A real opportunity to touch live tradition

Two cups of fresh milk await us on the kitchen table in the morning. Aunt Rachel went to milk the cow at the grandmother of the Zedník family, where we had spent the night. We have a quick breakfast; we have a busy day ahead of us. In the end, it proves to be even richer than planned. At 9 a.m. we arrive at the local school, which is named after J. A. Comenius. It was built in the 1990s with help from the Czech government and NGOs such as People in Need. The teacher, Mr Skořepa, introduces us to the school principal in an office decorated not only with the Romanian, Czech and EU flags, but also with a NATO flag. Our arrangement is to work with all the children from the first to the eighth grade; the ninth graders are preparing for their final exams. We have about an hour to prepare, to see the school and to talk to the teacher, who very kindly spends his time with us. We peek into the kindergarten; from children’s murals we learn about the history of the Czechs in the Banat. In the library we talk about books, reading and the out-of-place magazines (fashion and gossip magazines such as Květy and Impuls) sent to these expatriate Czechs by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The selection of magazines is even more ridiculous considering the fact that the people in Helena are strong believers who live very earnestly and consistently according to almost Old Testament-like principles – working the land, sharing with neighbours, serving God. One odd addition to the Czech school is the air-raid shelter, required by Romanian law and built with Czech money. As a result, two large rooms with toilets cannot be used (the teacher mentioned a clubroom and cinema) so as not to compromise antinuclear cleanliness and safety. Mice do not respect these rules, however, but isn’t a ping-pong table better than mouse droppings. After all, mice don’t play nuclear war. From our conversations with the teacher, we also learn about the Czech minority on the Serbian side (Češsko selo, Běla Cerkva) and their Cyrillic, as well as the difficulties in switching to the Latin alphabet in Czech classes, which are taught by external teachers from Helena and Gernik. We talk a lot about education, the Romanian curriculum for minority schools, the planned secondary school exams in Czech, the success of the Czech-language Olympics, and about the exodus to the Czech Republic. The school is a telling example. Built for 200 pupils, from preschool to ninth grade, the school is attended by some thirty children. During our workshop we get to know almost all of them by first name, playing various games, including our favourites – with letters and rulers, talking about Cyril and Methodius. The children are absorbed in trying to guess which letter is which in the Glagolithic alphabet. One of the older boys, a football player called Štěpán, writes his own line on our Glagolithic sheet. The best part is probably the work itself and the conversations. The children collaborate regardless of age – it is obvious that they are close to each other. Many a teacher in the Czech Republic would be amazed by the peaceful and productive atmosphere. We offer Helena’s children some pictures of ours – the Cyrillic alphabet by the children from Ochrid is a big hit, as is a Czech film which based on Alan Marshall’s Whispering in the Wind. As we are leaving the school, we run into a delegation from Pilsen. The deputy governor is so surprised by our presence that she immediately wants to take a group photo with us. Support is promised, as is cooperation in preserving the “open air museum.” But this isn’t a museum, we were here among interesting people. We share our views with the development programme coordinator for People in Need, Mr Dokoupil, with whom we talk briefly. The fact that Svatá Helena offers an opportunity to experience authentic rural life becomes even clearer to us in a conversation with Uncle Venca and Aunt Rachel; an oral historian would definitely have been excited. We learn about the coexistence of the two churches, about people leaving (and coming back), about Helena’s golden ages and difficult times, about the relationship with other nationalities and about the locals’ relation to Czech culture and language. In the afternoon we have a unique chance to attend a funeral. We are concerned about being outsiders but our friends want to show us how traditions are kept. The whole village gathers. A Catholic funeral is not paid for – everything is contributed by the community, with people digging the grave, carrying the coffin all the way to the churchyard above town, and filling up the grave afterwards. The procession includes both Catholics and Baptists, and the two congregations are buried in the same graveyard with a view of Svatá Helena in one direction and the Danube in the other. Roman receives an extra present – his uncle shows him the place where his stepfather’s house once stood. Then we continue with our journey. There is a long way ahead of us, with a new task for the next day – not to miss Velehrad and Methodius’s grave. As we are leaving, we encounter a group of tourists drinking beer outside Helena’s grocery shop. The things that we experienced must have escaped their attention. And then we’re in Moldova Nuova, where we had previously spotted a friendly shop with a sufficient supply of cheap vegetable oil. With the help of a Serbian shop assistant, we strike a good deal. This just increases our disappointment when we realise that our car’s troubles are only getting worse. Several metres out of the parking lot our blue Methodius suddenly comes to a stop. A filter deformed by heat has begun to aerate the engine – which we don’t learn until later, since none of our two-member crew is an expert car mechanic. Not only that, but the sky is overcast and it begins to rain. But like a miracle – the car starts just as are getting ready to look for someone to tow us back to Helena. From then on, things only get better. In Timisoara, we manage to find the recommended shortcut to Hungary. Overjoyed, we go to sleep at a nice petrol station in Hungary. We even catch up with our journal, at least on the computer.

Towards one’s roots, or how to be more than just a tourist

Monday is a travelling day again. We’d decided in Bela Rechka to visit our fellow countrymen in the Banat region. The village of Svatá Helena, where Roman’s stepfather was born, was the clear choice. A chance to collect another personal story, this one even from the category of children’s dreams. Also, Roman and Agnieszka want to test the possibilities of collaboration in situ. But first things first.
We get up according to plan, although we hadn’t planned such a leisurely pace, the result of a short night. Céca sees us off and we promised to meet again soon (PQ 2007). We arrive in Jabuka with only a ten-minute delay, caused by our dear Serbian police and its deep interest in our four-wheeled companion.
Breakfast in Jabuka, prepared by Dragan’s mother, is delicious. While eating, we listen to a new CD of local music put together by Pepa using the recordings which Martin made on his first visit here. Dragan’s mother is overjoyed and immediately calls up her neighbours for coffee. In Dragan’s room the three of us look through maps and software to find the best route to Svatá Helena. For a while it look like a historical map of Austria-Hungary will be the most useful. Finally we find help on www.banat.cz, which is administered by the NGO People in Need.
Not only do we find there the shortest route, but a very scenic one at that. It looks like we will be able to see all the beauty of Vojvodina and Banat. After passing lush meadows and fields of black earth we cross a meander of the Danube and some old sand dunes before reaching rich pastures, limestone mountains, and – as the grand finale – the wild Danube as it flows through the legendary Iron Gate. We fight for the best views, sometimes from the car window, sometimes just having to stop and look. The customs office on the Serbian-Romanian border brings us back down to earth, however, and its irritating post-socialist spirit affects us all. A reminder of something that we thought long gone.
Svatá Helena itself welcomes us with picturesque sceneries and the pleasant Czech spoken by all the friendly people we encounter upon our arrival. In addition to Roman’s family, we receive a warm welcome from the local pub dwellers and the local teacher, Mr Skořepa. We are included almost naturally in discussions of the soil, tomorrow’s funeral, school memories and memories of times past. Everyone has something to say about Roman’s relatives. For instance, about those who have left for Bulgaria and Argentina. We learn quite a bit of history: about the grandfathers’ arrival, the relations between local Catholics and Baptists, the school situation, the growing number of empty houses, the dwindling number of young people, and how everyone wants to go to the Czech Republic. We also talk about ourselves and our project. We arrange a visit to the local school to hold workshop with children. Without even having to try, we are accepted by the locals; maybe it’s our openness and willingness to listen. The real tourists sit alone, trying to overhear conversations or, struck by the culture shock, gathering impressions of how “primitively” people live here. Somehow the locals take a liking to us. Maybe they recognised our interest in people and their lives and everyday joys, the fact that we aren’t there just to spend our holidays.
We are put up in a vacant house, full of grandmotherly smells, doilies, biblical quotes and a black hen forgotten in the outhouse in the courtyard. Both she and Pepa are sure to remember their night-time encounter for a long time to come. It sure made for a good story the next day. It begins to rain. Roman fell asleep while looking at the day’s pictures, and slid into the monitor. We sleep like kings.

