Introduction
To keep the map of ‘Nappstraumtunnel’ in my mind, I see a wheel that turns from Norway to the Alps and from the Alps I follow the Danube to the Black Sea before cycling back to Scandinavia by way of the trade routes of the Volga vikings on the Eurasian steppe. Like all maps this one is too simple and schematic to be true but it helps me to organise my own peculiar version of European history with all the spokes pointing to the Balkans.
Within this wheel there is a simpler journey of 130 kilometres from the town of Svolvær to the village of Å in the Lofoten archipelago. Setting out one morning to hitch-hike between these two points, Miroslav picked me up, and it is his story that brings us to the Balkans where he was born not far from the banks of the Drina.
‘Balkan’ is a Turkish word. It means mountain. The Ottomans controlled this area from the 14th to the early 20th century and the bridge over the Drina that Miroslav talks about was built by a vizier with a biography that complicates our sometimes simple view of east and west. Bajica Nenadić (I call him Bakic), an ethnic Serb by birth, was training for the priesthood when he was taken from his homeland as part of the ‘blood tax’ — the recruitment of boys for the elite military corps of the Ottoman army — the Janissaries. This kidnapping marked the beginning of his spectacular rise.
On the other side of the Mediterranean, his nemesis, Charles V of Spain, has a heritage every bit as mongrel as that of the Serb cum vizier. Born in the low countries in 1500, Charles was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Aachen Cathedral and ruled from the Alhambra Palace which was built by the muslims of the Al-Andalus caliphate.
The two boys were forever busy with the management of colonies, the stamping out of court feuds and the instigation of intermittent genocides — in short, the usual business of monarchs. Bakic’s desire for a four-tiered crown that might out-do Charles’ three-tiered crown can be seen in the light of his anxiety when it came to the size of their respective empires. Spain was the superpower of the day. Charles controlled the Iberian peninsula, much of Italy, the runt of German princely states left over from the collapse of the Roman empire, as well as the rapidly expanding colonies of Asia and the Americas. Famously and probably apocryphally, he said: I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse.
Sandwiched between these empires the Balkans are seen by those in distant capitals as a ‘Krajina’ — a frontier or edge-land, populated by barbarians of ambiguous loyalty and uncertain ethnicity. The view from the banks of the Drina looking back might well give the same impression in reverse.
Skipping forward a few centuries (this historical wheel is not logical or orderly), we come to the Second World War and the Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia run by the ultra-nationalist Ustaše who were supported by the Axis powers. The Allies along with Russia supported the Serbs, while Turkey aided the muslims with whom they had ruled Bosnia for nearly half a millennium. The events I describe — the competition between Mile Friganović and Father Pero (a Franciscan priest) to see who can kill the most inmates (the prize is a gold watch) are adapted from an interview that Friganović gave to a Croatian psychiatrist who was himself an inmate in the camp. I should say that when Friganović orders his victim (Vukašin Mandrapato, now considered a saint in the Orthodox Serbian Church) to shout out praise for the Führer, he means Ante Pavelić, the leader of the Ustaše.
Strange to say, even for the Nazis, the Ustaše went too far. An Austrian general writing around this time to his superiors noted that “the Ustaše have gone raving mad.“ These atrocities gave rise to retaliatory killings which gave rise to still more killing in a corkscrew of violence that continued right up to the wars of the last decade of the 20th century. A friar of the gentle Order of Saint Francis murdering innocent civilians might surprise you but the religious leaders on all sides in this theatre have often aggravated rather than attenuated inter-ethnic hatred. This is why the phrase ‘with god anything is possible’ is repeated around the episode of a Serbian war criminal sheltering in a monastery where a patriarch advises him to reject the New Testament in favour of the Old. The patriarch likes to nurture old wounds, or as Simone Weil says: false gods always turn suffering into violence.
If the crimes of Charles and Bakic were characterised by state expansion, the Balkan conflicts of the late 20th century were characterised by disintegration. Another fundamental difference is that later armies became heavily reliant on organised crime as a means of financing their operations. Opium poppies were almost unknown in the Balkans before 1990 but by the end of the millennium narco-trafficking was a multi-million dollar business. This forms some of the background to the sections related to narco-jihad as well the Tintin adventures of Osama Bin Laden paying a flying visit after receiving a ‘journalist visa’ from the Bosnian embassy in Vienna.
