The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans

by Simon Winchester

  It was when we were looking for a hotel, strolling along the streets above the harbor and planning to ask for rooms at a place called the Villa Dubrovnik (which turned out to be closed and barred, a victim of the war like so much else around here), that we came across an ancient and, from her dress and appearance, evidently Croatian woman who was giving an evening hose-down to her equally ancient and rather decrepit dog. She spoke English with a notably cut-glass accent and demanded in an imperious manner that we clamber up the stairs to meet her and Wookie, as the beast was called. When we got there she extended a frail and blue-veined hand.

  “A very good afternoon,” she said, and then began a staccato, nonstop curriculum vitae. “I heard you speaking English. I get to see very few people these days. I like to speak to people. But there are none here now, because of this blessed business. I lived in Chelsea, do you know, for thirty years. I would shop at Gorringe’s all the time—you know Gorringe’s, don’t you? Now I eat Dinkel all the time—I would be dead by now if I hadn’t discovered it. It comes from Germany—I have heaps of it, literally heaps.

  “Would you answer that telephone?—I am getting dirty calls from a man who breathes down the line. It is rather disagreeable. I’m ninety and then some. He must think otherwise, though goodness knows why. And I’m descended from a Serb who fought at the Battle of Kosovo. All these things may be of interest to you. So will you stay awhile? And might I interest you in some Dinkel, and perhaps a cup of tea?”

  She was called Jelka Lowne, and she was well known at this end of Dubrovnik. “The mad Englishwoman,” they called her, though she was neither very mad nor at all English. Her husband, an engineer with the British Post Office, had come from Kent. She had lived in England from 1935 until he died in 1963—they had a apartment opposite the Chelsea Town Hall, which is when she shopped at the now long-defunct (but among the well-heeled London elderly, still much missed) department store. They had then moved up to Coventry, which she gamely said was “a very decent sort of town.”

  She lived in some congenial squalor, with books and newspapers all over an unmade bed, congealed gruel in the bottom of a saucepan, dishes piled up in the sink, unopened letters from a branch of Barclay’s Bank in stacks everywhere. “Some difficulty with a trust fund,” she said—“perhaps you’ll be able to help sort this out?” Wookie, a large and ever-bounding black dog who had the most unattractive mange and seemed to be at constant war with his coat, guarded his mistress with unfailing zeal, and whenever she rose to do anything—to open a letter, to make a cup of tea for us—came rushing to her side, panting, eyes gleaming, back leg scratching furiously. “My only friend,” she explained. “No one comes to Dubrovnik anymore. This frightful nonsense is driving them all away. I had some friends from Sussex who used to come, and they would bring me tea and Marmite. But they write to say it is too dangerous. I say fiddlesticks—is that the word? I have been away so long!—but they don’t come anyway.”

  She told us of her famous ancestor, a General Hrebeljanovic, who had fought at Kosovo alongside the legendary Serb leader Prince Lazar. On seeing my interest, she went to a locked drawer, extracted a manila folder and pulled out a sheaf of papers that she said would prove her ancestry. I was amazed and delighted.

  Hrebeljanovic, from all accounts, was Prince Lazar’s family name, and so there was every likelihood that this lady—and her papers had the look of authenticity about them, though I had only a cursory look—was related not merely to a general at the Battle of Kosovo, but to the great Czar Lazar himself. At least this is what I wanted to believe, for here I was, taking tea with her: It struck me as splendidly incongruous and almost impossibly serendipitous. Lazar, after all, was the one true hero of Serbian history, the man who in 1389 had his head cut off by the Turks in Kosovo after choosing to die rather than surrender, a man whose death all Serbs have since been avenging, and whose memory all Serbs have since been honoring. And here, sitting in a tiny overheated room on the Adriatic coast with her boisterous dog Wookie and nibbling at puffed Dinkel—here was a woman who claimed to be his supposed direct descendant! It seemed, of course, too good to be true.

