Balkan Worlds: The First and Last Europe

The First and Last Europe

Traian Stoianovich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781563240331
• eBook ISBN: 9781317476146
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Encompassing the period from the Neolithic era to the troubled present, this book studies the peoples, societies and cultures of the area situated between the Adriatic Sea in the west and the Black Sea in the east, between the Alpine region and Danube basin in the north and the Aegean Sea in the south. This is not a conventional history of the Balkans. Drawing upon archaeology, anthropology, economics, psychology and linguistics as well as history, the author has attempted a "total history" that integrates as many as possible of the avenues and categories of the Balkan experience.

PART ONE

Let us proceed from the deepest to the less deep and finally to the recent layers of history. Let us embrace the premise that the past is “reversible,” that it can be known and understood in new ways not only by the discovery of new data but also by asking new questions, identifying and analyzing new sets of relationships, employing methods new and old appropriate to questions new and old.

1	EARTH CULTURE

In the lore of the Pelasgian pre-Greeks, black earth was the most fertile of soils. By way of homeopathic logic, the opaque or black acquired among them a wondrous quality. Among the Slavs, the words for “magic” and “black” exhibit an identical root, čar(n) or variations thereof,¹ and possess a cognate in Latin carmen or English “charm.” Associated with the Crnojević (crn = black, magical) lords, the territory (Zeta) inland from the Bocche di Cattaro (Boka Kotorska) and from what was known as Venetian Albania came to be called Crna Gora (Black [or Enchanted] Wooded Mountain), translated into the western European languages as Montenegro. In Anglo-America, one refers to the black art and to black magic. Wicked from the viewpoint of the Christian churches, the black art is awesome and uncanny in the world vision of pagans.

Earth Mother

To the ancient Arcadians of the Peloponnesus, the Earth Mother was Melaina, the Black Divinity, a fitting title for the deity of fruitfulness and “mistress of the earth and sea”—black like the black-earth ritualistic pottery of Lesbos.² Wearing black robes and a horse’s head in order to achieve communion with the ocean of ancestors, the legendary Melaina—or Demeter—retires to a cave (Paleolithic temple) to mourn the disappearance of her daughter Persephone. The fruits of the earth perish. Famine threatens. But a miracle occurs. The god of the underworld restores Persephone to her earthly abode. In exchange, she promises to rejoin him annually. Upon her return the earth dons a garment of green. Fruits grow again.

Under Roman rule, the peoples of Pannonia and Dalmatia honored three goddesses: the “mothers of the Pannonians and Dalmatians” of Roman inscriptions, replicas of the Greek Moirai (the trinity of spinners, or dividers,³ of time, space, and fate) or of the Celtic Matres Deae.⁴ A veiled memory of this tradition persists in Serbian riddles in which the secret names for earth are mother (mama), earth (zemlja), dodola (discussed below), friend (druga), mistress (gospa), bride (neva), or parent’s sister (tetka).⁵

The clay, bone, stone, and ivory female figurines of the Aurignacians suggest that the Earth Mother cult goes back to the prenomadic Aurignacian mammoth hunters of Eurasia. Aurignacian figurines honor two dissimilar but complementary aesthetic principles, the round and the cylindrical. Of the two goddess types, one is short legged, obese or pregnant, and broad hipped; the other is tall, long legged, and slender.⁶ Both figurines draw attention to the areas of fertility. One is the Mother. The other is Kore, daughter ready for initiation to womanhood. In the Balkan Neolithic cultures, the female figurines with egg-shaped buttocks represent a fusion of the human form and the form of a bird goddess, with buttocks resembling an egg (the cosmic egg) to symbolize fertility.⁷

The role of the Aurignacian cult of the Great Mother may have been designed to obtain, by mimetic ritual, an abundance of wild herds, thereby ensuring the biological continuity of the band. In the postglacial period, with the rise of nomadism and downgrading of women, the cult declined. When it was revitalized after the introduction of hoe farming by women, it gained added significance as a mimetic ritual designed to secure an abundance of crops.

Little is known of Balkan Paleolithic art. Balkan Neolithic art shifted from naturalism to symbolism, even in representations of the Great Mother or of the “supreme god,” often portrayed as a stylized tree or cross.⁸ Participants acting ritually divested themselves of their individuality by putting on a mask, a device for achieving communion with the collective totem.⁹ Tattoos—the sculpture of the body—and painted designs on Neolithic figurines discovered at Gradac in Serbia, Cucuteni in Moldavia, and Sesklo in Thessaly proclaim their sacral character. Extant Neolithic clay stamps suggest that magical designs likewise were applied to the human body. In any event, Thracians, Dacians, Agathyrsi, Sarmatians, Illyrians, and Celto-Illyrian Japodes practiced the art of puncturing or tattooing the body in the time of Cicero, Virgil, Pliny, and Strabo. In Bosnia, home of the ancient Illyrians, the custom of tattooing persisted among Roman Catholics of the Vrbas valley to the twentieth century. It was also common among Catholic and Muslim Albanian tribesmen. Tattoo patterns were known in Bosnia as the cross, ear of corn, twig, fir tree, circle, and ring fence. Symbols of regeneration and procreation, with an overlay of a later sun cult,¹⁰ they are the archetypal mandala symbols of Jungian psychology.

