive. Note that his Roumeli also is in my possession, and I'll tackle it next, after Mani.

Don’t forget your pith helmet, by Mary Beard

Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Words of Mercury by Patrick Leigh Fermor, edited by Artemis Cooper

... What we are dealing with, in other words, is one aspect of the power struggle – or at least the complex negotiation – between visitor and visited.

This is clear enough in what now seems the quaintly old-fashioned advice given to travellers of a century or so ago. We find it harder to see how it works in contemporary tourism and the writing associated with it, from the cheapest guidebooks to travel literature of higher pretensions. Here, the legendary Greek hospitality – with its roots that supposedly go back to the Homeric world – provides a revealing and complicated case ...

ON THE AVENUES: From Baltic to Mediterranean, the diary of an unrepentant New Albanian Europhile.

ON THE AVENUES: From Baltic to Mediterranean, the diary of an unrepentant New Albanian Europhile.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

In less than two months, the Confidentials will travel to Gdansk, Poland for a long overdue appointment with my bucket list. It’s sweet of the missus to indulge me.

In 1980, the Solidarity trade union was established at Gdansk’s Lenin Shipyards, an act made provocative by the fact that Communist doctrine of the time in Poland precluded such an independent challenge to orthodoxy.

In theory, the Polish Communist government already was protecting the interests of workers, and for Solidarity to suggest this stewardship was deficient plainly represented a threat to the established order.

Unfortunately for the party bosses, it wasn’t their only problem. The Soviet Union had imposed communism on the devastated territory of a revamped Polish state following World War II, but the indigenous Polish variety of red star rule was capable neither of collectivizing agriculture nor curbing the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Smallholders and clerics remained as obstacles to "enlightenment." 

In combination with these obvious resistance sources, Solidarity proved to be a mortal contagion. Nine tumultuous years after the trade union emerged, Communism collapsed both in Poland and across the “East Bloc,” a demise attributable to socio-economic pressures from within as well as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s calculated gamble of jettisoning the USSR’s vassal buffer states to buy time for an ultimately doomed effort to reform his homeland.

By all rights I should be preparing for the trip to Gdansk by learning a few words of basic Polish, like numbers, greetings and restaurant menu items, but instead I’m suddenly immersed in the Southern Peloponnese -- specifically, the Mani Peninsula, where a tangle of jagged mountains on the Greek mainland yields to the cooling breezes of the Mediterranean Sea.

As my preoccupation with Europe has been throughout the past four decades, so it continues for me in 2018. I am an unreconstructed Europhile, an enthusiastic scattershot generalist fascinated by all things European irrespective of where they’re located on the continent, and as yet stubbornly unwilling to concentrate on any one facet of Europe long enough to become an expert, whatever this word means.

Except as it pertains to beer.

The process of boning up for Pints&union led me first to the United Kingdom and readings about traditional pub culture, cask-conditioned ale and the history of Guinness in Ireland, pausing for a digression into Bavarian wheat ale, and recently followed by an overdue re-reading of Michael “Beer Hunter” Jackson’s seminal Great Beers of Belgium, last updated shortly before the legend’s death in 2007.

Stuck somewhere in the middle of Fuller’s, Weihenstephaner and Duvel samples came The House of Government, a lengthy tome by Yuri Slezkin, which gently lured me back to previously dormant Kremlinology via the history of a 1,700-unit Stalinist apartment block built on the Moscow River embankment.

Cast against a 2018 summer’s backdrop of raging Putin paranoia in America and the World Cup successfully held in Russia, this book had me contemplating the eternal Matryoshka “Slavic enigma” dilemma all over again.

Rest assured, it has not been resolved.

---

Christianity of the Russian Eastern Orthodox persuasion connects Mother Russia to Greece by way of Byzantium -- or Constantinople, now known as Istanbul.

Hence my current serendipitous choice of reading: Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, written by Patrick Leigh Fermor. My friend Ken loaned me two of Leigh Fermor’s travel accounts some months back, and last week my internal alarm clock serendipitously reminded me it was time to begin, Gdansk or no Gdansk.

Regular readers will recall that Greece was a prime motivation for my first trip to Europe in 1985. Toying with the idea of studying in Greece, I actually was accepted into a “year in Athens” university program, but decided against it, and instead spent three weeks in the country as a tourist (including an idyll in Istanbul) before returning to Italy by boat.

I haven’t returned since, and I've no idea why.

Thanks to my cousin and mentor Don Barry’s recommendation, my lone visit 33 years ago was encouraged and prefaced by a travel book by the American novelist Henry Miller, called The Colossus of Maroussi.

Following is background from a previously published piece.

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For someone as renowned for his bawdiness as Miller to pen an entire book with nary an explicit mention of the horizontal arts will come as a surprise to some, but The Colossus of Maroussi is just that volume.

Written and published as World War II made ready to welcome the United States as participating/liberating belligerent, it recounts Miller’s months-long holiday in Greece in 1939, a respite coming at the conclusion of his Depression-era tenure as a Parisian urban expatriate, and immediately prior to his relocation and reinvention as tree-hugging primitive in California’s Big Sur.