  But then so much else did too. Almost everything about Lazar himself is clouded and enfolded by myth and legend, as is usually the way with heroes who become the subject of songs and epic poems. The Serbian tradition of the blind Gypsy, traveling from Balkan town to Balkan town, playing the one-stringed instrument the Slavs call the gusla, and reciting the long series of poems known as the Kosovo Cycle, endures to this day.

  Lazar, glorious emperor,

  Which is the empire of your choice?

  Is it the empire of heaven?

  Is it the empire of earth?

  ………………

  “Kind God, now, what shall I do, how shall I do it?

  What is the empire of my choice?

  Is it the empire of heaven?

  Is it the empire of the earth?

  And if I shall choose the empire of the earth,

  The empire of the earth is brief,

  Heaven is everlasting.”

  And the emperor chose the empire of heaven

  Above the empire of the earth.

  His choice made—so the myth has it—he was promptly executed and his head cut off by the Turks who would then go on to defeat his Serbian army. His body was dried, he was dressed in the cloak with lions rampant which he was said to have worn on the battlefield, and a red-and-gold cloth was placed over him. His remains were placed in an open coffin in a monastery nearby. The monastery, at a place nearby called Ravanica, became for three centuries the center for a cult following that attracted hundreds of thousands of Serb pilgrims from all over the Orthodox dominions.

  Three hundred years later Czar Lazar’s withered and headless body and his red-and-gold-shrouded bones left Kosovo for the relative safety of the north. They were taken there by the Orthodox patriarch of the Pec monastery, the holy man who was leading a column of thirty thousand Serbian faithful to a safe haven in the Slavonian and Croatian, the frontier land that had been gifted by the Austrians and that would in time become the Krajina. And then they went to off another church near Budapest, and in 1697 to yet another at a place called Srem. Finally, in 1942, after the Croatian Ustashi fascists stole some of Lazar’s rings, the Germans—who had no love for Orthodox Serbs but did have some respect for tradition and holiness—helped take the relics to relative safety in Belgrade.

  And there they stayed until 1987, when, at the urgings of Slobodan Milosevic, their priestly guardians allowed them to begin a rabble-rousing progress around all of Yugoslavia. The remains of Czar Lazar Hrebeljanovic—his coffin lid of transparent plastic, his thin brown hands, withered and frail, visible, sticking out from under their covering—were one of the early devices used to whip up the froth of nationalistic fervor that would keep Milosevic in power, and all Yugoslavia in turmoil. The czar’s bones were central to the glorious mythic memory that Milosevic was to cite in his infamous speech on Saint Vitus’s Day 1989, at the old battlefield near Kosovo Polje, the Field of the Blackbird. “Six centuries later again we are in battles and quarrels….”

  “But the odd thing,” whispered the ancient and now tiring Mrs. Lowne, “is that I am hardly a Serb at all. I am a Croat, really—I am Catholic, for a start—and I am part Hungarian. Yes, I have Serb blood—who doesn’t, in these parts? But it is droll, don’t you think, that a living descendant of the greatest of all remembered Serbs is a Croat-Hungarian, living beside the sea in old Ragusa. I suppose that shows what six centuries of interbreeding can do.

  “And that’s what makes this nonsense”—and she spread her arms wide, gesturing toward the distant war—“all seem so utterly crazy. We are all Slavs, for heaven’s sake. We are all the same people. Why do we fight so much among ourselves? I have seen so much in ninety years. And it is ending no better than when I was a child. That is so sad. So sad.”

  We stood up to leave. Her dog had caught the melancholy mood, I thought, but he
jumped up and began racing furiously around the moment that we made a step for the door. Wookie’s sudden excitement snapped her from her glum mood, and she became animated, too. “Will you stay? Will you stay?” she asked. She found and pushed into our hands a large bag of puffed Dinkel—which turned out to be the German version of the grain known elsewhere as spelt—and then asked forlornly if whether, instead of staying at a hotel, we might consider staying with her, in a shack at the end of the garden. We went up and looked at it, but it was like a potting shed, full of broken implements and yellowed copies of ancient English newspapers, and it smelled of mold and Wookie’s leavings, so we thanked her and politely said perhaps another time. I needed telephones, I said, and a good long bath—particularly a bath, after all the exigencies of Sarajevo and Mostar. Mrs. Lowne sighed, and then drew herself up, recovered, and became her old imperious self again. “Then stay at the Excelsior, do,” she said. “I know both of the managers. The man at the Excelsior is a cultured man. The fellow at the Argentina is perfectly nice but quite frankly, a bit of a peasant.”