Of course wartime looting was not invented in the 20th century. Nor was genocide. Europe was shaped by massive ethnic cleansing in the 7th and 8th centuries. Earlier still, we have much to choose from in the Roman catalogue — taking an example at random, half a million inhabitants of Carthage were murdered and another 50,000 were sold into slavery at the end of the Third Punic War (183 BC).
Even as the Roman empire turns Christian we have the salutary example of Constantine who crops up obliquely in relation to the new muslim elite that emerges in the 1990’s and their distrust of the businessman turned politician known as the Chicken Tycoon. They call him a shaky muslim, just as Constantine is a shaky christian, just as every political figure in this poem is a shaky something or other.
For Constantine’s relevance, I would say that he was a wily, capable emperor who never lost a battle. He was also a chancer who saw a vision of the cross at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge (257 AD). Naturally enough, he interpreted this cross as a promise of victory. In gratitude, he eased the persecution of the Christians though he himself waited until his death bed before he was baptised. The reason was that he believed that the magic wand of baptism would absolve him of his sins; better then to rule as a pagan emperor and clean the slate at the last minute. And this saint of the Orthodox church had quite a slate to clean. To give an idea of the man, he had his son and wife put to death — the former was poisoned, the latter was thrown into a vat of boiling water.
The story of the Chicken Tycoon is equally ridiculous. Under Tito, he masterminded the transformation of a local chicken concern into one of the largest agricultural conglomerates in Europe. This came tumbling down after the discovery of a byzantine network of fraudulent bank notes. Charged with ’counter-revolutionary activities‘, he served time and was released to the wild again, spending the war years battling Ali Izetbegović while maintaining a stronghold on his home enclave which he ran like a fiefdom. After the war he was jailed for war crimes. After that he was mayor of his home town. After that he was arrested for abuse of public funds.
In short, jokers to the left of me, jokers to the right — here I am, stuck in the middle with the citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina who are fed up with deadly nightshade warlords and buffoonish politicians. And it was these same men who sat down to carve up their peace-time retirement plans after the war. That peace has held but Bosnia remains one of the poorest countries in Europe. Rates of depression are high, the school curriculum reinforces ethnic grievances and the country has one of the world’s highest rates of recruitment to jihadi organisations.
Moving from the outer-wheel to the inner, I find myself at the strait of the Nappstraum — the half-way mark of the journey from Svolvær to Å. The Nappstraum is a narrow sea passage between the islands of Flakstadøya and Vestvågøya where the E10 road dips down into a tunnel that runs under the sea.
‘Nappstraumtunnel’ is not a name that trips off the tongue but I hold to it because it makes me think of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Maelstrom’ which was based on the nearby Mosktraum.
Here the whirlpool sucks us down to the depths of a nightmare that plays out on the flicker-lit walls of the tunnel — the suicide of a young girl whose father is a general in the Serbian army. Almost one year to the day after that tragedy the general marches on Potočari and Srebrenica.
Killing in the Balkans, as elsewhere, relies on ethnic divisions that are easy to manipulate but almost impossible to pinpoint in terms of cultural history or biology — the Grand Vizier’s biography is surely a good example of the shifting boundary between east and west, muslim and christian. Another example is the British Isles which crops up in the sections related to the fall of England. This refers to the Battle of Hastings in 1066 when the Normans conquered the Anglo-Saxons. But who precisely were the Anglo-Saxons? A generation or two before the apocalypse of 1066, Cnut the Great was king of England, Norway and Denmark — a triumvirate known as the North Sea Empire. Was he then a Dane, a zombie viking or an Englishman?
Whoever he was, his ancestors paid a heavy price for their defeat. England would have French speaking kings for the next three centuries but more immediately the Normans laid waste to the north of England with an estimated 75% of the population either killed or forced to flee the land. This is why the chronicler of Byzantine history, Anna Comnena (daughter of emperor Alexios), noted a steady stream of new arrivals from ‘Thule’ (she meant, vaguely, the North) into her father’s realm in the years after the Norman conquest. These were refugees from England, among them Magnus Barford (Magnus the Barefoot) and Cnut the Dane (a descendent of Cnut the Great).
Connecting Constantinople with Lofoten was the most difficult spoke in the wheel but the solution was given by George Mackay Brown who tells the story of the viking Arnor journeying on the blue road to Ireland, Jerusalem, Narbonne and Micklegarth. At first, I took this last for a poetic invention but Micklegarth was the viking name for Constantinople — ‘the Big Walled Farm’.