Ostensibly, Colossus is a travelogue about Greece as a country caught in transition during the middle of the 20th century, with one foot in the grubby present and the other very much rooted in an epic (and generally exaggerated) past. Much of Miller’s narrative focuses on a larger-than-life Greek poet and raconteur named George Katsimbalis, and therein hides a significant clue, because as readers have understood virtually since release, the book actually is all about Miller …

… For all its flaws, The Colossus of Maroussi was essential and compelling reading, and I cannot underestimate its profound influence on me during the early 1980s. Upon request in 1984, the Greek tourist office in New York had mailed a huge package of brochures and maps, and as I read Miller’s account that winter, I plotted his progress with their assistance. At the time, Ernest Hemingway meant more to me as a writer, but he hadn’t written about Greece. Spain would come much later.

There I was, finally in Greece, well aware that the intervening decades would render dated Miller’s descriptions unlikely, and this much was true. 

Many things had changed, but happily there were moments of timelessness when the pre-war mood still jibed, and when, not unlike the writer, I stood at Mycenae, Epidaurus and Delphi, brushed off the dust from the journey by bus, and felt the weight of millennia … when I’d hear a tinkling bell and see a shepherd’s profile on a hillside, and later devour tomatoes, cucumber and feta doused with oil, kick back a cool beer or tumbler of Retsina … watch the grizzled old men nursing their cloudy drams of ouzo at breakfast … and then be reminded that back at the hotel, one was officiously instructed to keep toilet paper out of the commode lest the too-narrow sewage pipes became clogged.

---

Patrick “Paddy” Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) was the son of a well-to-do English family, not a product of Miller’s hardscrabble, working-class Brooklyn. However, their shared obsessions with Greece are mutually evocative.

I’m chagrined to concede that until seeing Leigh Fermor’s obituary in The Economist seven years ago, he was completely unknown to me. Had I been aware of his incredible life story, perhaps a trek to the Mani Peninsula would have been in order back in the day. He’d have been 70 years young then, and still a working writer. He might have helped me with my Retsina education.

In 1933 at the age of 18, Leigh Fermor -- later described by a journalist as "a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene" -- departed London on a journey to Istanbul by foot, first to Germany and then along the Danube into the heart of the Balkans.

In all this walk lasted almost six years, until Leigh Fermor returned home to enlist in the fight against Hitler. Later in life, he authored a trilogy of books documenting these pre-war travels; the final unfinished volume was published after his death. They’re acclaimed to this day as incredible snapshots of Europe, pre-destructive spasm.

During the war Leigh Fermor, a master linguist, was a special forces operative in Nazi-occupied Crete, where he famously orchestrated the kidnapping of a German general. Remarkably, the two soldiers became friendly owing to their shared love of antiquity, and met again two decades later on a Greek television show based on “This Is Your Life.”

Eventually Leigh Fermor settled among the Greeks in his beloved Mani with true love Joan Rayner, a photographer, in a house they built on a hillside at Kardamyli. The book I’m reading now begins with the couple trekking from Sparta with guide and mule through wild forbidding mountains into the Deep Mani, and a first glimpse of their village of destiny.

---

Such is the agony and ecstasy of the aging Hoosier hick as persistent Europhile, frustratingly wrestling for the 34th consecutive year with nagging expatriate thoughts that have been tamed in twilight, though never altogether dispensed.

Might it all have unfolded differently?

It's a stupid question, and I avoid it 98% of the time. My oft-aborted escape plan from the 1980s would have been furthered had I hailed from a wealthy family, possessed some semblance of a skill (linguistic, literary or artistic), or displayed more raw ambition.

At the same time, as crazily fortunate as I’ve been in this charmed life, it would be ridiculous to lament spilled milk. After all, I hate milk.

If there exists any such thing as a celibate expatriate, I suppose that’s me. Nothing wrong with that; a voyeur from afar, looking not touching, and scratching the itch with short trips like the one to Gdansk, and later, Munich.

Someday if we liquidate everything we own and get just a little bit lucky, a period of retirement in Europa might be an option. A collegiate classmate has done this in Ecuador, which comes recommended for affordability. She loves it there. The problem for me is an utter lack of interest in places like Ecuador. Nothing personal; I'm just a Porto kind of guy.

I’ll hold onto this pleasant retirement dream for a moment or two, until reality rudely intrudes, and then as always regroup, channeling the mad European impulse into a beer travel story from the salad days. This tale will be told at Pints&union, hopefully to someone who hasn’t heard it before.

I may still be stuck inside of NA with the Mechelen blues again, but whenever passing along the chronology, I'll at least have done my job as cantankerous wannabe expatriate.

---

Recent columns:

August 23: ON THE AVENUES: The "downfall" occurs when we all fall down.

August 20: Non-learning curve: This ON THE AVENUES column repeat reveals that since 2011, we've been discussing the safety hazards on Spring Street between 10th and 9th. Too bad City Hall is deaf.