A Glagolic intellectual salon in Belgrade

It’s Sunday but we’re hard at work preparing our presentation. The venue Ceca has arranged for our little show in Belgrade turns out to be rather prestigious – the Clio publishing house which, thanks to its clear programming, has a very good reputation among Belgrade intellectual circles (worth mentioning in relation to our field is their book Cultural Tourism; also on display were Fromm and Handke). During a leisurely, discussion-filled breakfast, we plan what to do and how to do it. We opt for maximum interactivity. Something that will make clear our approach to this expedition. It turns out to be a challenging plan, but we go for it.
First, though, we have to take care of Vlado’s ticket. This operation provides an opportunity for Roman to experience, however briefly, the real Belgrade. Although we are unable to exchange Vlado’s train ticket, we do manage to find another cheap connection to Skopje which allows him to spend the evening with us, take a night train and still be able to fulfil his theatre responsibilities. Without Vlado, we would not be able clearly show our international collaboration. Besides, we want to spend some more time together.
The streets are sunny and hot. At Céca’s, we sort through piles of material, rearranging, renaming and creating new categories and subcategories; Pepa’s gadgets are overheating and spinning out of control. Our only short break is lunch prepared by Céca’s mother.
In the end, everything works out. Having only slightly altered our original plan, we take several cabs to Clio, the DVDs still piping hot. Pepa wasn’t kidding; everything is there like he promised. Plus, he discovered a number of new tricks for operating his well-tried machinery. Most importantly, however, people have come even on a Sunday evening and despite the summery weather. And they listen, ask questions and play with our material. We offer an introduction, screen our DVD, show off our undoubtedly intriguing switching between Serbian, Macedonian and Czech – all elegantly translated by Dragan – and allow people to browse through our material on two computers as they please.
The third computer shows our website; too bad we didn’t know earlier that it wasn’t exactly in best shape. All in all, Céca’s “direct marketing” proved successful. Plenty of people came and there are interviews and questions and applause and admiration; even radio and newspapers. After seeing and hearing our presentation even Mr Zoran, Clio’s director and an important personality within Belgrade’s intellectual circles, promises to write a text for a prestigious cultural magazine. And this despite our truly site-specific camping out in his office. In one word – success. Then we say goodbye to the guests, the door is locked with seven turns of the key, we see Vlado off, have a night-time stroll through Belgrade, sit at a summer restaurant and walk back through the quiet town, faintly lit by distant sheet lightning. And we stay dry. Only three of us now, we keep talking until three in the morning. And then off to bed because our leftover tandem (Pepa and Romana) is planning to travel to Romania and breakfast is planned for 10 a.m. in Jabuka.
P.S.: The author of this text knows nothing about the night scene on the balcony, noisy arguments regarding a fictitious car thief, or the destruction of a laundry rack.

Driving. Ceca.

We feel like three men in a boat. Our original agreement was to leave Bela Rechka at 10 a.m. It wasn’t raining. Although all our stuff looked pretty much packed, a number of things needed to be fetched or rearranged. Then we had a light breakfast prepared by Nikolaj, the writer. And then greetings, kisses, goodbyes, invitations and ideas for future gatherings. We leave before twelve. Thanks to the switch to daylight savings we have an extra hour. We want to avoid the motorway, so we head for Vidin and then towards Serbia. The landscape changes with every kilometre; we descend to the Danube, passing through mountain passes, ascending and descending on numerous serpentines, all the time on the edge of the storm. Looking towards Stara Planina, the sky is filled with dark leaden clouds, while above the Danube it is clear blue. Our road is the dividing line, all the way to Belgrade. The air is humid and oppressive. The monotony of eight hours of driving in our blue “Methodius” is relieved only by our last shopping break in Bulgaria on which we duly spend all our leva. Mostly on oil, naturally. It’s quite fun, actually – a bunch of guys opening thirty one-litre bottles of the cheapest vegetable oil and pouring it into the fuel tank. This is preceded by our attempts at finding the cheapest place to buy oil and asking how much they have in stock (Billa is reliable). This way, our fuel costs are one third lower than with diesel. Nor do we neglect our needs – our last coins go for goat cheese and vegetables. Another change in the rhythm is the Serbian border control, which feels a little like being in a movie about a run-in with uniformed authority in a sleepy town in the middle of nowhere. Luckily, Vlado can converse jovially on both sides of the border, Pepa’s papers are in order and Roman smiles and mixes Russian and Bulgarian with all other Slavic languages, which manages to – occasionally – amuse even the stand-offish uniform. The recently established customs office savours its few minutes of importance. Again we have to explain the purpose of our project. The main question is: Why are Czechs, who use the Latin alphabet, so interested in Cyrillic? Who knows? After all, even in Serbia they alternate and mix both alphabets on public signs. Sometimes a village is marked only in Latin, sometimes in Cyrillic, sometimes in both. Graffiti is also written in both alphabets; Latin is especially striking in nationalistic slogans… and on the police car whose crew, hidden in the bushes, measured our speed. Now we know that EU citizens are charged special rates in Euros; not even Vlado is able to bargain a better deal this time. The heat and humidity are constantly getting stronger. At last, the Danube appears and then Belgrade itself. Ceca works at the theatre academy; we seek her out in New Belgrade. Vlado is radiant again, able to get directions even though hardly anyone in the street has a clue that there is a theatre academy in their area. Then we just rest and talk and rest and talk and eat and drink. We are joined by Dragan from Jabuka; he’ll be at tomorrow’s presentation, too.

Sunny morning, peaceful after the storm.

In the middle of the kitchen, which for two days has been the site of constant activity, there now remain only two lonely packed suitcases. Vladimír is catching up on sleep, since the night storm has again proved the roof’s leakiness and his bed got all wet, this time thoroughly.
Katka, Tomáš and Martin report from Vienna.
We, too, are slowly beginning to get ready. We buy oil for the car in Varshets and also something for us – the usual: bread, yoghurt, ljutenica and beer. For a brief period, the scorching sun breaks through the clouds.
The goat festival in Bela Rechka continues in its second day; Murat teaches belly dancing; our “oralists” enjoy their moments of fame. Instead of the planned hour and a half, their discussion of techniques, projects and project outcomes goes on for three hours. There is a lot to talk about.
Again thunder, lightning and rain. More people arrive, a lot of them students, some of whom sleep in tents above the village. They often ask us about our “bukvyte”. People switch languages as needed – Bulgarian, Russian, English and also Czech. There are locals, students from Sofia, Plovdiv, foreign visitors… The bar can’t keep up, even running out of beer for a while. A new shift of family members takes over at the bar.
And again people dance. An energetic Balkan brass band, again a classical Bulgarian circle dance. This time Roman even dances with Agnieszka, or at least tries to. Their polka is a bit more of a success; there even is applause. Standa concludes today’s festival programme with kino nočne (night cinema) about his eco-pilgrimage to the Near East. The festival audience listens carefully and Standa’s pictures receive well-deserved acclaim.
Then we sit together for a while before parting with Mirek and his “oral bunch” (they’re planning to leave in the early morning on an equally fun trip back to Prague, via Sofia and Vienna, using all possible forms of public transport).
A peaceful discussion with students on whether it is okay for Slavs to communicate in English was interrupted by a macho challenge – who wants to dive into the Bela Rechka river? The two Bulgarian bogatyrs, who look a lot like professional Greco-Roman wrestlers, accept. The rest of us stick to intellectual challenges. It’s drizzly and cold. Then we go to bed; we’re leaving the next day.
Lightning again.

The Goatmilk Festival

Today is a bank holiday in Bulgaria and in the surrounding countries in honour of Cyril and Methodius day. In Bela Rechka they are throwing a traditional sabor, and the Goatmilk Festival is taking place as well. The whole morning is spent cooking in Dežka’s garden; we have salad, rice with herbs, beans, and baklava for dessert. Before lunch, the results of the Nova Kultura foundation’s call for projects titled “On the Alphabet” are announced.
The first prize goes to the “Glagolithic Dictatorship” project and is presented to all the main “ideologists” of this humorous and intelligent project. After lunch two Swiss photographers, Sáva and Desiré, presented the “Couples” project. Due to unexpected thunderstorms and the resulting power outages the projection has to take place in the former “pigsty” in Diana’s garden. Sáva and Desiré present the contents of an exhibit currently on display in Sofia. They travelled all over Bulgaria photographing almost 30 couples and documenting their lifestyle, all accompanied by respective “soundscapes.” Murat gives the audience an insight into the secrets of belly dancing. This is followed by a beautiful concert by a girls’ choir from Plovdiv and a real traditional brass band from Varshets, whose music – interspersed by showers – makes the whole square dance. After dark, we present a new version of our project updated by one day of new films and photographs. Those who haven’t popped into the local pub to munch on cece fish or to refresh themselves with Zagorka beer can dance to Murat and his friend’s vigorous drumming until midnight…

Prophets selected the 3 best alphabet projetcs

Roma kids and the singers of the spa

Getting up early in the morning so that we are on time in the Roma school. The Roma live in a ghetto here as in other parts of the world, the hetto it is over the bridge. We started playing a letter game with kids in a large circle. The energy quickly accelerated. The kids were creating letters, playing with the parachute sail, and the alphabet table. More and more kids joined in—for every 10year old, there were suddenly also 2 five-year olds. Others were crowding behing the classroom windows and the main entrance to the school building. There was commotion everywhere, we were surrounded by activity and play. Eventually we felt a bit bad for the teachers who will have to tame the excited kids in order to bring them back into the classroom. The event went surprisingly well, despite our worries that the Roma will not have much of a relationship with the cyrilic script. We tried to talk with them in the Romany language, in the fragments we managed to remember from what they taught us. It was a strange juxtaposition of Romany and the cyrilic, but the kids at this age reacted with no hesitation. We saw four little kids running down the muddy street, dressed colorfully and dancing as they ran. It was an image of freedom and joy, perhaps more possible amongst the apparent poverty of this place than in the regulated world of affluence.
We needed a rest and appreciated the breakfast/lunch in a café, and after that even more restful soaking in the local mineral water spa. The main pool of the spa was in a domed hall decorated in the art-deco style, and it had excellent acoustics. Even when you sang into the canal bordering the pool, the sound resonated all the way from the water surface to the green-painted cupola.
We eventually returned to Bela Rechka, where more guests arrived in the meantime—Mirek and his people from the Oral History Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and also people from the Bulgarian National TV. We will be in the news the day before the national holiday of St. Cyril and Metodus on May 24. The day ended in the pub. We had a dinner and celeration with the newly arrived friends. They said that there was great weather in Prague, over 30 degrees Celsia and sunny. So we hope and pray that it finally arrives here as well, tomorrow.

