The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans

by Simon Winchester

  He clapped his hands for the old black-clad woman who had been his housekeeper for twenty years, and she brought out a dish of dew-fresh strawberries, a bowl of red gelatin dessert, a large number of bottles of beer, and a young man with whom Father Sbutega had been spending the afternoon. He was tall, handsome, dark-haired, and muscular—very much the Montenegrin—and in his late thirties. The two spent much of their time with us continuing an earlier conversation in Montenegrin about various foods and the degree to which Turkey had influenced their making. It was possible, both agreed, to buy good halvah and baklava in Montenegro, as well as a divine cevapcici—the perfect blend of East and West, North and South, and all in a place that had never been subjugated by any outsider.

  His interests in the current war, he said, were only humanitarian—and indeed, some days before when I had tried to telephone him, he had been off helping French aid workers take a convoy of food to the refugee camps that had been opened just over the Albanian border. “But they are inside Montenegro,” he said. “Isn’t that too strange? People are coming in as refugees from Kosovo to Montenegro—in the same country. We’re a part of Yugoslavia, for heaven’s sake!—and yet other Yugoslavs are asking us to take them in and look after them. But there are VJ units everywhere here, and lots of the people here are Serbs. How can they feel safe?” He harrumphed with disbelief.

  “I guess they know we’re Montenegrins first, and we won’t put up with any nonsense. But it makes this war seem even crazier than it is.”

  He positively loathed the war, he said. He would rather talk instead of civilized things. Like London, for example. How was his old friend Cardinal Hume? (Not good, I had to tell him—and three weeks after I left Basil Hume died, which left Don Branco “devastated,” as he put it.) He had come to know him when he filled in at a small church in Brixton, at a time when he was doubling working for the BBC Russian Service at Bush House in London. “Tell my friends there. They will remember me.” He still listened to the BBC faithfully, every day. Except that he was very busy. “I have eighty parishioners,” he said. “Very demanding people. I have far too much to do.” And he waved his hand wildly and put on a panic-stricken expression.

  Then he brightened. Would we care to come and look at his chapel, to see the work he had done? And so, joined by Hook, who bounded along merrily ahead of us, we trooped through a low door into an immense Aladdin’s cave of wild mosaics and gold trim and rich red carpeting: the new Chapel of Dobrota, Don Branco Sbutega’s legacy for the Catholic people of the Montenegrin coast. It was an extraordinary place, bizarre, vulgar in the extreme, a fantasy chapel that might have been in Las Vegas, or at Portmeirion, or on the set of a Hammer film. Don Branco sat and happily played the organ—“The Wedding March,” “Silent Night”—while we stood, awestruck, looking up at ornate single eye under the apex of the dome, which gazed down coldly at the congregation below.

  Outside, on a bus shelter, was the Serbian cross, and a vulgarism denouncing the Catholic Church. Beside it was a swath of graffiti, the reminder that this territory, like Kosovo, was “Serbia forever.”

  “That’s what they think,” growled Don Branco Sbutega. “But let them ever dare to try and take on the Montenegrins. They have good reason to be scared. Not of people like me of course—I’d just run away. But the people up in the hills. All they know up there is guns and fighting. They’ve been doing it for hundreds of years. And they always win.”

  Before climbing up the hills to the desolate karst plateau, I had a small mission to undertake down on the Adriatic coast, at a seaside town called Petrovac. I had heard something of the place—a tidy little resort, though not quite so fashionable as the near-islet of Sveti Stefan, where film stars used to pay thousands of dollars a night to be housed in perfect Adriatic peace, in a jumble of houses and cypress trees on the sea five miles away. Petrovac was much less assuming than that, a pleasing seaside mix of the acceptably new and the delightfully ancient. A friend in London, a well-known magazine editor, was married to an architectural writer who had come from Petrovac, and both he and his brother, now a lawyer in Scotland, wanted to know how their old family house was getting along, and how their neighbors were, from whom they hadn’t heard all through the war, and about whom they now were a little worried.