August 9: ON THE AVENUES: There's only one way to cure City Hall's institutional bias against non-automotive street grid users, and that's to #FlushTheClique.

August 2: ON THE AVENUES: Daze of future passed.

30 years ago today, sightseeing in Sofia (photos).

Previously: Five days in Skopje with the greatest seismologist of them all. 

Thirty years ago today, I arrived in Sofia, capital of the People's Republic of Bulgaria. I'd taken a bus from Skopje in Yugoslavia, probably via Kumanovo and Kyustendil. Nowadays it's a three-and-a-half hour trip. Back then, navigating the border crossing took at least ninety minutes, and the roads weren't as good.

I remember very few concrete details from my brief time in Sofia, although I can clearly recall being the only American on the bus, with only seven passengers altogether from Skopje. At the border, the Yugoslavs yawningly waved us through. The Bulgarian police were uptight and seemed about the confiscate my Let's Go: Europe book, but they relented and the subversive budget travel text remained with me.

The language barrier was daunting. Only Russian was useful as a foreign language, and fortunately I knew numbers and a few words. Like Russian, Bulgarian is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. At least I could decipher place names and street signs.

From the bus station in Sofia, I walked directly to the tourist bureau. Following the fashion of many such bureaus in the East Bloc, it wasn't particularly welcoming. The bureaucracy was stifling, and the terms of the mandatory daily currency exchange were baffling.

In effect, visitors had to have verification of "approved" accommodation for each night's stay, or face fines. I'd been led to believe that rooms in private homes were available, if dependent on the whim of tourist office staff. I was due for a lucky break, and got one.

My room was in the flat of a pensioner with lots of books written in languages I didn't know how to read. It was within walking distance of everything I'd have time to see. I slept on the couch, and it cost only a few dollars per night.

Given the mandatory exchange, there was ample cash left over to eat functional meals and drink draft beer in the workers' cafeteria located on my street. Meat, potatoes, a vegetable and two beers ran three, maybe four dollars. These were marvelous institutions, pleasingly egalitarian and unparalleled for people watching.

The first two sets of "then/now" photos illustrate how much things can change after three decades. In 1987, the expanse of yellow painted bricks in Battenberg Square (called 9 September Square during the Communist era) was filled with people strolling, not cars. The building to the left is the former royal palace, now the National Gallery of Art.

The Google street view images are from 2015.

You can see the structure with columns to the right has disappeared entirely. It was the Georgi Dmitrov mausoleum, where the Bulgarian Communist leader's embalmed corpse functioned as the main attraction of a pilgrimage site comparable to Lenin's tomb in Moscow. In 1990, Dmitrov's remains were cremated and buried, and in 1999 the mausoleum was dynamited.

I desperately wanted to visit the official museum of Bulgarian Communism, which reportedly contained the prison pajamas and shaving kits of Dmitrov and other iconic figures, but it was already closed on Monday by the time I made it there, and it never opened on Tuesday. I'm guessing it has since been liquidated, too.

At any rate, a short walk from the mausoleum brought me to the spectacular Alexander Nevsky Cathedral

"Designed in the Neo-Byzantine style, the church can hold 10,000 people and is one of the largest Eastern Orthodox cathedrals in the world."

The cathedral was built in honor of Russian soldiers who died in the war to liberate Bulgaria from the rule of Ottoman Turkey (1877-78). Cultural affinities help to explain why Bulgaria was among the more loyal Soviet satellites.

Next, two buildings facing the cathedral. There is no explanation for my taking this photo apart from a fascination with the gold-painted bricks, mocha stucco and a pleasing overall ambiance of Balkan-ness.

My room was a walk-up somewhere along this street. The group wielding flags was walking toward St. Nedelya Church. There were various aggregations parading through downtown that evening, leading me to surmise an organized propaganda show of some variety.

According to my notes, all museums and churches were closed on Tuesday. There was little opportunity to go inside, and so I must have spent the entire day walking.

In front by the subway stop is the medieval Church of St. Petka of the Saddlers. Up the street is the Banya Bashi Mosque. A synagogue also was nearby, though during the Communist era it rarely opened. For more about the oppression of religion in Bulgaria from 1949 through 1989, this excerpt from the Library of Congress is informative.

Just to the right of the sunken church and a block away was a secular cathedral: Communist Party headquarters, one of three buildings dubbed the Largo, and built in the 1950s. Here the red nerve center can be seen over the rooftops, complete with the standard issue red star.

It took some doing to unravel the next photo. I can't recall even seeing the seated lion sculpture behind what was intended as a vignette of Sofia street life. In fact, the lion marks the entrance to Bulgaria's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Finally, there is Sofia's Monument to the Soviet Army -- and it still stands in 2017. The main soccer stadium's lights are seen behind the heroic statuary.

Click through the article at Wikipedia to see what has happened in recent years to the sculpture at the base: "Soviet Army soldiers as the American popular culture characters: Superman, Joker, Robin, Captain America, Ronald McDonald, Santa Claus, Wolverine, The Mask, and Wonder Woman."

