|
Thursday, 15 December 2005 07:40 |
By DAVID FORBES
|
Elizabeth Kostova
|
SWANNANOA ?? Despite bloody ethnic civil wars and decades under repressive regimes, the people of Eastern Europe continue to keep up ancient traditions and a connection with the land ?? a mystique that has drawn many visitors over the decades, author Elizabeth Kostova said in a Dec. 3 lecture at Warren Wilson College.
The presentation was the annual Harwood-Cole lecture, held in honor of Ray Harwood, Joan Harwood and Nancy Cole, notable donors to the college. Around 200 people attended the lecture in the Gladfelter Student Center.
?®The agricultural, medieval past has in many ways, at least until recent years, been preserved culturally and in its landscape ?? despite the censorship and collectivization of the communist era,?∆ Kostova said. ?®This proximity of the modern West to a world it barely knows is exactly the conundrum that has attracted Western visitors to Eastern Europe for centuries ?? a region European and yet alien to the West.?∆
Kostova is the author of ?®The Historian,?∆ which has sold more than a million copies since its release in fall 2004. Kostova attended Warren Wilson and worked in the library as a freshman. She worked on her novel about several generations of scholars traveling to Eastern Europe to unravel the truth behind the myth of Dracula for 10 years.
As an example of the hospitality and humor of the region??s inhabitants, Kostova shared a story about her own travels in 1989 in Sarajevo, today located in Bosnia.
?®One day, at a bus stop, some American friends and I met an old man who wanted to buy us coffee,?∆ Kostova said. ?®We??d never seen this particular man before: tiny, frail, shabbily dressed, pants with ragged cuffs. He was so insistent on showing us the hospitality of his city that we consented to have coffee with him.?∆
In a nearby caf?‡, the man questioned them about American culture.
?®We told him where we were from, but the American cities we named seemed to hold no meaning for him, though he did grasp that we were across an ocean,?∆ Kostova said. ?®Then, he leaned forward over his brandy. ?¥Do you know the amazing thing about the other side of the world??? he asked in his heavy Bosnian dialect.
?¥You??ll never believe this, but when it??s day here, it??s night there.?? His face was full of astonishment and perplexity.?∆
His amazement continued, she added, as he asked them if Americans had grapes and bread.
?®I have often thought about this generous old man and his wonder at the gap between us ?? even greater for him than it was for me and my compatriots,?∆ Kostova said. ?®He has come to represent for me an extreme of the world I encountered while in Eastern Europe. Sitting there in that caf?‡ with our new acquaintance, I was a short flight from Paris and Frankfurt, a train ride from Vienna, yet in a wholly different world.?∆
In addition to her own experiences, Kostova drew on the accounts of many of those travelers to help give accuracy to her novel. Specifically, she concentrated on travelogues written between the first and second World Wars, part of a personal bookshelf she jokingly calls ?®rather eccentric?∆ by most standards.
She noted that even the borders of the region and what exactly defines ?®Eastern Europe?∆ are amorphous, rapidly shifting due to political circumstances, but containing populations with cultural ties that stretch back centuries.
?®If you drift over the border of Western Bulgaria into Northern Greece, for example, you find a significant Slavic-speaking population and music reminiscent of the Slavic Macedonians,?∆ Kostova said. ?®If you??re inclined to visit the northwest lands of Croatia, you are likely to run into Hungarian shepherd culture. This heartening cultural disregard of modern national borders is true of all of Europe, of course. But it is particularly complex in the Balkans, whose political boundaries have shifted so bloodily over the centuries.?∆
Those boundaries have changed so rapidly and frequently, Kostova noted, that many Westerners use the word
?®Balkanize?∆ to describe the fluctuations.
The reason for the cultural differences, she said, lies in the dominance and influence of first Greek the Byzantine empire and then the Turkish Ottoman empire over the region up until the late 19th century.
The Byzantines, whom Kostova termed the Eastern heirs to the Roman Empire, ruled and influenced the region for a thousand years, from the late 400s A.D. until they were conquered by the Ottoman Turkish Empire in the late 1400s.
?®The Byzantines won and lost and won again vast areas of the Balkans, vying with the Bulgars, Slavs, Vlachs and other groups,?∆ Kostova said. ?®In the process, they bought a wealth of art and architecture and the Eastern Orthodox Christianity that is still the main faith in the region.?∆
Meanwhile, the Ottomans left yet another ?®sedimentary layer of art, government and learning?∆ in the region.
?®It is this blend of Byzantium and Islam, of golden domes and minarets that has given the Balkans their pungent flavor, as well as their tragic history of conflict,?∆ Kostova said.
Some of the travelers to the area viewed the Balkans almost ominously, she added, reading from the writings of Dudley Heathcote, an American who traveled the region in the early 1920s.