Varshets in the rain

It didn’t. I mean the nice weather from Central Europe that we hoped would catch up with us…didn’t. We’re not that far away, or? How can the weather be so beautiful in Prague and so awful in Bulgaria, all rainy and cold? Bundled in sweaters, we spend most of our days preparing for our evening presentation in Varshets. Finally in the afternoon, the sun peeks out for a moment. Overjoyed, we spend a short moment sunbathing on the terrace of Diana’s house. Nikolaj even manages to do his laundry – he seems to enjoy the chance to wash his clothes outside, under cold running water, using old-school Bulgarian laundry soap. We arrive in Varshets at around 7 p.m. There is a wedding going on, so traffic is limited where our presentation is supposed to take place and it takes some explaining to the police why we need to drive down the closed street. In the end one of them softens up – thanks in part to our permit from the local municipality, after explaining how great our project is, and also after telling him that we would be passing through in a car which runs on used frying oil. He climbs in with Standa and negotiates our passage all the way to the fountain in the main square. We unpack our portable screen, put on music and are immediately surrounded by crowds of curious spectators. Just as Tomáš is beginning to present our project to the audience, the lightning starts. Then it begins to drizzle, followed by rain, which soon turns into a downpour. The audience stands there under their umbrellas and it is clear that they are captivated by the presentation. Some old grannies even stomp to the rhythm of the music. Everyone is waiting for the rain to stop.
But it doesn’t. Not the rain, but our drenched audience begins to go away. Although the weather couldn’t have rained more on our parade, we are happy with the event because the response of the people who stayed against all odds was really good. And this when there was a World Cup match on.

The state of things

Today we meant to do an alphabet happening in the Roma (Gypsy) school in Vrshets, the nearby spa town. It turned out that schools where the elections to the European Parliament took place yesterday were closed for today. We just confirmed that we can do the event the next day, and moved on to have a nice breakfast in a coffee shop, with „banica“, coffee and yoghurt. We stopped by the town museum, where they had a collection of historical artefacts, from the Roman and Thracian times up to last century folklore. There were also small bells that were used to enhance the healing qualities of the mineral water ever since the Roman times.
It stopped raining and the sun was finally out. Suddenly, it felt hot, pleasant and relaxing. We decided to visit the nearby Klisursky Monastery, which was coincidentally also devoted to Sts. Kiril and Metodius. The monastery also housed a tourist hotel, so everything was too nicely decorated and arranged. It almost offered itself as a setting for a music clip in the local superpopular kitsch music style called “tchalga” or else also turbofolk. The only somewhat authentic place around was a water spring in the nearby forest. The water is miraculous, and if you drink it with faith, it will fulfill your wish. The spring comes out at a place where 6 monks were massacred by the Turks, when attempting to rebuild the monastery destroyed at the time. Once we got over the idea that the water comes out from a grave, Standa gave us a lecture about how all this veneration of God is just not for him. He knows that God is, because he feels it, so that’s for sure. But his God just does not belong to any religion. So it is questionable if his wish will work.
On the way back, we stopped at the Сталин (Stalin) restaurant for some roasted trout. We entertained ourselves with comparing what some of the same words mean in Czech and Bulgarian. So for example, the Bulgarians could not believe that we call perfume „voňavka“ (nice smelling), when the word for good smell „vůně“ means „bad stink“ in Bulgarian. We created a list of things following the Bulgarian alhabet for tomorrow’s event, and revelead more fascinating linguistic similarities and differences.
In the restaurant, Standa was trying his messianic guilt-tripping about using recycled veggie oil to save the world, but the waiter answered that in this restaurant, they do not fry things, they only have a grill. On the way back we stopped at the open-air market to get vegetables, and at one house in the village to buy eggs and cheese. As soon as we got home, it started raining again.

It’s raining

It’s raining and cold the whole day today, and we don’t like it. In the morning we needed a screening room for a presentation about composting, so we turned an old barn in the back of the garden into an improvised cinema/lecture hall. Never mind that the spiders whose barn this was so far would include us in their webs. The topic of composting was more than appropriate for the place, and local people came to listen and share their experiences. The word „compost“ is apparently derived from the Latin „componere“, like the word „compose/r“. Coincidentally, we learned from a book that Roman brought from Pilsen about the history of the cyrilic, that Cyril composed the script partially from an old syllabic alphabet of Pliska, used in north-east Bulgaria, and also from some Greek letters. He as well added 14 letters for specifically Slavic sounds such as [zh] [sh] [ch] [tz] [dzh] [ue] [ua] [yu] [ya] etc. For lunch, we invaded the only local pub which is proudly equipped with 3 tables. So far, the pub owner has been facing some tough issues around its suddent popularity. Today, we were trying to help him solve the challenge of too few forks for too many people.
We spent the rest of the day inside, by the fire in the stove. We also had to chase a small rat from its favourite hang-out place in the food-storage room. In the morning, the rat jumped on Pepa, he got startled, poor thing, and swore, thus waking up the whole house. The rat won the chase, and took refuge in a hole under the staircase. Well, it’s right next to the storage room, so it knew what it was doing, apparently.
Diana read us the spiritual interpretation of the cyrilic by the philosopher Bejnsa Duno (Петър Дънов, another name that cannot be transcribed into latinic). He created the paneurytmia philosophy and started the White Brotherhood movement (Byalo bratstvo). We also discussed why the Bulgarians shake their head to say yes, when every other nation does the exact opposite—nodding. Someone said that once the world goes crazy, only the Bulgarians will look like they know what’s going on.
Now we will have a Bulgarian dinner made with our Macedonian ingrediences (and the still surviving Hungarian mayonnaise), and in the evening we want to have a screening of an old Yugo-Macedonian movie called „Yad“ (Sadness). It is about the Bogomils and takes place in Ohrid.

Bela Rechka

After breakfast in Diana’s house at noon, where we are staying, we met up with the other workshop participants, who would present their projects about letters at the Goatmilk Festival. The festival is organized by Diana, Mariana and Kalin from the Nova Kultura foundation for the fourth time. The festival is called after the goats of the village, which probably outnumber the people in the village.
One of the projects for the festival is called Glagolic Dictatorship. It was presented by Atanas as a member of the group who worked on it. Their argument builds on the fact, that with Bulgaria now being in the European Union, there are two official scripts in the Union. To avoid the problems this will inevitably cause, they propose to use a third alphabet, so that both the Europeans and Bulgarians at least share the same problems with a script. It turns out that the only pan-european script other than latinic that was ever used, was glagolic. So only the glagolic alphabet would be suitable. Clearly, a dictatorship can easiest be established by means no other than revolution. The Glagolic dictatorship is thought through to the smallest of details—including a flag, revolutionary indoctrination (the Slav version is rather intoxication) and a word-to-word transliteration of the European Constitution into glagolic script. Cveti and Desi work on a project that follows how the latinic transcribes public notices and road signs. The latinic is not able to capture properly certain Bulgarian sounds, so when a word is transcribed into latinic and read back, it is not only imprecise, but it also reduces the sound richness of the language. Some sounds do not have their letter in latinic, and their transcription can differ, such as in ъгъл (angle) is written as „agal“ or „ugul.“ Place names as Кърджали are transcribed as Kardjali, Karjali or Kurdjali, but none of the transcribed versions have the proper Bulgarian sound. Vania prepared a pocket guide of different styles of transcriptions of cyrilic into latinic, as practiced in „business“ and in informal personal emails. It is clear that somewhere deep, the Bulgarians are a bit irritated by the presence of latinic, and try to brace themselves against it. They have a very emotional relationship to their script. Those who live abroad even nostalgically miss the possibility to use a cyrilic keyboard. No wonder, when you go back and realize that their script was a revelation from God captured by Saint Cyril. The pope even recognized the cyrilic script as sacred already in 867 A.D.. So the cyrilic is not be taken lightly! It was around way before any of us were even hoping to be born!
Bela Rechka is in the Stara Planina mountains, which, together with the Dormitor mountains in Montenegro and mount Olympos in Greece, were the three pillars that held up the heavens in Aristotle’s idea of the world. We are travelling in this imaginary triagle—it is a territory of three sacred scripts—the Greek, the latinic and the cyrilic. And the food is good too.