On Wednesday, 3 June 1987, I took a train to Belgrade and unexpectedly ended up in Budapest on Thursday morning. More about this another time.

Next: Sightseeing in Sofia with the ghost of Leonid Brezhnev.

ON THE AVENUES: Welcome to wherever you are, and come to think of it, Ljubljana will do nicely.

ON THE AVENUES: Welcome to wherever you are, and come to think of it, Ljubljana will do nicely.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

(This column is just one installment in a series about my travels in 1987. Previously, Perugia ... next, more about Ljubljana)


May 15, 1987 … Trieste, Italy

I returned to the train station in early evening with a slight glow from cheap Italian table wine, and promptly suffered the first noticeable lancing of an otherwise sanguine seaside mood.

Rounding the litter-strewn corner to an isolated side platform, I saw the rusted, elemental Yugoslav train waiting for the ride to Ljubljana. There were only three passenger cars, and they had no frills left to give.

In 1985, my first brief glimpse of communism had come from the vantage point of a sleek Finnish tour bus. Now this unadorned vintage Balkan rolling stock hinted at what was to come during the next few weeks roaming southeastern red-starred Europe.

A port and border town, Trieste’s geographical resting place was much in dispute following World War II. Yugoslavia's Marshall Tito (Josip Broz, a Croat by birth) eventually acquiesced in his demands, and Trieste remained Italian, which it had been for only three decades after forcible detachment from the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire at the close of the previous war.

Consequently, a sizable population of ethnic Slovenes living in Trieste's suburbs and hinterlands became Italian citizens overnight. Their descendants appeared to be my fellow outbound weekend passengers, probably visiting relatives on the other side.

They began boarding the so-called "express," many encumbered with multiple bags, bundles and boxes. No one was speaking Italian. It was almost as though the dilapidated Trieste rail siding was an extension of Yugoslav sovereign territory.

The train finally began rumbling slowly to the east. We lurched toward the border, into the blackened mountains for which the Balkans are both celebrated and feared, although the forested heights seemed less imposing when brightened by a setting sun.

At the border, my passport merited little more than a glance. The visa inside was duly stamped by the youthful, uniformed guard with the rifle slung over his shoulder. It all seemed unusually relaxed, a condition not always to be repeated in the Bloc during my journeys later that summer.

The locals had it somewhat harder, and their packages were inspected closely. Once inside Yugoslavia, the train began emptying as we stopped in one small town after another. After three and a half hours, just shy of 22:30, the express that never was shuddered to a halt at Ljubljana's central station.

Excited, I bounded down the worn metal steps into a warm and humid night, hoisted my pack, turned to follow the crowd, and was greeted by a full-scale reprise of an Animal House bacchanal, minus the togas.

---

Unsteady chorus lines of drunken young men were chugging bottled beer, the liquid streaming down their faces as they stumbled across the rails singing verses of unknown songs, with nary a female in sight.

To my right, a group of them were merrily urinating on a rail yard wall. Some were shirtless, half-heartedly wrestling. Others were projectile vomiting.

Although obviously harried by the mayhem, train station personnel looked on it with remarkably equanimity, as though the performance had been seen many times before.

And so it had.

Two days later while in route to Zagreb, a seismologist from Skopje explained that what I’d witnessed was a semi-regular occurrence throughout Yugoslavia. The revelers were the latest cohort of military draftees, celebrating their final night of freedom before shipping out to serve the motherland for two years.

Upon arrival in Ljubljana, I didn't know any of this.

Rather, standing on the platform transfixed and appalled, watching the crazy party, a question occurred to me.

Why the hell had I come here?

As throngs of thoroughly inebriated future Yugoslav soldiers milled through the debris in Ljubljana's otherwise unoccupied train station, I found myself an object of curiosity and attention, perhaps the lone western backpacker.

It must be said that the scrutiny wasn't threatening, and the general mood remained one of revelry. Gingerly picking my way gingerly through the ranks of the fallen, taking care to avoid evil smelling puddles, I scanned the strange directional signs in an effort to locate a safe path into the station's nerve center.

Two of them stood out: "Informacija" (information) and a pictogram of bank notes and coins.

Money was the first priority, as I'd passed from lira to dinars. In pre-Euro times, every border crossing required exchanging the previous nation’s currency into the next one. In 1987, there were few ATMs even in Western Europe, much less the East Bloc. Similarly, the credit card in my neck pouch would be almost useless in socialist locales outside of special "hard currency" shops.

Back then, you changed money the old-fashioned way, with actual dollars or American Express traveler's checks. The man behind the only populated window miraculously spoke a bare minimum of English, and was able to answer my questions.

Yes, he would cash a traveler's check.

No, he could not help me find accommodations.

No (gesturing at the cacophony), the baggage check room was quite full.

Bureaucratic scribblings followed, and he began slapping down those one thousand dinar notes, again and again, until the pile was at least two fingers high.

Not a bad exchange rate: $100 per inch.