  Wookie stood stock-still beside Mrs. Lowne as we made our way down her garden stairs and off to the hotel. “Think Dinkel,” was the last thing she said. “I think I would have died a hundred times over if I hadn’t eaten it for so long.” We had an enormous bag of it, her parting gift, and it lasted us for a week.

  There is a large map screwed to Dubrovnik’s old city wall, just inside the Ploce gate. It records, with black diamonds and red stars, where every artillery shell and mortar bomb and incendiary device fell on the Old Town, during the eight months of the siege that began in 1991. The map is covered with symbols, like insects on flypaper; and it is a testament to the pride with which Dubrovnik itself and Croatia beyond regard this incomparably beautiful place that so much is now repaired. The city burghers once apologized that they had had some difficulty matching the exact color of the ancient clay roof tiles that had been destroyed, and indeed, from the distance of our window at the Excelsior, the roofs within the walls did have a mottled, mosaic appearance. But I thought it rather added to the magnificence of the place, the mite of imperfection underlining the otherwise impeccable.

  The siege of Dubrovnik still seems to me to have been a pointless act of savagery. Just as with the Croats’ wrecking of the lovely Turkish bridge at Mostar, and just like the systematic wrecking of Muslim houses in the villages in Bosnia, it seemed yet another indication of the brutish, unnecessary spitefulness of this wretched war. What military need had there ever been, “for heaven’s sake,” as Mrs. Lowne would have put it, for the Yugoslav army to fire artillery rounds from within the safety of the Montenegrin mountains, directly into the center of one of the world’s most revered architectural sites? It was a monstrous crime, as unthinkable before it happened as would be the bombing of Oxford or Kyoto. But the Serbs in their army seemingly felt no attachment to a town that was 90 percent Croat anyway, and in a country that had declared its independence: And so in the middle of October 1991 they unleashed their guns, and the battering of the almost undefended former city-state began in fearful earnest.

  The dramatic geography of this southern portion of the Dalmatian coast turned out to be both the deadliest curse for the fate of the town and yet, in the end, a blessing, too.

  The Dinaric Alps here are almost at the waterline, and plunge precipitously down into the sea within a mile or less of horizontal distance—they are, in other words, almost cliffs, and very high cliffs at that, almost sheer. The borders with Bosnia and Montenegro—not that there were true borders back in 1991, when the siege began, but only the unformed lines of future states—wind among and in some cases along the top of those cliffs—meaning that artillery pieces could be placed high on the mountains overlooking the Old Town, and from safety positions in front of the soon-to-be-declared Croatian frontiers, fire a barrage of shells down into the city with unceasing impunity.

  A Yugoslav army bombardier would watch with glee as he conducted his sport—firing shells into the parking lots below, for example, and gawking as the ensuing fire leaped from car to car to car, as the successive fuel tanks exploded like firecrackers on a string. The artilleryman could be confident that there was virtually no chance of retaliation: From down below his firing positions would be no more than a couple of dots on a horizon that loomed neck-breakingly high over the town. But the Serbian firing master had merely to peer over the cliff-edge and select which building—which Catholic church, which shop, which apartment house, which segment of the thousand-year-old wall—to destroy, then load, aim, and fire! As with some diabolical arcade game he then had only to peek over the cliff once more to watch his whistling outbound shell land, and perform its gruesome task.

  But the steepness of the Dinaric hills had for the attackers a disadvantage too. Soldiers could not clamber down the slopes rapidly enough ever to invade the city below—the descent would be too dangerous in and of itself, and besides, the men would be picked off one by one by snipers firing from below. The ground was open: Only a few cypress tress afforded any protection, and cypresses, though now abundant on the hillsides, grew here as solitary specimens, not in forests that might give an invading army cover.