From Prilep to Sofia

In the morning we pack up and continue on our journey towards Sofia. A message arrives that Roman has already landed there. But it’ll take us another five or six hours before we can pick him up.
On the way to Sofia, we detour off the main road after Kumanov to look for a church in the small village of Staro Nagoricani. The church dates back to the 11th century and its interior is decorated with 14th-century frescoes from the floor all the way up to the cupola. There is a unique scene in which Jesus is arguing with artists who are mocking him on his way to Golgotha for looking like a king. There’s also St. George with a very pretty dragon – a snake with horns. Above the church entrance is an inscription in old Cyrillic and under an opening into the corner church tower is a fresco containing a plaque written in old Cyrillic.
Only later, when we are further on our way, do we learn that Kokin, only a few kilometres from the church, is home to the oldest megalithic observatory in the world, older than Stonehenge, which was not discovered until six years ago. The site is surrounded by several plateaus rising above mild rolling hills, which gives the whole area a friendly and open spiritual energy.
Standa’s car manages to get a puncture so we have to change the tire. The roads after the Bulgarian border are even worse than before but we are in a hurry to reach Sofia. We arrive before 8 p.m., say goodbye to Agnes, who is flying back in the morning, and pick up Roman who arrived in the morning from Pilsen and Radmila, a journalist from Sofia. There follows a night-time rallye to Bela Rechka on winding and bumpy mountain roads. We arrive after midnight. Diana has been expecting us, with dinner, an open fire and rakija, also known as loza. We discuss how the Cyrillic alphabet is viewed in the countries through which we have already travelled. Diana said that everybody in Bulgaria knows Cyril and Methodius, that they’re almost a cliché. In retrospect, when comparing the various relationships people have to the alphabet, the role of Cyril and Methodius, and the political situation, history and future of various Balkan countries

Site-specific in Prilep

We found out we have an extra day we can spend in Prilep because Agnes was flying from Sofia one day later than we thought. Since we did not have enough time yesterday to do the events we planned, this was a great opportunity for us.
As we were preparing for the afternoon and worked thru the materials we collected, there was a game we spontaneously started with the kids in the yard of our house. We created a table with fields for each letter of the Macedonian alphabet. Each field was for an object that started with that letter. The kids played shop, where if you wanted to „buy“ something, you had to show the given letter, either with your fingers or the whole body.
In the afternoon we organized a similar event in Varosh, where we went already the day before to see the old churches. With help of the people in the village shop, we bought things „according to the alphabet“ and placed them on the „alphabet table“ in front of the shop. We were then „selling“ each thing in exchange for a letter, as we did earlier with kids in Prilep. Our alphabet shop sold out while we managed to engage and entertain half of the village. As we were leaving, even the kids who did not participate in the event already played the letter game on their own.

From Ohrid to Prilep

Leaving Ohrid. On the way to Prilep we stopped at the Monastery of St. Naum by the Ohrid lake, close to Albanian border and right next to a large spring of crystal clear water. St. Naum and St. Kliment travelled with Cyril and Metodus all the way to Great Moravia, from were they eventually returned and founded the Ohrid university. In the monastery there is a church with the remains of St. Naum from the 10th century. The chapel with the tomb of St. Naum is covered inside with frescoes depicting the life of the saint, including one scene where Naum is being chased by the heretical Bogomils. By the entrance to the church there are two marble pillars which have grafitti-like slavonic cross engravings in several places reminiscent of glagolic signs. Almost all churches from this period have a special intimate atmosphere of a spiritual encounter, perhaps because the saints who are crowding alongside you on the walls, are lifesize and within reach.
In the ticket office we met our old friend Danko, who Standa, Tomáš and Martin interviewed when they were here last year in the fall. He happily pulled out a bottle of rakija and shot glasses from under the counter, and this church foreroom turned, for a few minutes, into a bar.
Danko chose as his favorite the letter Д as dům (house), duša (soul), dobro (goodness), da (yes) and Danko, his name. His second letter was T, because there is a table in the house, or a sacrificial altar. He chose the glagolic letter ŠČ for St. Naum, as „ščot“ (the sum) of D and T.
We climbed up over the Galičica mountains on a small road, and saw beautiful views both of the Ohrid as well as the neighboring Prespanske lake. On the way to Prilep we passed by Bitola, which has both the remains of Roman settlement and the messy but pictoresque gypsy quarters.
Vladimir’s family welcomed us in Prilep. His father took us to the village of Varosh, on the outskirts of Prilep. Above was the towering rock with the fortress of King Marko, and right below the rock but high above the village was a monastery of St. Archangel Michael. We met a young monk at the monastery. He told us how originally, in the 9th century, this place was a hermitage, and the monk’s teachings were so attractive that eventually he gathered followers who settled in the caves around, and founded a monastery. The door to the church was guarded with the fresco figures of king Marko and his father. Marko was depicted in white dress to mark the mourning after his beloved father’s death at the time of building this church. Inside were lines of saints, most of them doctors, such as St. Cosmas and Damian. The monk showed us a glagolic text carved into the marble pillar at the church entrance. He mentioned that he was surprised that Kliment changed the glagolic script into cyrilic, because the glagolic was developed as a divine act. By changing it, Kliment would be committing a sin against his teacher and God, so there must have been political pressures for replacing the glagolic with a new script. Kliment would most probably not have done this on his own.
We descended to the village of Varosh, which was the oldest serttlement in the area. As the city grew and other settlements were being „glued on“, the city came to be called Prilep (glueing), at least according to Vladimir. There were originally 70 churches in Varosh, one for each house. Several churches are still preserved, almost right at the houses‘ backyards. They are from the 13th century and several of them still have wonderfully preserved frescoes. You can see how recycling worked at that time—each of the churches has carved marble stones build into its walls, still with the Greek inscriptions and reliefs.
After a great banquet that Vlado’s mom prepared for us, we still went to explore the town center and ended up in the ВИРУС bar. The last item on the day’s program was a showing of a film called The Secret Book about the legendary sacred book of the medieval Bogomils. Part of the book took place in visions and dreaming, and since we watched from the beds, some of us naturally transitioned from the dreams in the film into their own.

Workshops in Ohrid

Workshop about letters with kids that Jasmina, Nikola, Marija and Strezo of Media Artes work with regularly, continued this morning and most of the afternoon. We were in a park by one of the voluminous water springs flowing into the Ohrid lake. The nearby beach lured for a swim in the lake, cool water though.
In the evening we set up a workshop in the harbor to explore the topic of the body as a metaphor for writing. We presented a slide show of our trip, with Agnes and a local guitar player improvising music.
To say good bye to Ohrid, we ordered the great Macedonian meal „plieskavica“ for dinner, well, non-vegetarians only. The vegetarians among us seemed to be pretty happy with tasty baked cheese and mushrooms.