Public transportation had shut down, and so my search for lodgings commenced on foot. There was a chronic scarcity of streetlights, but I managed to navigate a half-mile to the first university-affiliated youth hostel listed in the guidebook.

There were cobwebbed padlocks on the door.

The second hostel defied all navigational efforts. It was dark, the streets were deserted, I was soaked with sweat and it was well after midnight. Reversing course back toward the train station area, I made for the first standard hotel.

The night clerk eventually responded to repeated buzzing, sleepily offering non-negotiable terms of one night in a single-bedded room for roughly a quarter-inch of my hard-earned dinar wad, or three times the rate I expected to pay in a hostel. Exhausted, notions of showers and naps were cheering. It was a splurge -- and a deal.

On Saturday morning, flooded in blessed daylight, the youth & student travel bureau was easily found, and a less inexpensive bunk booked in a three-bed student hostel toward the city center. The day was free for exploring Ljubljana – sister city of Cleveland, Ohio – and drinking a few delicious Union lagers.

---

A few photos from Ljubljana.

The same view, 30 years apart.

The Dragon Bridge, in the Vienna Secession style (circa 1900).

I was a philosophy major in college, remember?

Already I was displaying a knack for finding breweries.

Saturday the 16th of May, a market morning.

---

May 25, 2017 … New Albany, Indiana

It is the 30th anniversary of my lone visit to the country formerly known as Yugoslavia. From May 15 through May 31 in 1987, I visited five Yugoslav “republics” that are independent countries today: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Macedonia.

The sixth republic, Montenegro, wasn’t on my 1987 itinerary and neither was Kosovo (ethnically Albanian but part of Serbia at the time). However, during a day spent in the city of Ohrid, the presence of Albania could be vividly sensed, lying twelve miles away across the waters of Lake Ohrid.

Other Yugoslav cities that I passed through were Zagreb, Sarajevo, Mostar, Kardeljevo (now Ploče), Dubrovnik, Belgrade and Skopje. I exited Yugoslavia on the Bulgarian border, somewhere around Gyueshevo.

Even for those with a moderate grounding in European history, these place names still appear mysterious and vaguely eastern. Yugoslavia was a multi-ethnic country made up of Christians, Muslims and Jews, and speaking a half-dozen languages (in two alphabets). Over the centuries, the inhabitants of these regions were the subjects of various foreign empires, including Rome, Venice, Hungary, the Habsburgs and the Ottoman Turks.

The cultural kaleidoscope was calculated for sensory overload, and looking back on these scant three weeks in my life, my time in Yugoslavia seems almost otherworldly. Naturally I wouldn’t trade it for anything, and yet I’m fully aware of how much was missed or only partially digested. In truth, I was still in training, learning the ropes.

However, one thing about Yugoslavia has stuck with me. The people I met were amazingly hospitable, unfailingly friendly and invariably helpful to this flailing American in spite of the many language and cultural barriers.

These pleasant memories made it all the sadder for me during the 1990s, amid the murderous, decade-long Yugoslav civil war, when numerous barroom discussions began or ended with someone asking me if I could see the conflagration coming, all the way back in ’87, when I was there.

No, I didn't. Not at all.

But those men and women who’d been so nice to me – what had become of them?

I didn't know then, and still don't.

It's a melancholy feeling, indeed.

---

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ON THE AVENUES: A few beers at Vladimir’s local in Ostrava in June, 1989.

ON THE AVENUES: A few beers at Vladimir’s local in Ostrava in June, 1989.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

In the summer of 1989, the city of Ostrava was the old-school, coal-fueled Pittsburgh of Communist Czechoslovakia, and an extremely unlikely tourist destination.

However, my Czech émigré friend George’s parents lived there, and they graciously hosted me for two weeks.

Their house was situated quite literally in the shadows of smokestacks rising from the Nové hutě Klementa Gottwalda, a sprawling postwar steel mill named for Czechoslovakia’s founding Communist luminary. The late Vladimir Motycka, George's stepfather, worked there as an engineer. Nearby, George's mother was employed as a secretary.

Vladimir was a hearty, hard-working man. In addition to his responsibilities at Czechoslovakia’s largest steel mill, he maintained two cows, a copse of plum trees and a tidy vegetable garden on a minuscule plot of land behind his home.

A typical day for Vladimir’s was a study in meticulously planned perpetual motion, punctuated by phrases in his native Czech, Slovak, Russian, Polish, German and the English he’d only started learning George went to the United States in 1986.

My first full day in Ostrava dawned rainy, sooty and bleak, fully in keeping with the prevailing industrial landscape. Vladimir had a few hours off work, and so he took me aboard the tram for a ride into the city center.

The tram route took us past block after block of gritty factory grounds, culminating with the barracks-like campus of a technical school. Then came what might have been middle class suburbs during the interwar period of the 1930s, when Czechoslovakia was a prosperous country, prior to the ravages of WWII and the subsequent backsliding of the Communist era.

We disembarked at the shabby but proud central square. Vladimir was quite well aware of my fondness for beer, and consequently we drank lunch at a nearby pub, where he was hailed by a table of friends as we entered.