?®For many years, the Balkan district has bred unrest and war and constituted a great peril to the rest of Europe,?∆ Kostova read. ?®The inextricable mix of races found in it is undoubtedly at the root of much of the mischief.?∆
Noting that Heathcote had defined the Balkans ?®very, very broadly,?∆ Kostova said that many writers had failed to grasp the wide variety of ethnic groups in the region.
In her own travels, including her time as a child with her academic father in Slovenia, Kostova said, she saw
many of the nations in the region, most notably doing research on the traditional music of the area.
?®I remember three hardy women of Croatian descent who had been singing together for many years,?∆ Kostova said. ?®They were singing a capella and without deliberate amplification, but it was so deafening that my friends and I got out some of the toilet paper we carried everywhere with us and stopped up our ears when no one was looking.?∆
While interviewing one elderly Bosnian woman, she observed that the woman referred to a particularly distant field as ?®America,?∆ a trend Kostova said she found throughout the region.
?®We met other people who used the word ?¥America?? to mean ?¥really far away,???∆ she said. ?®A store in the next village that was a pain to walk to was also ?¥America.???∆
However, Kostova noted, the variety of the region is such that there was much she did not see in her travels, so reading travelogues about the region allowed her to gain a deeper understanding, particularly of information relating to Vlad Tepes, known as ?®The Impaler,?∆ who ruled Wallachia, part of modern-day Romania, in the mid-1500s.
Vlad the Impaler, she continued, was a member of a group of knights known as the Order of the Dragon, which led to his honorary title ?®Dracul.?∆ That title provided fodder for novelist Bram Stoker, the author of the novel ?®Dracula.?∆
Combining her own travels with the myth of Dracula, including stories told to her by her father, Kostova decided on the premise for ?®The Historian.?∆
?®I imagined in a flash a story that would take Westerners into Eastern Europe,?∆ Kostova said. ?®Both into its
medieval past and into the past I had seen the last days of with my own eyes ?? the Eastern Europe of the Cold War. Vlad the Impaler and Dracula would be woven throughout, a symbol of tyrannical government, of the violence and oppression of the region??s history.?∆
For a description of the Transylvanian forests, she read the travelogue of Patrick Fermor, who traveled the region in the 1930s. His initial description of plunging into the woods ended up providing fertile material for her novel.
?®It was like going indoors,?∆ Kostova read. ?®Climbing into the shade at once made the valleys seem far away. The woods were silent at first, until the ear was attuned to the birds. Conical beehives were set in rows along the edges of the enfolding trees. As we moved forward, we heard an old woman??s high quaver sing the lead of a sequence of verses with a haunting tune. We could hear that tune long after the harvesters themselves had dropped out of sight.?∆
One traditional ritual in particular that Kostova wanted to include in her novel was fire walking ?? when Eastern European women go into a trance and, after kissing religious icons, walk over hot coals unharmed.
To find out more about this ritual, she read the 1939 account of folk revivalist Philip Thornton, who was amazed
after observing such a ritual.
?®Fire walking is almost certainly an ancient pagan ritual that was converted to Christian use,?∆ Kostova said.
Kostova read from Thornton??s account of the women??s fervor and his report of their miraculous lack of injuries.
?®The square was full of people, rushing about with great bundles of wood, stoking the fire,?∆ she read. ?®They built up a square pile. Meanwhile, two groups of dancers were using different steps, but following the same tune to the ?¥gaeta,?? the bagpipes. As it grew darker, one could feel a definite magic in the air. Suddenly the moment stopped. The priests, accompanied by two icon bearers, walked around the pile. There was a mass of white-hot charcoal about 18 inches deep.
?®The icon bearers walked around again, their eyes screwed up against their skin. This was the sign that the fire was ready. When the icon bearers returned to their original position, two women came forward and were blessed by the priests. Slowly, they dance around in front of the icon. I saw their eyes roll upwards under the lids. Their faces became rigid and fixed in a sublime smile as they took the icons and danced straight into the blaze.?∆
Examining the women afterwards, Thornton found them completely unburned and their pulses normal.
Continuing such traditions, Kostova said, deriving as they do from ancient times, is but one example of how Eastern Europe??s people have managed to keep cultural traditions alive ?? though she noted that globalization, more so even than communism did in the past, is changing their world, too.
?®A much greater change has come to Eastern Europe since I talked to that man in the caf?‡, who had such an astonishment that the youth of the region, with their vast exposure to Western television and movies, will never experience,?∆ Kostova noted. ?®When I go to Eastern Europe now, I still savor the extraordinary hospitality of my hosts ?? their devotion to music and conversation, their almost fatalistic love of life, their deep rootedness in the soil of their country.
?®Fought over by one group and another down the ages, when I hear their talk of local events and ancient invasions, I feel that little has changed. Empires come and go in this part of Europe, but its people, despite their trials and the loss of their traditions, will always be close to their beloved earth.?∆ |
|
|