First day in Ohrid

We woke up in our panel-house apartment, equipped, among other things, also with the collected works of Josip Broz Tito. Nikola stopped by to arrange the plans for the upcoming days. He took us to see Plaoshnik, on the top of the hill above the old town, where the monastery of St. Kliment and the first Slavic university founded in the 9th century used to stand.
The entire surroundings of the church of St. Kliment were now turned into a large archeological excavation site, and we could see the newly revealed mosaics or bone remains in a burial ground. Saint Kliment and and Saint Naum, who founded the university, were disciples of St. Cyril and St. Metodus. Only during the life of Kliment, the university educated as manz as 3.500 students. St. Kliment simplyfied Cyril’s glagolic alphabet into a new script, which he called „cyrilic“ in honor of his teacher.
We walked down a forest path above the cliffs towards the church of St. John the Theologian, which nested on a rock outcrop above the clear blue-green waters of the Ohrid lake. If there are places that give out particular type of spiritual energy, this was certainly one of them, even though there were some 30+ kids on a school trip running around.
In the afternoon we settled on the lake embankment next to the statue of St. Cyril and Metodus. Both our cars, covered with the glagolic and cyrilic letters, immediately caught attention. We started interviewing people around about who St. Cyril and Metodus were and what they know about them. We learned, among other things, that the Macedonians are by no means Slavs (despite our objections that Macedonian is a Slavic language!) and that Macedonia is the original center of European civilization. Coincidentally, the Serbs claimed the same for themselves. So it probably depends on who you are talking to.
When we discussed this somewhat problematic question with Vladimir, he said it may not be good to poke into the topic of „how it really was“, since in the Balkans, these issues are often disputed through wars.
The contradictions and paradoxes are different, yet similarly intensive, in Macedonia as in Serbia or Montenegro. According to the law, public signs in Macedonia, including shop signs, have to be in the cyrilic. This still does not prevent „the american language“, as they say here, to have its influence. When you finally get through reading signs like Гарфиелд, Сунрајс or Матрикс видео цлуб (Garfield, Sunrise, Matrix video club), you get the feeling that cyrilic may be going too far the other way.
Tomáš and Marija from Media Artes did a workshop and creative games with kids in the afternoon. The „kilometr“ or rather the kilo of bricklayers’ measures (called „metr“ in Czech) work as a flexible material for creating letters, not only visually, but also physically so that children can express themselves through movement and interaction with the letters and abstract shapes created from the measures.
Media Artes filmed a short video in which the kids playfully represented the entire cyrilic alphabet with their bodies. We showed the film in our mobile cinema on the promenade in the evening.

Slavko from Ohrid - about the history of alphabets

Crossing Albania

We say good bye to Djordje and Petrovac, a town still luckily bypassed by the tourists invasions. There is a day-long trip ahead of us through Albania towards the Ohrid lake in Macedonia. Ceca is returning to Belgrade, and we are leaving her in a small coffee shop at the train station in Bar, her train is coming in less than an hour.
The road to Albania takes us over a highland plateau, maybe this is where the ancient Via Ignatia was. The houses, people and cars are different now. Albania has for sure the highest number of Mercedes cars per capita. The language is now incomprehensible to us and even if signs can be read in latinic, they are not similar to Czech at all, as opposed to all previous countries. We stop at Standa’s acquiantance from a previous trip, the owner of one of the restaurants along the street which is called Enigma 1. This little village with a broken road has also an Enigma 2 restaurant and Enigma 3 is being built in a brand new medieval castle complete with stone walls and towers. This time, the owner does not have any used frying oil for our cars, so told us to stop by next year again.
We navigated through the thick traffic in Tirana and continued on a narrow road along the steep mountain sides all the way to the crest, where the view opened over the valleys on both sides of the mountain range. This rollercoaster ride with all its adrenalin and movement sickness continued for 2 more hours before we finally descended into a wide valley, scarred by a gigantic rusting factory in Ebasan.
We bought olives and cherries, passed by street dogs along the road and started climbing up another mountain range, which held the Ohrid lake.
The never-ending wait at an almost empty border crossing became absurd and bothering, especially because Vladimir needed to be in Skopje by the morning so that he can apply for a Bulgarian visa. As a Macedonian, he needs it to be able to continue travelling with us.
We reached Ohrid at about 10pm, with Nikola and Strezo from Media Artes awaiting us.

Gentle Intervention in Budva

Finally a free day, or, at least a morning. Swimming in the sea and everyone having breakfast whenever they wanted. We have to prepare a presentation in the town of Budva for tonight, so everyone does what they do best. Our living room with the sea view is filled with more technology than people—computers, videocameras, recording gadgets, cables everywhere. We are working thru the footage we recorded in the past few days, so that we can publish it on the internet and show it tonight. We are leaving towards Budva, the old Venetian fort town, around 4pm.
Our event is not to be a „street performance“ for the consumption and entertainment of tourists, but we want to do a gentle „intervention“ which engages people, their creativity and their thinking about writing. We have an opportunity to learn that local Serbs have very strong feelings about the fact that the latinic script is slowly replacing cyrilic, and with the disappearing cyrilic, they feel their identity is being weakened too. It is confusing now to read some signs on the street. The pharmacy sign APTEKA, has an ambivalent reading—if you are used to reading in cyrilic, you get the nonsense reading „arteka“, only when reading in the latinic, the sign makes sense as „apteka“.
On the tourist leaflet advertising the Budva sights, there is no cyrilic text at all, even Serbian is transcribed in latinic. Sasha was quite irritated over the transcription of his great great grandfather’s name, Stefan Mitrov Ljubisha (who was an important historical figure and has a museum in Budva), into the latinic script, because cyrilic is much better suited to express its sound. This is at the core of the problem—latinic cannot express the sounds of letters properly.
Local TV documented our event and interviewed us and the participants.
Later in the evening we still had to find a working internet café to finally update our blog and upload pictures from the journey.
Sasha and Maja invited us to their house for a “Slavic
jam session.“ We sat on a terrace of a darkened house round a table with a late dinner, and deep below us the edge of the bay was outlined by street lights. The Slavic part of the jam session was a playful interlace of languages—Czech, Slovak, Serbian, Macedonian and occassional Russian—with Agnes‘ Hungarian violin.

Skadar Monasteries

In the morning we drove to the Skadar lake on the border between Montenegro and Albania, to visit monasteries on the lake islands. We stopped for a cup of coffee in Virpazar, an then got onto the narrow road hugging the mountain slopes for the next 15 km towards the monasteries. Tomáš a Djordje managed to give a live broadcast interview to radio Svjata Gora. This day was starting in the name of the letter S. Not only it was to take place on a Skadar lake, accessible by serpentine roads, also the name of the boat owner who was waiting for us, was Slaviša.
There were two male monasteries and one nunery, each of them on a tiny island. Moračnik island had the oldest monastery, and only one monk, Nikolaj, who lived there. The small church was dedicated to the Mother of God of Three Hands. According to the legend, the arm of the painter who painter her icon was chopped off, but he was praying incessantly and his arm grew back. As an expression of thanks, he painted the arm on to his patron St. Mary.
In the house of two rooms, glued to the side of a half-ruined medieval tower, where Nikolaj offered us pommegranate juice, Tomáš asked him if he lived there alone. Nikolaj’s answer was that he did not live there alone, he shared the house with God. Nikolaj did not like being photographed. Photography only captures the mundane surface, but cannot communicate the inner meaning and richness. He had a similar opinion about the cyrilic script—each letter can be read as a sign that corresponds to a sound, but also can carry sacred meaning, which is intuitive and deeply felt.
The island of Baška is inhabited by 5 nuns, and we were welcomed by one of them, the smiling sister Milena, originally from Albania. She took us around the two churches on the island. One of them was not in use, ever since they built it in the 14th century, because water was leaking in through the porous vulcanic tuft of which it wass made. This church was built in the same time as the original monastery and dedicated to Saint Djordje. Our friend Djordje paid hommage to his namesake, and in front of the humble altar, on an earth floor and under the rough stone cupola, he wrote out their name in cyrilic. The only difference between them was that one was saint and the other not really. He is a sociologist.
The second church was dedicated to St. Mother of God. Above the entrance, there is a cyrilic text in an unusual style of the Dalmatian monks, dated to the year 6948 according to the Serbian calendar (1439 A.D.). It marks the entombement of the remains of St. Jelena Balšič, the daughter of king Lazar, and the ruler of a Serbian province Zeta.
On a stone in front of the church threshold, a rosette was carved, where the “metropolita“ stands during religious ceremonies.
We landed on the third island, Starčevo, welcomed in a somewhat grumpy way by the monk Grigorije. Apparently, we docked our boat at the wrong place and so maybe somehow disrupted the holy order on this island. Nevertheless, meeting Grigorije ended up being very pleasant and interesting, reminding us of a mosaic that is being put together slowly from fragments, and whose beauty is only seen at the end, when the picture is complete. Father Grigorije was very educated and friendly, and we spent the next two hours discussing the meaning of life, while drinking the home-made juice of wild pommegranates that he offered us. Grigorij talked about simple life and mentioned that he does not need the information from newspapers and the TV, it is unimportant and distracting for him. His biggest wish was „to reach the Paradise.“ His world already looked like paradise to us, being surrounded by beauty and calmness of nature around him, a garden of olive trees, citrus trees full of oranges, lemons and grapefruits, and the wild bushes of pommegranates.
Day S was about to end. We were returning to the mainland. The shadows were surfing across the mountain slopes, shifting with the sun. The smell of the lavender growing on the rocky fields was mixed with the subtle smell of lemon flowers, which Grigorije gave us when we were leaving the island.