In Micklegarth, Cnut tells his friend Magnus that he doesn’t want to go back to breaking skulls because he has found peace growing cabbages. These cabbages, I should say, are stolen from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It was Diocletian who said to his old friend and one time co-emperor Maximian, “that he should no longer be urged to relinquish the enjoyment of happiness for the pursuit of power” if he could only see the cabbages that he, Diocletian, had planted with his own hands. Gibbon cites Eutropius and Victor the Younger (“two sincere pagans”) as his source for this anecdote and I’ll bet my bottom besant dollar that Eutropius and Victor got it from an even more sincere pagan who simply made it up.
As the poem begins in the land of the midnight sun with a question about daylight robbery, I should come clean about a few more thefts. It was Mussolini’s son-in-law, Ciano, who said that fortune is a prostitute who offers herself fleetingly before passing on to another. It’s unlikely that Magnus Barford would say such a thing. Anyway, Barford himself is stolen from Jorge Luis Borges who lifted him from a German scholar by the name of Hugo Gering, a true 19th century historian. But Gering did not write the book, ‘Anhang zur Heimskringla’, that Borges says he did. And it’s curious that Borges gives 1893 as the year of publication for this imagined book. That was the year that Hermann Göring was born and Gering was one of Göring’s many nicknames — it means ‘little nothing’ in German, a play on the general’s substantial girth.
The foregoing is all history and no poetry. My aim here is to give an overview of my slant on European history and to assert that ethnic claims and pitch-fork counter-claims tend to unravel the closer you look at the deletions, insertions and mutations of any genome. The further back we go in history, the more it looks like so much comedy. The courts of Charles and Bakic seem like badly written telenovelas to me. Monty Python used this distance to good effect for their sketches of the Spanish Inquisition. Their Grand Inquisitor is based in part on Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros who was responsible for any number of executions, not to mention the burning of all the Islamic books in the library of Cordoba, excepting books of medicine. But with the inoculation of centuries anything can be turned to comedy.
Making fun of medieval kings is simple enough but more care is needed for events that lie closer to living memory. For this reason, I have leant more heavily on historical documents for the scenes in the Jasenovac concentration camp and later events in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990’s.
As templates for what I hoped to write, I had two strange works in mind, or strange-seeming, in the sense that what I’ve written hardly bears any resemblance to the models that guided me. The first is Borges’ early collection of stories about gunslingers, cowboys, murderers and bank robbers, ‘A Universal History of Iniquity’. Charles V of Spain even has a cameo in the opening lines of the book: In 1517, Fray Bartolome de las Casas, feeling great pity for the Indians who grew worn and lean in the drudging infernos of the Antillean gold mines, proposed to Charles V that Negroes be brought to the isles of the Caribbean, so that they might grow worn and lean in the drudging infernos of the Antillean gold mines.
The second is Robert Browning’s long narrative poem ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ about the painter, the good brother Lippo, who grows tired of painting saints for his patron Cosimo de Medici and climbs down from his cloister cell to the alleys of Florence where ‘sportive ladies leave their doors ajar’. Lippo is one of my favourite characters; I never tire of his slant-wise humour, his cursing of the prior who orders him to ‘rub all out’ when he sees that his niece is the model for Herodias in Lippo’s ‘Banquet of Herod’ — his niece ‘who comes to care about his asthma’ — in truth, the prior’s mistress.
Lippo knew ‘the life’ from growing up a skinny orphan kicked about the place on the streets of Florence before the monks took him in. So it is to Lippo I return over and over, looking for a voice, a slant that might meld history with a good-humoured scepticism. My admiration being so all consuming I even tried to write ‘Nappstraumtunnel’ in iambic pentameter which is the meter of Lippo’s monologue. Alas, I did not have the chops for that and the poem fragmented into the separate parts of its present form.
After rehearsing my limitations, all I can add is that I enjoyed spinning a yarn with a card of wool as long as the human genome — which stretches, as every biologist will tell you, from the earth to the sun and back again. I found patches and spokes to link Lofoten with Istanbul, Belgrade with the Caliphate of Al-Andalus, the Drina with the Volga. Much is invented and more is stolen but now is the time to deliver my work, as the Gibbon has said before me after twenty years of labour and I say after a few months toying with my telenovela, to the candour and curiosity of the reader.
Laurence O’Dwyer | Beginning in Svolvær Contents | Mudlark No. 75 (2023)