The Foreign Service Journal, March 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2014 37 character, he crooned, and the Greek brigadier whistled, and the Albanian parliamentarian joined in on a drum passed around by the band. The music was usually in a low register and the language was delicate. Language is the portal to any culture, and I simply could not feel it the way everyone else did. But the quiet Bulgarian doctoral student told me from across the table that even for her, the music and words raised the hair on her head. Before I knew it, Aleksandr had his arms around the Croat and they were belting out another song together. The Greek brigadier, sitting on the other side of me from Ana, jabbed me in the ribs and said, “Look at them! Ten years ago, they were ready to kill each other!” West Meets Eastern Europe This was very much the unspoken theme of my visit. It was 2006, and I was in Macedonia for a conference to talk about regional cooperation, the yin of the Balkan yang—the centrip- etal force of political order and integration pressing against the centrifugal force of ethnic strife and disintegration. More than six decades ago, the statesman Robert Schuman wrote about how European institutions could repair what centuries of war had rent across the continent. But it was up to these people around this table to make that happen in a new region emerg- ing from conflict and institutional collapse. The conference was stupefying at times; the mix of Balkan grammar mashed into English made me feel as if I were listen- ing through a lead pipe. But it was also fantastically idealistic and optimistic, a counterhistorical experiment operating entirely against the conventional wisdom contained in Robert Kaplan’s pessimistic Balkan Ghosts . I carried my own travelogue of the former Yugoslavia, the tome Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West. Seventy- odd years after its publication, it vividly described what I was seeing, and her experiences as she traveled with her husband and Yugoslav friends across the region during the 1930s mir- rored mine. The coincidences were so striking that I started bringing the book with me on social outings; and, without prompting, my companions would hold up the volume as they discussed the history and prospects of the region—just as West and her companions had done with volumes of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Earlier in the day we walked through Ohrid, exploring St. Sofia, a Byzantine church that the Ottomans had converted to a mosque before Christians knocked over its minaret and recon- secrated it. We passed the country’s best archaeology museum on the way to the Church of Plaosnik on a high overlook, a site that dates to the Roman era. West describes the Orthodox church as a place where the priests understand magic, and it was easy to see why. We walked from there down to the small, 1,000-year-old Byzantine Church of St. John, which is perched on a promon- tory with a dramatic view of Lake Ohrid, one of the oldest and deepest bodies of water in Europe. To the brigadier’s delight, he found a Greek family performing a baptism in the tiny shrine. He insisted I witness this event and shoved me inside. The family was packed into the narrow sanctuary, and the infant was passed around with a perplexed look on his face. Naked but for a light cloth, the baby was held by the priest who dripped water from his hand onto the child’s head. The fam- ily giggled at the baby’s reaction. Then he was handed to the godfather for a blessing. The room was dark but seemed to glow and, despite the close quarters, the crowd was perfectly quiet. Leaving in the sunlight, the family pressed sweets on the buoyant brigadier to share with us in celebration. This seren- dipitous encounter seemed a latter-day incarnation of West’s experience on the same spot, when she stumbled across a wed- ding, the fields covered by well-wishers and people paddling boats around the promontory, “singing ecstatically.” Greek to Me History, like life, cannot be expunged from the landscape. Visiting a traditional print shop in Ohrid, the Greek brigadier seized on a few lines by Grigor Parlichev, a 19th-century poet, as proof of the influence of Greece in Macedonia. This is a delicate thing to assert, and the brigadier was anything but delicate. “He was Greek!” he insisted. “But he was born in Ohrid,” asserted Biljana, a tiny but will- ful Macedonian college student who sparred with the brigadier all afternoon. “He is Macedonian.” “But he wrote in Greek!” the general roared. “He was Greek!” To appreciate the general’s ardor, it helps to know that Ohrid The mix of Balkan grammar mashed into Englishmade me feel as if I were listening through a lead pipe.