Procession in Tivat

Djordje had a plan for us today. It all starded inocuously, with a visit of a monastery of St. Archangel Michael at the Miholjska Prevlaka peninsula near Tivat, north of Petrovac. We passed around the neglected gate from the pompous times of socialist tourism, which was more in the way than celebrating the treasure it gated, and went up a winding street along houses that reminded of hotel bungalows or housing projects. It turned out that the people living here are Serbs who came from Kosovo. At the end of the road, a small church appeared and nearby, behind the ruins of an old monastery, a few stone houses. The whole place gave the impression of nothing special, yet it had a long and dramatic history. Since the 13th century, it had a powerful monastery, which was shelled and destroyed in the 17th century by the Venetians. The reason was that it was said that plague broke up in the Monastery, but recently it was proven, that the 70 monks living there at the time were actually poisoned by arsenic. Few centuries later, a miracle happened here, when a special beautiful smell lead to the discovery of the bones of the monks who died here. The bones gave out kind of a dew, which had the power to heal any ailment. The sacred bones still give out this odor of unknown origin. After we smelled the sacred bones, as one should at this place of pilgrimage, Djordje arranged with the monks to let us see a small museum housing archaeological findings, including tombstones with old cyrilic inscriptions.
We got engaged in a conversation with sister Stefanida, who lives here. She told us about the history, and also said that time to time, the special smell still comes out from the place were the massacred monks were burried. A moment of coincident synchronicity happened when we talked, that gave the whole situation an unexpected dimension. This was all about the letter T, which sister Stefanida, originally called Tatjana in her civic life, chose as her favorite letter of the cyrilic alphabet. She was telling us how before becoming a nun, she studied theology in Belgrade, and how she was also interested in theater, and even wrote a theater play herself. At that moment, Sasha’s cell phone rang. His friend, who is a taxi driver in Toronto was asking him if he knows this monastery in Tivat. Sasha told him that not only does he know the monastery, but also that we were at the very place right now. His friend did not believe, so Sasha passed the phone on to sister Stefanida, who confirmed. This moment of synchronous presence of smell-giving medieval bones, slightly hunched-over fragile nun in black, and a mobile phone with a voice of the taxi driver in Toronto was quite funny, with all respects.
In a few moments, something started happening. We had no idea that today was the Day of Martyrs, celebrated across Serbia and Montenegro in honor of St. Sava, at the anniversary of the burning of his bones by the Turks. Moreover, we turned out to be at the place, where a procession is about to set out to carry the sacred remains from the church Archangel Michael into the town of Tivat. On the stony path, the archbishop was coming towards the church in his white and gold attire, and monks who were accompanying him just had to run back to fetch the cross, which they forgot home. The bells were ringing, and the decorated remains, along with a sacred icon, were being carried out of the church. The procession embarked on a boat, and we caught up with it again in Tivat, as the bones, the icon, and the monks along with the archbishop were ceremonially disembarking from their little boat on a pier right next to a huge transport ocean cruiser, all welcomed by the town religious authorities.
The theme of the day—Tatjana, theology, theater, sacred body (Telo), Tivat, taxi Toronto and Tibet….the neighboring town anyway was Budha, I mean, Budva.

1st day in Petrovac

Waking up right in an old house right in front of a small-pebble beach, with no tourists yet around, had the charm of the old days when only a few rich families vacationed here and few daring travellers came by. Over a morning coffee with Djordje and his friends, we discussed the topic of little known connections in historical dates and events which we recalled from school versions of history. Saša, the descendant of the famous Stefan Mitrov Ljubiša, inspired us by his paraphrases and interpretations of Slavic connections from the time before Christ. He says that such interconnections can be traced in old balads, wall inscriptions, roots of words and local names of rivers and regions, where the ancient Slavs were settled. We were surprised by the fact that indeed in the old documents, the dating uses a different count, not counted from the birth of Christ, but according to the Byzantine calendar, which would mean that currently it is the year 7515 since the creation of the World. Is it the legend or reality that the Slavic tribes were settled on both banks of Danube ever since the sea, which covered the area, receded to create the Black Sea? Near Belgrade, in Vinče, was a settlement of old tribes, whose phonetic alphabet (not pictograms) was documented on 1500 signs found on ceramics (by professor Pešič). The script was similar to the Etrusk letters, and dated back to 5000 years before Christ. There are also similarities to the runic signs from Transylvania. They read from right to left.
As far as the present time, we can already predict a slow disappearance of the old-fashioned cyrilic script because tourism, along with west-European orientation, carries its expansive globalizing tendencies and pays no respects to specifics of local traditions and memory. Only fragments of local rarities will be surviving, such as the monastery in Buljarica, which now stands above the green expanse of a scarcely settled bay, which will soon pay for its beauty by being buried in the concrete crust of ugly tourist developments and access roads. In one of the churches of the monastery, the iconostas carries a small depiction of Saint Kristifor, a rare picture in the Balkans of a saint with an animal head. The legend says that St. Kristifor was so handsome a man, that his physical beauty overshadowed his inner beauty, and so he decided to put on the appearance of an animal, a wolf or a monkey. Even so, when he stood before Christ, he was recognized and accepted. Another legend says that he also overcame cannibalism.

Mostar to Monte Negro

Denis, the architect who we stayed with, took us around Mostar in the morning. Surprisingly, and successfully, the city is waking up from the deranged nightmare and the pain of war, which is now being covered by layers of mundane daily life. The present carries the traces of shell explosions and bullets in the walls, through which the carefree greenery pushes towards light. The trauma contained in the walls is slowly changing into the virtual attraction of wild action stories, captivating the attention of incoming foreigners. We crossed one of the bridges to the Muslim side and entered the oldest mosque in the town. The multitude of Arab inscriptions, which we could not read, reminded us of musical notations or even of grafitti signatures, because of similarities in their shapes. We were told that even before the war physicaly started, there was a symbolic battle of signs and words, which eventually carried the aggression over to the streets. What does it then mean to inscribe and mark someone, a street, a house or a territory? The loyalty to family, tribe (called „pleme“ here), club, nation, or religion, became fateful for many who now rest together in the town center cemetery. The old bridge over Neretva carries a double meaning, it connects, but it also is a mark of the division between two sides. The balance of the letter M, as Mostar, is cracked by the memory of men mauled by the war who now walk on crutches.
Denis chose for himself the latinic letter L, not because it is in Latinic scrit, but because it reminds him of the right angle, which opens up the empry space for thinking and creativity.
Our journey continued towards Stolec through the village of Radmilja, where we stopped to see the necropolis of the Bogomils, a sect which was founded in Macedonia. The date of the founding as well as reasons are unknown…but somewhere, there is a connection with the story of our patrons, Cyril and Metodus. The possible connection? The area of the monumental necropolis was inland, on a highland plateau surrounded by mountians, probably hidden away from the Ottomans or the reach of the Monarchy. Typographically, the basreliefs on the large house-shaped tombs were reminiscent of neolithic or even Aztec markings. The tombs repeated a figure of a hunter or warrior with a raised right arm, which had a disproportionally large hand. Two tombs had inscriptions in a kind of cyrilic script.
We crossed the Klobuk mountain and the border to the independent republic of Montenegro at the height of 1060m, and then rode down the tobogan of narrow roads along the rugged mountain slopes all the way to the sea at the Boka Kotorska bay. With the luck in the left and right arms of our drivers, we were brought to Petrovac on the Sea, where we will stay for a few days.

Going to Mostar

After a night of thunderstorms, we are leaving our temporary home at Vojvodina. "Majka", in Sebian mother, Stojcevska is saying good-bye to us with tears in her eyes. As a last joke when leaving the Jabuka village, we left a marketing logo of Apple on the village name road sign, carrying a second one with us to Mac Edonia. It is pouring rain, all the way to the border between Serbia and Bosnia. The clouds disappeared only there, perhaps to allow us a better contact with the radio reporter Iva, who does weekly reports about our journey for Czech radio Leonardo. Our green promotion flyers help us regularly to overcome problems with road police and border patrols. Sometimes they maybe think that we are a strange religious sect. After we explain the project, we leave the impression that we are just obsessed artists, who set out on a pilgrimage to follow the forgotten winding and dusty paths of disapearing alphabets. Now heading to Mostar (meaning Bridge), which is a metaphor for us for bridging the glagolic, cyrilic, latin and arabic scripts. We stay overnight in the city with the restored monument of regained mutuality. Not sleeping under the bridge, but rather in the house of our friends. My intuition, which I do trust, suggests that this will be an inspirative meeting.