  So no land invasion of Dubrovnik ever took place—only the merciless nightly shelling. On one spectacularly horrible day in November 1991 the besieging army, using wire-guided missiles, destroyed and sank, with deliberation, every single boat that was moored between the moles of the old Dubrovnik harbor: The television pictures of this most wanton act, the blowing up of sailing yachts in one of the best-loved sailors’ harbors in the world, did much to nudge Western opinion, at least for a while. Why are they doing this? wailed half the world. What danger could a small schooner or a sloop from Marseilles ever pose to the Yugoslav army? What harm have these old walls ever done to the memory of the heroic fighters of Kosovo? What, for God’s sake, is the blessed point?

  And in the end the Serbs gave up and went away. They never breached the walls, never sent men down on ropes or in parachutes to invade and occupy the old city, never extended their influence beyond the boundaries of their own areas in Bosnia. Croatia won its independence; the shelling was stopped for good. Dubrovnik was safe, at least for a while—safe, and able both to rebuild itself physically and to rebuild its reputation as a place of tranquillity and serene loveliness. It has been, by all accounts, difficult beyond words.

  We had dinner, several times running, in one of a number of cafés that line Ulica Prijeko, a narrow street parallel to the Placa, the magnificently wide, shining marble pedestrian street that runs between the cathedral and the monastery that, respectively, mark each end of town. The food was perfect*—lobsters and crayfish and fresh garden salads and pancakes, and a red Croatian wine called Dingac. But there were no other customers, except for a group of internationals down from Sarajevo for the weekend, and a group of archaeologists, investigating Roman sites on an island nearby. A genial but out-of-work jazz musician named Ben, who normally played saxophone in a group called the Dubrovnik Troubadours, was sitting nearby: Not for another year or so, he said, would the town revive.

  “People are frightened—and who can blame them? I lie in bed at night, when the sea is quiet, and I can hear the NATO bombs dropping on Montenegro. We always have the fear that there will be fighting in Montenegro once again, and that the remainder of the Yugoslav army will be back in the mountains again, making trouble for us. It is not so good.”

  But he perked up when I told him I lived in New York. He was due to come to play in Weehawken, New Jersey, in a few weeks’ time: The Croatian-American Fraternity Union paid the fares and then was sending his band on to Pittsburgh, where a quarter of a million Croats live. He slapped us both on the back, and folded us in his arms, and led us off to his tiny bar beside the Church of St. Blaise. We sat there drinking slivovitz (plum brandy) until two in the morning, when his exceptionally disagreeable and very ugly dog bit Rose in the ankle, and we decided to limp back to the Excelsior.r />
  A few days later I met a man who looked, with his wild gray hair and straggly beard, and sounded, with his strange theories and propositions, charmingly but disconcertingly mad.

  He approached me almost out of the blue and proceeded to tell me a story that for a long time afterward made me wonder whether he was certifiably insane, and whether or not to write about him. I asked others, too, and indeed, on the very eve of planning the writing of what follows, I received an E-mail from a professor at Yale University who urged me in no uncertain terms to ignore all that the man said, and to give him no credence whatsoever.

  But one aspect of the man’s story, even to the skeptics who insisted that I not give him a second thought, did ring uncannily true—a truth that bothered me, made me wonder. And so in the end I decided to ignore the Yale professor’s caution and tell what happened when I met a Swedish mathematician named Jan Suurkula. We met by chance at an airport, and although he knew nothing about me or why I was in Dubrovnik in the first place, he proceeded to tell me in some detail his particular interest in (a) unified field theory, and (b) its connections, if properly harnessed, with the lessening of human chaos. Since there was a very great deal of chaos in the area just now, he said, I would surely be interested in anything that might lessen it?

  His basic thesis, though hardly simple, was easily stated. Proving the unified field theory, the notion that all the main forces of physics—electromagnetism, time, space, and gravity—are somehow linked together in a kind of all-encompassing multidimensional geometry, has been the Holy Grail of great scientific thinkers for most of this century. That human beings might somehow contribute to, or somehow affect, the frail gossamer threads that link all these physical elements together is what mathematicians like Dr. Suurkula have come to believe.