  Everyone in the dusty outskirts of Petrovac knew the family—“The boys did very well, went to England, you know,” said one old man I met in the street, who was leading a donkey on a string. He gave directions, and we found the house, part of it now turned into a butcher shop, part a warehouse. It was built of limestone, weathered, substantial, and still in good shape. The neighbors lived behind it, and were sitting in a courtyard drinking Turkish coffee. They sat us down immediately, assured us they were fine—but that the telephones, run as they were by an administration in Belgrade, were not working too well. So I called Scotland on my cell phone, and within minutes there was a babel of Montenegrin passing across the ether, and to celebrate the moment someone broke out a box of lokum, the gummy and flower-fragrant sweetmeat that elsewhere is known as Turkish delight.

  The neighbors, grateful for the contact with the outside, then seemed to feel it their duty to tell us stories—did we know, for example, that there were families of black people living farther down the coast at Ulcinj? The coast had fallen to the Turks for a while, and back in the sixteenth century the bey of Algiers brought African slaves to the walled port city they built at Ulcinj and made them work with the corsairs, who, with the official blessing of Topkapi, were then trying to wreak havoc among the trading ships of imperial Venice. The slaves had in time intermingled with the local Montenegrins. Part of Ulcinj town, they said, remained noticeably African in appearance, “rather like the souk in Djibouti.”

  We whiled away the warm afternoon in the sunshine, listening to the stories, hearing waves crashing on the pebble beach, idly watching the fishermen stocking their lobster pots or sorting through their hauls of oysters, and gazing up at the mountains we would soon have to climb. Both of the capitals of Montenegro were somewhere up there, in the sea of rocks of the karst lands.

  One was the present capital, the unlovely socialist-realist city of Podgorica that had until the late eighties been known by its temporary honorific of Titograd, and that spread out into a wide river valley at the southern edge of the mountains. The other, the old capital, was high in the mountains, remote and unreachable, and said by all to be one of the most curious capital cities in all the world.

  It was called Cetinje, and it had been founded in the fifteenth century around a huge and isolated monastery. For nearly five centuries it was the seat of power of a series of regal (but popularly elected) Orthodox bishops—all of them, after 1697, coming from the same family, nephew-bishop succeeding nephew-bishop. In 1910 the then ruling bishop, Nicola Petrovic, declared himself King Nicholas, and reigned for eight years before the Austrians deposed and deported him. The capital itself, confused by war and turmoil, lived on as the administrative center of the tiny country—by then absorbed ignominiously into Serbia—until 1948, when the heads of state and government moved across to the duller and less romantic commercial center at Podgorica.

  Cetinje stands in curious and glorious isolation in a basin of rocks just below the holy Black Mountain, Mount Levcen, where there is a mausoleum to one of the more revered of the bishop-princes, but which it is now impossible to visit because the Yugoslav army has a radio and radar station on its summit. But getting to the capital itself was interesting enough: You may go by road from Podgorica itself, or still by the old way, from behind the city walls of Kotor and up the cliff face via a dizzying switchback of a track, called the Ladder of Cattaro, that is more suited to mules than for the kind of passengers—diplomats, bureaucrats, and the like—that a capital city ordinarily attracts. The track, though it has been widened and metaled in recent times, still has the capacity to scare.

  I must make sure I went to Cetinje, Father Sbutega had said, for more than mere historical amuseme
nt. While there I might find the answer to a matter that had recently been intriguing him—but a matter in which he, as a Catholic, had no direct and vested interest. If, he said, the Montenegrin people were overwhelmingly of the Orthodox faith, then at which Orthodox church were they supposed to worship? Because as he had heard on the ecumenical grapevine, there were now two Eastern churches in Montenegro, both competing for saints and competing for sinners. And as he had heard tell, battle royal was currently breaking out between them.

  The mountains around the old capital are bone dry, the limestone too porous to hold water after rain. The fields are tiny, crops do not thrive, the trees are stunted—there is a lunar bleakness to the place that makes one wonder why anyone lives there. In every fold of rock, they say, there are six kinds of snakes—the poisonous sharka is the worst, but the boskok, which according to improbable local lore leaps from trees and strangles passersby, is also less than endearing. But nevertheless, and however harsh the landscape, there are small stone houses, patches of scrub, a wizened lemon tree, a donkey or two: Somehow people manage to eke out a living.