Day of Saint George

Day of Saint George, on this day snakes and lizzards come out of their holes... It was a cloudy day and our plan was to drive to Beograd at noon to make a gentle letter intervention in the place where the old National library used to be. Before leaving, together with Dragan and his parents, we hung white-painted apples bearing glagolic inscriptions up on an apple tree in the family orchard, nearby the pigstall of the three pig sisters. I wondered how the idea of introducing an alphabet to the vast and varied area inhabited by Slavic tribes was actually realized in the dark 9th century. The pagan atmosphere in the Stojcevski family garden was even stronger not only because of the absurdity of our act, but also because Draganís mother was next to us†bent over planting lettuce and his father was wearing strange overalls protecting him from the chemicals he was spraying onto wine plants... plus a desperate lonely old neighbour talking to the plants in the field just behind the fence.
At twelve oíclock we set out on the trip, stopping at a fish restaurant to fill our tanks with used oil. Later we found ourselves parking our cars under the linden trees close to the place of the former National library building at Kosancicev venac. We took out our camping furniture and cleared dust from our cars. After we decided what should be done for our planned two-hour programme, we started to address people passing by and offered them to take part in our event. There were not many passers-by on Sunday. One of the cyclists passing by slowed down, attracted by the unusual situation and later it turned out that he spoke Czech as his grandfather was Czech. He was a student of sociology, so he shortly explained the situation concerning the monument ruins of former library behind the fence. A cat was sleeping on the wall, while we were entertaining ourselves as well the Sunday walkers willing to join our game. Evocations and metaphors of the letter game worked perfectly, and not only for the intellectually-oriented participants. There was still suspicious and shy attitude to foreigners in Beograd, and some people did not understand what we mean by this project and why we were interested in cyrilic and glagolic alphabets. Some of them felt that both of these alphabets are already old-fashionable, and probably would disappear soon. Dictatorship of free market forces them to be "In" (meaning EU?) and melancholy and imagination are not appretiated any longer. Our return to dinner in our Jabuka "home" was enriched by a event in the night garden, initiated by Dragan for Katka who came today from Prague to join us.

Contrast inside ourselves

As usually, day and night of cold weather was followed by hot breath of the land, and hot day started. Because we had an agreement with professors from the Universita Umetnosti /University of Arts/ in Beograd, we had to hurry up, from from the Jabuka village to the meeting. We were dangerously incorporated into city chaos. Traffic, and curly roads have suddenly ended near the place, where the Sava river meets Danube, where the customs office building used to stand close to a former ferry for crossing of the river borderline between Europe and Balkan.
We were sitting in a summer café at the edge of White Fortress-Singidunum in Beograd, talking with Brkič and Serbian intelectuals about the current decline in using cyrilic letters,
about signs and the role of script in dangerous patriotic atmosphere. Also about global fashion of azbuka letters and local iconography. Walking through the city, we were watching rapid changes in use of alphabets. Places with cyrilic writings changed into fashionable, modern and European somehow totalitarian latin letters, ranging from a bizzare bazzar, little shops, up to supermarkets and hotels. Alphabets are fighting among themselves on walls under bridges, in subways and on hidden places. Maybe nobody is realizing this growing distance to the original Slavic writing, similar to the emptiness of deep hole left after the bombing of the National library at Kosancicev venac. How deep does politics infiltrate into the pergamen layers of local attitudes towards traditions and history? Is it dangerous to see this as a territorial struggle of signs and Scripts? Proclamation, description and claiming of place by letters/grafitti reveals the particular attitudes to the environment.
Evening in Jabuka was filled again with longing for homeland, of the Macedonian mountain people who were resettled from the hills to lowland Vojvodina after the World War II.

Third day in Jabuka

Third day in Jabuka, with our laptops and locals,the day, when DADA maestro Massimo has left us on oour own, of course the technical problems with dataarchive have begun.
Some of us spent most of the day at internet caffe in nerby city of Pančevo, the others by shopping materials needed for our actin in the village.Various nations and cultures ere strangely mixed here in Vojvodina area. Therefore we can hear except Serbian and Macedonian also Slovak,hungarian,sometimes Romanian and German language…but it is more question of memory after resettling after the 2nd world war.President Tito was the one ,who invited nations from whole Yugoslavia to settle here in empty houses of Germans,and so the mixture of nations, languages and letters started again. Vojvodina lowland area was always rich in crops of cereals and corn, and therefore it was called barn of Europe. You can hardly meet phenomenon of europanism, as new nationalism is waking up from dust again, thanks to fear of loosing their identity , possib le tornado is maybe coming. On the walls of old socialistic dreams, the fashionable graffiti of latin and cyrilic screams of Serbian oportunism are showing their teeth. Dragan s mother beked beans on pan for us and gravče na tavče, and this macedonian speciality changed taste of the day. Evening has changed usual daily shoping activity into concentrated work in the house of Stojcevski family. Later their friends brought in melodies and passion of Great Macedonian empire-promissed land, from where majority of Jabuka inhabitants came…
4.5. terrible, rainy atmosphere, bot not a single drop of water fall on thirsty, dusty-hot fields around. Today is the anniversary of Tito s death, some still remembering sadly…
We spent our day by preparations for evening event for the locals.In the cultural house was few guests , gathered by curiosity. Originnal idea to organise the event in the park outside was pushed inside by windy and cold weather. Projection, using footage from Romanian week long journey was helping to understand to our idea, and soon the atmosphere was loose enough for singing of glagolic song and backpipe player, followed by group singing.Few kids joined creation –cutting out of the foil, the letters chosen by the locals, which our cars will bring on the surface of our blue Transit, to their homeland, representing Jabuka village during our journey. We were singing, dancing and drinking together, and last action was home-made,hand-made greeting from Vojvodina Macedonians to Macedonians inOhrid lake area. Where some of them still keep their roots. Falling asleep with Jovanka song, full of sadness, memories of the day, and evening together in our heads.
Light darkness…

Jabuka and Apple MacBook.

The name of the village Jabuka means Apple….
Morning bird longer jumps, says another Czech saying, not applying to us, as we slept enough after demanding journey and thanks to full moon. We walked through village in a group, trying to orientate and realise what is where around us. We met few friends of Dragan, and soon our event was agreed to happen on friday evening, in front of local culture house. In case of warm weather it will be pleasant evening with Macedonian community, living here since Tito`s invitation. Than Dragan led us to huge stone cross, in strange disposition slightly leaning to right side, this monument seemed to fall from heaven lately, or growing from the ground for centuries. Was it `The` place again?
Where were the early Christians meeting? Or was it more a sign of the territory, border between Osman Empire, and Austro-Hungarian empire?
Till late night all of us worked on materials from previous day, as the roads did not allow to work much. Main thing was to converting the photos and sounds for DADA programme, because Masimo is leaving tomorrow back to Italy, together with his skills to use this new interactive archive software , so we decided to use the metaphoric Jabuka=Apple locality of eaten apple to convert into Mac Laboratory in Apple orchard..

Going to Jabuka

1.5..First of May, day for love, says Czech poet K.H.Mácha, remembering Czech believe to kiss under the blossoming cherry, in order to have happy life, which we did not realise, running uphill to see Saxon castle instead, where also famous Vlad Dracula was living. To be honest, it is place, washed out by turistic industry and even the atmosphere is directed by German order and system of circulation around historical buildings, because here is the borderline between Saxons, and Hungarian Sikuli tribe. Our journey to south was long and demanding, mainly because of sudden changes of the surface of the roads. It was somehow evident, that the mosaic- mixture of the nations and historical events around became imprinted to the surface of the road. Presence of Roman Empire, or better its Latin colony was supported by whiteness of the marmor fragments and also stone quarry around the road. Bysantine diversity was hanging in the air as loundry on a line. Suddenly we took off the main road ``Via Romana``walking, followed by local dog, we reached top of little hill, where white bearded orthodox monk was lit by sun, opened generously the church to us. Mosaic, of the materials, used for this local juwell signed something, yet we did not know, that we are standing on a place connected directly with Cyril and Method, who were resting here, to accumulate energy after demanding crossing of frozen Danube river and mountains white with snow. On the walls of this orthodox church were Cyrilic inscripts , hidden among icons and decorations. None of us wanted to leave this strong place. This place kept us in its hands. Our next horizons waved by Banat area, inhabited by Czech community since 1830. We were forced to separate later, as our Romanian guide Agnes was not allowed to enter the Serbia without visa? This was really sad end of our rich travel through Romania, prepared by her with sense of historic connections, but this is the reality of present borderlines, and relations inside and outside European Union. ``Kick him –Serbia-. out of the circle?.``.. says Czech game for kids. Late evening we found ourselves hurrying to Jabuka village in Vojvodina, where we were already awaited.

Going to Szegesvar

Day of the witches, before packing our things for journey from the Atyha village we decided for cutting favourite letter together with local kids, they had fun helping us to stick on our car their personal choice. It was letter G, reminding by its shape ram. We accumulated energy, information and local ferric water from this village, and after passing down the Tatos hill, we reached main road. The weather was changing, and our journey tracing hidden alphabet was interrupted by numerous stops . Runes in the space continued till reaching the Székelydálya village, where we finally found the longest writing on the wall of the church in Europe. We were surprised by speciality and richness of the information of local evangelic priest, living opposite the church. To trace out, find or even see and decode hidden meanings was difficult not only because of the low light ,glowing from one electric bulb, but also because the day was already changing to evening in this broken nave, and we were tired.
In ornaments above the altar is hidden many meanings, making use of similarity of outlines of plants and wild animals, or symbolic of growing plant into universe. Our logic was bound in the vegetable ornaments, whose historical meanings were already left behind.. The day of magical journey finished by arriving to high hill in Segesvar, where once the life of young Hungarian poet Petofi was ended.