Kouros

Under complex circumstances, including the appearance of bronze and iron technologies and horse-breeding nomads, emphasis shifted between 2500 and 1500 B.C. from an Earth Mother to a Sky Father. Never complete, the shift was aided by the subsequent development of cities, the growth of enlightenment, the displacement of totemism by anthropomorphic religion, and the spread of Christianity and Islam.

The transformation came through the evolution of the totemic cults (tree, ivy, serpent, wolf, dog, deer, goat, bull, boar, bear, horse, etc.) into a cult of the reborn male youth or Kouros¹¹—Dionysos of the tree, Dionysos Zagreus,¹² the Thracian Sabazios, and Attis, Adonis, Osiris, and Hermes, or the rider of the “green horse” (hippos chloros), the three-headed Thracian cavalier, the three-headed Slavic god Triglav (a taboo name), the three-headed “tsar” Trojan (or Trajan), and their Christian successors: St. George, St. Theodore, St. Martin, St. Michael, St. Nicholas, and St. Sava. The latter are all horsemen. St. Sava was reputed in Serbian legend to have as companions a horse and hound. St. George was known as the rider of the green horse Zelenko.¹³

The Illyrians, on the other hand, may have maintained an identity with their old totem, the serpent, and hence with the cult of the bird and snake goddess.¹⁴ They derived their very name from their word for serpent, ilur, for which a similar term exists in Basque (luur) and in Hittite (ilu or illu). As Ilion, it was also the local name for Troy.¹⁵

The Kouroi were underworld demons who were resettled in the skies. All were messengers of death and resurrection—culture heroes, inventors, teachers, saviors, prometheans. First to domesticate animals, they were the first to teach man to yoke oxen to the plow and practice the art of metallurgy. First of the millers and weavers, they were the first to cultivate the vine and olive. Inventions earlier credited to the Earth Mother were reassigned to these males or, as among the Serbs, after their conversion to Christianity, to such successors of the “supreme god” as St. Sava or the “devil.”¹⁶ They were venerated for the invention of such fetishes (material manifestations of the supernatural) as the hammer, ax, scythe, millstone, mill wheel, anvil, trammels (verige), and implements of war such as the shield, which aided the transition from an Earth Mother to a Sky Father cult.¹⁷ The function of the Minoan double ax thus changed from a rain charm to an instrument of battle and sacrifice of the sacred bull.¹⁸

The enactment of the mimetic death and resurrection of Dionysos and Osiris lived on in the Christian story of the resurrection of Christ. The Christ in effigy of the Easter holy days is one of the few sculptured (hence, three-dimensional) figures retained in the Orthodox church after the partial victory over iconoclasm, in the ninth century, by the partisans of the cult of icons.

Wooden and other three-dimensional idols or images disappeared from the social and religious practices of Byzantium after the compromise between the image breakers and the advocates of the cult of icons and just before the conversion to Orthodox Christianity of the greater part of the South Slavs.¹⁹ In Athens, however, where paganism lingered longer than in almost any other part of the empire, wooden idols known as xoana were borne in processions conducted to ensure communal health and wealth even as late as the Greek revolution of 1821. This practice was a carryover from the procession of the twelve xoana of the east Parthenon frieze. Such processions were accompanied in Greek antiquity by a sacrifice and communal meal designed to ensure the health and prosperity of the city ²⁰

Rites of the death and resurrection of the male youth were enacted in Greek girls’ spring initiation ceremonies until a half-century ago. In the Zagori district of Epirus, the Kouros was known as Zaphiris. A girl normally played his part. Sometimes, however, he was a wooden doll (idol) or a bundle of leaves in the form of a cross. The ritual suggests an older rite of the death and resurrection of Kore, the Earth Daughter. Covering Zaphiris (girl, boy, idol, or cross) with leaves and flowers in a ceremony purporting to portray his (her, its) death, a band of local adolescent “May girls” would burst into a threnody bewailing his legacy: a house in ruins and a grieving bride (kouremadia) “with a belly [stretching] to the mouth.” Of a sudden, Zaphiris miraculously would come to life.²¹

Green George

The Balkan Slavs link growth and fertility rites with St. George’s Day (April 23). In Macedonia and Bulgaria, young people celebrate the day by swaying on swings. Like dancing and jumping over fire, swaying symbolizes growth, vitality, virility, fertility. In Balkan mountainous areas, young men and maidens set up swings from tree branches and sing songs.²² In one such Bulgarian song, the Sun’s Mother instructs him how to win a maiden “more radiant” than he—presumably with the generative qualities of a daughter of the Earth Mother, Baba or Kubaba of the Sumerians, Baba the Radiant:²³

Coming are the sacred days,

Will come also holy George’s day.

Lower then the hammocks from the sky,

On that wondrous day, St. George’s Day.

To swing and sway for their health,

All the girls will come to play.

Maid Dobrinka will also come!

Lift then the hammock up, up, up,

And raise the maiden to the skies!²⁴

In Croatia, a “Green George” leads a company of “Georges” in a kolo or round dance from one village house to the next. The dancers sing songs welcoming nature’s rebirth. In Slovenia, a “Green George” and a company of goatskin-clad youths, or koranti, enact the struggle between winter and spring.²⁵ In parts of Carinthia, a “Green G...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Maps and Diagrams
• Foreword by Kevin Reilly
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author