  And in the midst of it all, sheltered in a crater in this Montenegrin sea of tranquillity and slumbering in the eternal sunshine, is the tiny old city, a place of miniature palaces and churches and pavilions, with small squares and rows of little blue-and-white houses. It is like the capital of Toytown: You half expect the figures—a mayor, a fireman, a constable, a fishmonger, a baker, his excellency the ambassador—to be made of plastic, and move from place to place only when the gigantic stubby fingers of a child reach down from the skies.

  The charming absurdity of the place is hardly mitigated by learning that one of the principal episcopal palaces is known simple as Biljarda—Billiards. One of the heroic clergymen who ran the country, the Prince-Bishop Peter II,* had a billiard table hauled up the Ladder of Cattaro in the 1830s, presented it to his people as a great wonder of modern life, and named his palace after the game. In the same building there is a three-dimensional map of the entire kingdom, made a century ago by the Austrian generals for whom the chaotic mountainscapes meant utter bewilderment, and a two-dimensional map was not good enough. There is an opera house nearby, and the feat of building it up in this remote notch in the Dinaric Alps must have rivaled that of the German rubber baron who carried his own, ready-made, into the jungles of Brazil.*

  The old royal palace is now a museum, from where His Royal Montenegrin Highness King Nicholas presided benignly over his people for sixty-eight years, fought five wars on their behalf, and turned Cetinje into a diplomatic clearinghouse for the Balkans and the glittering social center of the southern European world. The palace is a dollhouse version of what a fanciful monarchy should be like: There are flattering portraits and chased-silver guns, vast fireplaces, and a library of specially made and presented books,† polar bear rugs and chairs with the monogrammed letter N, immense silver tureens given by brother emperors, a dinner service from Napoleon III, pictures of visitors who would go on to head the royal houses of Europe from Norway to Sicily, and endless arrays of medals, orders, ribbons, scrolls, and honors in glass cases everywhere.

  And there are marriage certificates, too, and faded daguerreotypes from the more primitive lands into which his fecund majesty had dispatched the best of his three sons and nine daughters to be married and help create new dynasties of their own. Not for nothing was King Nicholas known as “Europe’s father-in-law”: one of his daughters married the king of Italy, another the king of Serbia, a third was the mother of the future king Alexander of Yugoslavia, and a fourth became a German princess.

  Most notable of all was the cascade of events that followed the marriage of the his daughter Militsa to the Russian Grand Duke Peter. It was Militsa who, in common with many in the fevered court at St. Petersburg, became obsessively intrigued by the outer reaches of religion, by mysticism and the occult. And it was Militsa, this young Montenegrin woman, who in 1908 conspired with her sister-in-law Anastasia to introduce to the Russian czarina a vibrantly eccentric monk named Grigory Yefimovich Novykh, a wandering Siberian peasant who was generally known by a nickname meaning “the debauched one”: Rasputin. The devastating influence that Rasputin was to have for the next eight years on the Russian imperial throne is only too well known—that the modest little royal palace of Montenegro played an unsung but profound role in the ruin of Russia is droll indeed.

  Everyone, the Russians included, had embassies here, and most of the buildings remain. They are suitably small structures, but they all display an elegance and dignity appropriate for housing the representatives to a full-fledged if somewhat Ruritanian kingdom. Most are like small country mansions in the old Caribbean or Scotland, made of gray or red-and-white stone and with roofs of flattened tin. The British mission remains, with a brass plaque on the gate, and is now a music school. The French embassy is the grandest, not least because it was a building supposedly destined for the governor of Algiers, but got swapped, thanks to the efforts of a cunning Montenegrin in Paris: The office in North Africa is still said to be one of the dullest in French diplomatic hands. Court intrigue and amusement was rife in the landlocked declivity of Cetinje; the embassies vied with one another to give the best garden parties, to import the choicest wines, to have as guests the prettiest girls. Life there was said by diplomats to be comfortably pointless but enormous fun.*