Was everyone playing hooky from work that particular day?

Even before I’d finished mumbling garbled Czech pleasantries, a half-liter mug of local Ostravar beer already was waiting on the table in front of me.

The men were rough-hewn, wearing simple work clothes and smoking acrid, unfiltered cigarettes, which I politely refused. Vladimir’s friends worked physical jobs and appeared exhausted, but their eyes were bright and their curiosity jovial and genuine, for it was sheer novelty for an American to visit Ostrava. As we cradled big, fluted half-liter mugs of Ostravar, I searched for something meaningful to say.

Recalling the phrase that George’s uncle had taught me in Prague, I downed my beer and let it fly: “Chesko pivo je lepshi nez Americanitsky pivo.”

Frighteningly bad pronunciation notwithstanding, Vladimir’s friends roared with delight, because I’d just informed them in their own tongue that Czech beer was better than American beer. Not only was it a fine way of breaking the ice, but the words were by no means insincere at the time.

In 1989, the American-made "craft" beer revolution was still ahead for a lad from Louisville, and the typically well-made classic Czech lagers never got old. In the days to follow, roaming and adventure kept me exploring. I bought a map of Ostrava, rode cheap public transportation and walked all across the city. Every now and then, I’d get a sausage and a bottle or two of beer, sit on a bench and watch the world pass by.

---

On Sunday morning, during a light breakfast of coffee, cold cuts, tomatoes and cucumbers, George’s mother informed me that later in the afternoon the Motyckas were slated for a social visit or three. I was more than welcome to join them as they made the rounds. Of course I would.

As his wife left the kitchen, Vladimir leaned over conspiratorially, informing me that first, we had another important appointment to keep: “You must come to MY pub,” he said, taking pains to stress a regular customer’s sense of ownership.

Several minutes later, we began a vigorous 15-minute walk to his neighborhood watering hole. Several streets into the stroll, there came a shortcut across a vacant lot, following a well-worn footpath until it intersected with a rough concrete sidewalk. This led down a ramp into a urine-stained pedestrian passage underneath the railroad tracks facing a deserted suburban rail station, where we exited the tunnel. Unkempt weeds peeped through the crack in the platform by Track 1.

The day was fast becoming hot and muggy as we reached a hilly street proceeding dustily into the hazy distance. Vladimir abruptly halted and gestured at a small, nondescript building. I cannot recall signage or any indication of it being a pub (or “pivnice” in Czech), although there must have been. The door was open, and from our sidewalk vantage point, beers and their renters could be seen inside.

Square wooden tables were topped with clean, faded tablecloths. The room was small and spartan, and there was no bar as such, just a service counter in the Czech fashion of the day, extending outward on both sides of the draft beer dispensing station with a lone, solitary handle. There was no kitchen, although crunchy snack items were available. A dozen or so males were smoking and drinking beer, and many of them also had small tumblers of indeterminate liquid arranged in line with their mugs and ashtrays.

As I was about to discover, the liquid was none other than rum, albeit not to be confused with Caribbean rum as we Americans know it, but rather the raucously rotgut Central European variant, a concoction tasting of alcohol, brown sugar and artificial tropical flavorings -- perhaps flavored somewhat like planter’s punch, without any of the positive qualities one might expect from a freshly mixed cocktail.

Consequently, the rum was extremely popular, and I enjoyed it.

The brand of beer is lost to my memory, although it would have been one of three dominant regional brands: Ostravar, Zlatovar or Radegast, all familiarly styled lagers in the pilsner mode, and each with a devoted, clannish following among the workers and soccer fans of Ostrava. Probably it was Ostravar, and as such, perfectly acceptable as well as preferable to Pabst, Milwaukee’s Beast or the ghost of Iron City.

---

A work buddy of Vladimir’s was waiting for us. He had already gone through most of a pack of smokes, and the butts were threatening to spill over onto the tablecloth. They began to gossip about work, with an occasional pause to attempt an explanation of the topic in limited English. It was plenty enough to keep me entertained as the customers came, drank, and went, preparing for their own Sunday social engagements, errands and drunken naps.

Soon a bearded man in a blue tank top began glancing at us from an adjacent table. After eavesdropping for several minutes, he caught Vladimir’s attention and said a few words – maybe a joke, since the Czechs at my table were unable to contain their mirth at the stranger’s remark.

As it turned out, he had politely observed that Vladimir was speaking very good Czech for an American, to which Vladimir replied that while 50-odd years of clean Czech living surely had broadened his language skills, the only American in the room was this guy from Indiana.

In fact, the bearded man was a Cuban guest worker in Ostrava, and this juxtaposition of imported North American “enemies” was too much for the locals to pass up. He was invited to join us.

The Cuban knew some English, and he had learned passable Czech. As it transpired, he had a wife and children to support back home on the island and had married a Czech woman, as he could find no compelling reason not to maintain a second family during what was expected to be a lengthy stay abroad. The Cuban already had been to Angola, Ethiopia and other locales in the East Bloc.

