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.With their curved Turkish sabers, oriental slippersand costume, they seemed to him mere curiosities, worthy only of a wax museum.Only during his second visit, when confined to the medieval monasteries of Mt.Athos,was he really stimulated.It was not only that they did not conform to his own imageof what was supposed to be Slav.One can perceive in Mucha also a subdued versionof the longing for cultural and racial purity, the ideology that dominated the civi-lized world of Europe at the time, with no foreboding yet for its disastrous conse-quences.The Balkan Slavs lacked the purity of a single breed (or of how the breed wasimagined); in their case the mongrel nature was more than visible it was their es-sence.It is true that in Mucha this tension is very delicate and barely discernible un-der the thick and rich slavophile layer; there is nothing of the crude and frank aversionarticulated by his contemporaries, Keyserling and Ehrenpreis.For Mucha, the BalkanSlavs simply did not conform to his purebred ideal abstraction of Slavdom; forKeyserling and Ehrenpreis, the Balkans were a contemptuous deviation from the lessthan flattering abstraction of the Orient.It would be dogmatic and simplistic to insist that there were no exceptions to thisdiscourse of rigid and harsh qualifications: not everyone subscribed to the temptationof orderly classification that permitted one to make sense of the Balkan chaos, but non-conformists are always the minority and they did not challenge or change the dominantstereotypes that finally crystallized in this period.Rarely would someone exclaim withthe Englishman Archibald Lyall:  I knew enough of South-eastern Europe never tobelieve anything anybody told one if it was humanly possible to look into the matter foroneself. Lyall himself left witty and spirited descriptions of late 1920s Romania (withBucharest as a sort of Balkan Hollywood), Istanbul, Greece, Albania, Montenegro, andDalmatia in The Balkan Road.An acute and epigrammatic observer, he managed toarticulate the reasons for the uneasiness a westerner would feel in the Balkans in a matter-of-fact manner not only devoid of venom but with mocking sympathy.One of the chiefreasons was the lack of bourgeois comforts and behavior:Amost everywhere east of the lands of solid German and Italian speech there is athin whiff of the Balkans in the air, hardly perceptible in Bohemia, but growingstronger with every eastward mile a certain lack of comfort, a certain indifferenceto rules and timetables, a certain je-m en-fichisme with regard to the ordinary ma-chinery of existence, maddening or luminously sane according to temperamentand circumstance.55Punctuality was never a Balkan virtue, although even there progress has been madein the half-century after Lyall.Greek steamers, he complained, were always late anhour and a half but this was nothing compared to the annoying propensity of Yugoslavtrains to leave ten minutes ahead of schedule.The most unsettling characteristic ofthe  pays balkaniques, pays volcaniques, however, was  the cult of the gun that hadled to the barbarity of the Skupa
tina murders in Belgrade, the Sveta Nedelya bomb128 Imagining the Balkansoutrage in Sofia, and the shooting of Greek ministers.And yet, Lyall would earnestlyinsist that the Balkans were no more unsafe for the foreigner than anywhere else:The natives only shoot their friends and acquaintances, and they seldom inter-fere with strangers.In Paris or Chicago you kill a man because you think he mayhave the price of a drink in his pockets, but in the Balkans you only kill a man forsome good cause, as that you disagree with his political views, or that his great-uncle once shot a second cousin of yours, or for some equally sound reason ofthat kind.If you are seized with a desire to go for a walk in a Balkan town at threein the morning, the risk of being knocked on the head is so small that it is notworth while not doing it.56Lyall wrote this in the section on Albania, where he thoroughly enjoyed himselfdespite warnings about the  horrible country by a Persian Presbytarian with whomhe spent some time in Athens.It is curious to listen to the funny incantations of thePersian, that is, to a prejudice from the east, rather than the usual one from the west.The standard offense to the Balkans in a Western rendition is that they are too East-ern; in the hierarchies of a civilized easterner the pejorative referral was Africa:Why do you want to go to Albahnia, my dear sir? Zere is nothing to see zere, onlyblack stones.And no houses, only little forts wiz cracks and holes in zem, wiz riflespeeping out of zem; and ze Albahnians, zey sit zere and zey go pop-pop-pop.It isworse zan ze Wild West.Kentucky! Tennessee! Zey are orphans to Albahnia! Or-phans! Children! It is Timbuctoo, my dear sir, ze very middle of Timbuctoo.Prom-ise me you will not go to Albahnia.It is a pity.You are so young.I tell you zis, mydear sir, God  e made ze Albahnians after he d just had a fight wiz his muzzer-in-law.57It was the ethnic complexity of the Balkans that proved the most frustratingcharacteristic.Unlike Western Europe where nations lived in more or less homo-geneous blocks, in the East they were jumbled in a way that added the wordmacédoine to the vocabulary of menu writers.This complexity that has continuedto defy easy categorizations and upsets neat recipes invoked, instead of condem-nation, a simple and fair remark by Lyall:  Everywhere east of the Adriatic thereare at least ten sides to every question, and it is in my mind that one thing is asgood as another. 58 The complex ethnic mixture was held responsible for the in-stability and disorder of the peninsula, which was diagnosed as afflicted by  thehandicap of heterogeneity. 59 Indeed, minority issues have been an endemic partof the development of the nation state particularly in Eastern Europe.Practicallynobody, however, emphasized the fact that it was not ethnic complexity per sebut ethnic complexity in the framework of the idealized nation-state that leads toethnic homogeneity, inducing ethnic conflicts.Not only was racial mixture con-ducive to disorder, racial impurity was disorder [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]