  The huge Orthodox monastery of Cetinje is next door to the royal palace, and I was just stepping across to it when I asked our guide if it was indeed true that there were now two rival Orthodox churches in Montenegro. He nodded and then looked rather sheepish, as if the rivalry were too unseemly to discuss. There was, he said, a new Montenegrin Orthodox Church; the old one, the Serbian Orthodox Church, had its headquarters in the monastery next door. It might be better, the guide warned, if I went to see the new one first—simply because if I admitted to seeing the established church first, then the patriarch of the new church, a touchy man, might well refuse to receive me. It sounded like William Boot’s visits to the rival Ishmaelian embassies in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop: I was intrigued, and so took directions to the house of His Beatitude the Metropolitan of the Montenegrin Orthodox Church.

  It turned out to be a small suburban house a mile from town, with net curtains and a lawn sprinkler. His Beatitude was asleep, but a delicate and fussy little acolyte in a black surplice welcomed us in, offered us Turkish coffee, and gave us magazines to read, and suggested we might wait for a little while.

  A brief minute later, with a flourish, the young man threw open a door and in walked a magnificent figure, who bowed and handed over a scarlet visiting card. In English on one side, Cyrillic Serbo-Croat on the other, was written the name and title: HIS BEATITUDE THE MONTENEGRIN METROPOLITAN, THE REVEREND MIHAILO.

  He was very tall, dressed in a long omophorion of black silk with a burgundy lining, with a delicate black velvet chasuble on top and a large metal and enamel cross on his chest. He had pure white hair and a long, well-trimmed beard, though a dusting of dandruff had formed below it on the black velvet. He wore a dauntingly imperious expression, and I could well believe he was touchy on occasion. But on this one he was polite and welcoming: He dismissed the boy-priest and his coffee, curtly demanding slivovitz instead. He bowed to us and raised his glass. He seemed very much the showman.

  He talked expansively, in broken English and good Italian, about the needs and aspirations of the Montenegrin people to have their own church, to break free of the tiresome domination of the Serbs, to resume the church’s once autocephalous state, with its own Montenegrin leadership, as they had enjoyed until their king was deposed at the end of the Great War. There were fully 667 Montenegrin churches back in the old days.

  “But now we are small, our congregations are tiny. Officially we have no churches, because the Serbs have gone to court to forbid us from establishing ourselves. But as pride in our country grows again, so pride in our religion does too. I am filled with optimism. Look at the two-headed
eagles in our coats of arms—see how the Serbian eagle has folded wings, while our eagle has its wings spread, ready to fly? Well, that is how we are—ready to fly.”

  But there were problems, he said. The right of a new Orthodox church to exist was determined by the supervising body of the Orthodox communion, an office in Istanbul—which Mihailo kept referring to, confusingly, as Czarigrad, the capital of the czars—and so far they had refused.

  And he took us downstairs to the tiny chapel he had set up on the ground floor—half a room, really, with a linoleum floor and a few icons stuck on the wall. He held services there once a week, and perhaps forty people came. “But at Easter we had fifteen thousand at an open-air service—the Serbians only had five thousand, and most of them they brought in by bus from Herzegovina.” He became visibly agitated as he said this. He denounced the Serbian church leadership as “rude” and “psychologically disturbed,” he accused them of trying to engineer his downfall, of bringing pressure to bear on the authorities in Istanbul, trying to deny his attempt at independence. “They are behaving like barbarians—the Barbarians of the Balkans. They must realize that tolerance is the spirit of the age.”

  But in truth Bishop Mihailo’s mission seemed more compounded of rhetoric than revival; the power of his Serb opposition seemed overwhelming, and there was little by way of ecclesiastical business going on in his small suburban house—the telephone never rang, the fax machine on his desk remained silent all the time we were there. Perhaps his claims of a large Easter turnout were true; perhaps the Serbian religious leadership was employing unfair tactics. But Mihailo was losing ground, by all accounts. I could well imagine that after we left, His Beatitude—especially after his fortifying afternoon plum brandy—went upstairs again and crept back into bed.