Vladimir’s friends and the Cuban got on well, but foreign guest workers often were the subject of disapproval in Ostrava. For one, they were a visible and irksome symbol of Czechoslovakia’s subservient status as Soviet pawn, but it also owed to what I interpreted as a thinly-veiled racism. Many of the guest workers were from Vietnam and Africa; they were “different,” and quite naturally kept to themselves, which was construed as threatening by natives already unwilling to accept their presence.

It’s another story for another time, and a phenomenon by no means confined to Vladimir’s part of the world.

As one might imagine, the afternoon dissolved quickly into liquidity. Shots of rum and fresh beers came and went like the skewered, rapid fire images in a music video. Between gulps, we attempted to construct lists of words comprising all the languages present at a table that continued to attract newcomers as we drank. We’d count to twenty in Czech, English, Spanish, Russian, German and even French, then recite phrases (“I like to drink beer”) in each, ending inevitably by a collective and precipitous lapse into the slurred second language spoken by drinkers across the planet.

At some point, we trudged back home far later than originally anticipated. George’s mother awaited her husband and American guest at the door with frying pan in hand, which at first suggested a remarkably quick way of sobering up, but she was only washing the pan, nothing more. No injuries were suffered, at least until the following morning. Our social visits on Sunday evening were duly conducted in an atmosphere of dignified silence, with just a few beers for equilibrium.

When I think back these many years later, my Sunday afternoon at Vladimir’s neighborhood pub perfectly encapsulated a month in Czechoslovakia. The uncut weeds at the commuter train station, the dusty street, the threadbare yet functional pivnice and the Cuban guest worker combined to paint a picture of a nation caught in a time warp imposed on it from outside.

More importantly, the chatter and shop talk of Vladimir and his friends, my host’s exemplary work ethic and his well-organized days of achievement at home and at work, along with the multi-lingual conversations – simple yet comprehensible – revealed something about fundamental humanity, decency, and the similarities between the lives of people everywhere.

Six months after the sodden Sunday recounted here, the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia crumbled. Appropriately, the man who best symbolized the Velvet Revolution became the liberated nation’s president: Vaclav Havel, a beer drinker and former brewery worker (he wrote a bit, too). I persist in thinking that if Havel would have wandered into Vladimir’s pivnice on the day of my visit, he would have fit in quite nicely at our table.

Verily, to have the chance to learn so much in a single afternoon is a phenomenon to be cherished. To do so over mugs of fine local beer, shared with friendly people is much, much better.

---

May 26: ON THE AVENUES: On the crass exploitation and politicization of tragedy.

May 19: ON THE AVENUES: Requiem for the bored.

May 12: ON THE AVENUES: A design for life.

May 5: ON THE AVENUES: Getting back, moving forward, drinking coffee.

April 28: ON THE AVENUES: You know, the two-way streets column I wrote -- 7 years ago, in 2009.

Old Albania, 1994: Beer in the Land of the Eagle (Part 3 of 3).

Part 3 of 3.

Back in the Brewing Business in Tirana.

In contrast to the brewery at Korça, the plant dating from 1952 in Albania's capital city of Tirana is a utilitarian, white-tiled facility resembling a dairy more than a brewery. It was built with Soviet assistance, and looks it.

Our ride from the port city of Durres to the brewery in Tirana took us past rustic villages, abandoned and dilapidated concrete irrigation channels, wandering herds of livestock, Albania's sparkling new Coca-Cola bottling plant, row after row of shabby socialist tenements, and finally a vast lot where the burned-out remains of the city's Communist-era bus fleet reposed in blackened, skeletal lines.

At the time of our visit, the Tirana brewery hadn't yet been privatized, but it was working again. Typically, upon arriving at the gate we encountered reluctance at letting us enter. Eventually a wiry, chain-smoking worker with an impressive five o'clock shadow and darting, nervous eyes took an interest in us and went off in search of the plant director, who couldn't be found -- but by that time we were in, our guide Genci having persuaded someone to make a decision and let the foreigners come inside out of the blazing, midday sun.

Minutes later, we met the "lost" director in the hall, and he hastily grunted retroactive permission to enter, no doubt thanking his lucky stars that he no longer lived in a nation where such negligence might be rewarded with a trip to the eastern Albanian ore mines or the dungeon-like prisons of the citadel in Gjirokastra with its handy rooftop garden once used by firing squads, but now serving as a convenient point from which to survey the ancient hilltop town and surrounding mountains.

We were met by a diminutive, white-coated brewmaster who happily led us around the spartan, functional plant and answered questions through our interpreter. Like the older brewery in Korça, Tirana's brewery had ceased to function for quite some time. According to the employees, it closed because the former brewery bureaucrat had been paid off by entrepreneurs who were engaged in importing Macedonian Skopsko Pivo, and who were intent on eliminating the local competition.

Only one beer, a Czech-style pilsner, was being brewed at the time of our visit. Hops are purchased from Germany and barley from Italy. Yeast bought in Italy is being cultured in a so-called laboratory; some was foaming merrily in a kitchen-sink sized steel receptacle.

After 5 to 7 days of primary fermentation, the beer is pumped into the secondary tanks in the basement for 21 days of lagering at near-freezing temperatures. As we enjoyed the contrast in temperature between the frigid lagering cellar and the sunbaked streets outside, the brewmaster's assistant tapped off some two-week old, unfiltered "Tirana's Best" and proudly offered glasses to each of us. It was surprisingly tasty, and it was better than most of the Italian imports on sale in Albania.

Later, we sampled the filtered, bottled, final 11-degree product and noticed the lack of labels -- they haven't quite gotten to that yet, but they hope to soon. Appropriately, the beer is priced to sell below the lowest-priced imports; this is a sound strategy in a country as poor as Albania. On both sampling occasions, first in the cellar and then at the bottling line, we were joined in our tasting by the wiry, chain-smoking employee from the guard shack, who had accompanied us the entire route through the brewery.

As we surveyed the women from the bottling line, who were taking a break as the line was repaired, I spotted our guide discretely posted behind a machine, taking a final, furious drag on his smoke as he removed the cap from an unguarded bottle and drained most of it in one swallow. In my view, it was his well-deserved reward for being responsive to the visitors, and I thanked him for it.

Plenty of Beer to Wash Down Your Qofte.

With only one brewery operational, and another fighting to revive, the thirst for beer in Albania must be met from elsewhere.

Albania's economy now is entirely open, and the entrepreneurial spirit seems to have taken root with a vengeance. Numerous small restaurants and bars are in operation, and street stalls and kiosks -- some no more than tables set up around the perimeters of dusty squares and thoroughfares -- vend all necessary consumer goods. Much of the import-export trade centers on cash-and-carry middlemen who have purchased used trucks from Germany and Italy, and who make buying trips abroad and purchase whatever is for sale and can in turn be resold in Albania.

In short, Albania still is in the transitional economic phase known as Big Lots Capitalism.

Although this wide-open business climate is bringing plenty of beer into Albania, the country is no Germany when it comes to beer. At least tolerable foreign brands are available, most commonly Amstel and Kronenbourg (both brewed under license in neighboring Greece) and a number of Italian brands, which attests to the status of Italy as prime investor in Albania at this time.

Some of the Italian brands aren't bad: Dreher, Splugen Oro and Moretti, all spritzy, mild lagers, do a fine job of taking the edge off the Albanian heat if served cool. All these imports are available at reasonable prices that range from 50 cents to a dollar, depending on the venue, but they are numbingly similar in terms of flavor.

It should be noted that the Albanians themselves don't seem to care, and we can only speculate as to the availability of beer during Communist times. Our guides said that beer from Tirana and Korça was generally available in the old days, and reminded us that the traditional beverages of choice in the country are wine and raki (brandy in various forms), as well as non-alcoholic beverages like coffee and tea -- legacies of the Turkish presence over five centuries.

However, surprises lurk in the chaotic, nebulous Albanian beer market. We found a small, modern street side bar in Tirana that boasted Hacker-Pschorr (Helles) on draft and Pschorr-brau Hefe-Weisse in cooled bottles.

Genci and Agim weren't as taken with the Bavarian wheat beers as we were. The future of this particular establishment is somewhat in doubt, as it has changed hands once or twice since being opened (I think it is currently owned by an Italian tour company).

A Clean, Well Lighted Place.

Pending the completion of an Austrian-built hotel complex adjacent to the former Hoxha mausoleum, one of the most modern, well-appointed bars in Tirana is the Piano Bar, owned by two brothers who amassed capital while working in Germany and who developed a taste for German beers while in the process. The bar serves little food other than sandwiches, and it is being expanded to include a stage for live presentations and an underground keller where the stone walls and wooden beams were being cleaned and readied on the day of our visit. Of all the privately owned bars that we visited, the Piano Bar was the best and probably the beer-friendliest.

The Piano Bar sells a Greek-brewed, Henninger-licensed export contrivance known as Golden Lager, which turned out to be a solid, Helles-like lager. The owners are eager to begin selling Pilsner Urquell on draft as soon as they can purchase the necessary tapping equipment and find a way to ensure an uninterrupted supply. Also available are a half dozen bottled beers, including (drum roll, please) Rolling Rock.

Why? Because both Rolling Rock and Italy's Moretti are subsidiaries of Labatt's, and Moretti can be found throughout Albania.

In any case, Latrobe, Pennsylvania met Tirana, Albania on the last day of our visit when we bought a round of Rolling Rocks at the Piano Bar for Agim, Genci and Nico, the latter our affable driver who pronounced it wonderful as the others looked on with a great deal of skepticism.

It was too mild for them, and also for me, yet it was fun to watch their reactions as we drank the only American beer to be found in Albania -- at least until Anheuser-Busch or Miller rewards the Korça consortium with vast profits for their reconstruction efforts and begins churning out Black Elk Mountain Light in aluminum cans.

It took nine years, but I was able to locate and taste Albanian beer. Now I need a new obsession.

Are there hamburgers in North Korea?