Atyha

Sunday mass in the garden between house of the priest and reconstructed church, welcomed something around 30 people, to take part at open air mass, if it is not possible in the church.Singing and predictions of local priest reminded us minimalistic compositions.During the friendly talk with him, we got to know, that all names of villages in this arera are made out of one sentence of testament. Whole story is interesting from the point of view of our project of prophets- Father, who was going down the Firtos mountain, said to his sons ¨Here I am living`` …itt en lakom..Enlaka village… and few steps later he said to his older son``this is yours…e tied`` and village Eted bears these letters., later to his younger son announced`` this is your little piece …kis mond`` and village Kusmond apparently keeps it till now, when the father stopped for a while, the youngest son asked where he can live, ``today I speak to you…neked is solok ma`` -Szolokma village has this part.Later they were going to return home, and the father asked the youngest son if it is sufficient to him, and he replied `` give me more if you want …adj ha akarsz atyam, and Atyha village appeared. So the story is wide spread on hills around. We found very interesting inscriptions in runes style in church of Enlaka village, used even in the emblem on flag of settlement of ancient Sikula tribe, based here.The evening is going to be devoted to present our project in local pub, which serves best for the community meetings.We will show interactiveprograms and Agnes will sing songs from Transylvania.Perhaps we will be able to start also creative contact.

Targu Mures

In Targu Mures city, where we were sleeping, in family of our guide Agnes, we had to find out and solve last technical problems of our communication with the civilised world, and we started our journey to Transylvania mountains. We stopped at grandmother of Agnes, to take stoves with us, and we also asked mothesr of Agnes , which is her favourite letter. Landscape behind the windows started to be hilly soon after leaving the city. There is an underground salt lake, so salt was the product of the area since ancient times. Same taste might have the fine because of wrong parking of our car, which moved on and stopped thanks to near telephone pole, after everybody jumped out.
After few kilometers we turned off to stony road, which lead us up to mountins, where village Atyha is well hidden. Maybe it is lucky to keep old style of life, without consuming society soaking through. Wooden houses, sensitively placed in terrain, invite us inside by massive, richly decorated oak gates, or by typical blue colour, hiden in some cases by vine ofsprings. Our position close to the heaven becomes evident, when we look at local church, which has no roof because of reparation. A while after our arrival we spread inscription, made out of grass, and through this we started meeting activity with locals and their cows.Later , during evening friendship in pub the circle grows, some of them we will meet at tomorrows sunday mass…
Cows choice the letter "A" fo Atyha

Churches and cemetery

Morning orthodox mass, all in singing form became part of our morning hygienne, and helps us to tune into common feeling with locals. Brother Ovidio and father Cleope. At the breakfast together we discuss problems of body and soul, the holy Script and the content of word and letter. Father, who paradoxically is younger than us, is very tolkative, and I think we amuse him by our questions. In gestures oh his hands, and explanation of the blessings the cyrilic letter are still contained,

Jesus Christus is represented by IICX. Our thoughts concerning mutual emotional attitude among an icon and its meaningfull gesture s support each other, especially during watching giant fresco decorations of the church, refectory and both small chapells. We feel surrounded by iconography of latino-cyrilic writings and we are trying to decode stories painted on the walls. Both of our hosts individually answer our question about their decission for „their“ letter choose for the one, similar in shape to omega. Because it was strong impuls for beginning and ending, alpha and omega, contained also in the aureola of Jesus Christ. Symbol =signal,code=way,icons=story,idol=example, these are some possible views and relations in watching this environment, full of hidden meanings.

During our journey to Maramures we stoped in Sapante, village with local tradition of decorated crosses is confronting private Later we found ourselves in a discussion life iconogrphy with orthodox iconography of the church. Later we found ourselves in nearby pilgrimage area,

discussing the sense of giant oak wooden structure of the tower of the church, in the context of contemporary consuming society.During the lunch we became pilgrims , speaking at symposium about religion.

Later on, passing through villages of Maramures area we were excited by traditionally decorated oak wood gates, in combinations with blossoming apple and cherry trees, we smelled chassidic past of this „island“, place which even without any water context, protected the jewish minority for several centuries. Today maybe mental island of the community.

Orbis Pictus

Today we decided to visit local museum and school, where J.A. Comenius used to teach, and where he wrote the book Orbis Pictus Sensualis, . The exposition was rather sparse concerning his importance, but it represents basic attitudes to theme of letters, but also use of multimedia as didactic and communicative environment. Definitely inspiring and challenging visit!

We had to devote certain time to finalisation and uploading of our web pages, including the blog, which is still more simple tool to operate….surprisingly it was not easy to find internet connection in this city with university, finally there was one, in the local touristic youth cultural house, in the shape of frog, sitting on the spring, hiding several chaps, chatting…

Stanislav, as one of the brave, was the hero, who created our blog, so that we are able every day to let you know what is going on. Many thanks to him! We have tried to define together the categories for digital interactive data archive, which we are going to use as communication environment in communities.

Easy going passing through Romanian borders belonged to the pleasant experienes. City of Satu Mare stepped out of the night, but it was not feeling really open, Therefore we left the city in the light of lams and let ourselves draw into darkness of unknown, which ended by orthodox monastery, in the middle of the forest, still under the construction, originally decided to sleep in the cars, but suddenly invited to come inside by brother Ovidio, nearly waiting for our coming invited us inside. Unfinished building, of this new sacred place, lit by moon and neon light, welcomed our adventurous group with open heart.

Hungary

this morning we spent by last necessary adaptations of both our cars, so that we feel fine inside, and on the road interconnected. We run our cars on vegetable oil, smothly, and wehad to tune our group for the journey so that we eliminate wasting time at planned stops. Also design of our second car needed some touches, and it became an event for introducing new ember of the group- Agnes, coming from Rumunia, who will be our guide through Romania, epecially Transylvania.

We started the journey together a bit late, - afternoon, but luckily left Budapest with its rush hours behind massive Danube riverflow. Passing Miskolc city we reached Szarospatak, pleaasant old city, where J.A Comenius, Czech so called „teacher of the nations“ spent 5 years of his life.

We supposed to find interconnection between his didactic method Orbis Pictus – vizualiation of the world, , and his orbis sensualis- experiencing the world, translated as „learn through game“, and our project, searching meanings hidden in the form of letters.

We go to Sarospatak without any previous contact, at the place, because we didn not find anybody avalable in local mueum. But we want to go, and stop, or realise our presentation. We parked just near the church,and met a man, infront of the garden, who has informed us sufficieently enough about local traditions and relations. By coincidence we appeared at the yard of evangelic youth house from where the rock music was tempting us to enter.

Our expectation to meet youngsters, disappeared immediately after entering the rehersal room with group called President, with old chaps, at the age of Rolling Sotnes played violently aloud , tossing one hit from pop music after another.Later on, we spoke about our project, and two members – singer Gabriel, and drummer Janczi stayed till late.The singer appeared to be former mayor of the Szarospatak (for 16 years) and with passing time we realised that he might be helpful in many things to us .They both decided for the letter in the shape of mushroom, which represents, just by chance letter S.

Nitra

our journey to Nitra was surprisingly exciting, as we were driving through unbelieveable picturess landscape, and curly road slowly unveiled tiny chappels and calvaria stops together with morning bus stops, full of waiting schoolmates.
In Nitra, we were avaited unpassionately, at the University of Konstantin, the Philosopher, as none of the partners guessed what will be the development of the situation…we tried to present our plan for the journey through Balkan, together with certain ideas, so that the students of pedagogy and arts understood us and continued to develop their inventions, supporting the project.Our presentation was successful and opened new dimmension to us, how to orientate in similar situations, and to be able to formulate our goal.Students reacted openly and after short hesitation d ecided for two letters from glagolic, representing the mood in the collegium – the first one is U, =university, which is similar to blossoming K – Konstantin, and second was I , in shape of wine glass … Also we got to know, that the University is using form of glagolic letter of C as Cyril, for the annual prize awards. Our guide, Eva showed us the city,including the casttle, where used to stand fortress of Pribina,Rastislav, and Mojmir. We met with people from the monument preservation organisation, who explained to us historical facts and present polemic about the relation to the two prophets – Cyril and Method. Circle, turn of end into beginning were the themes appearing here councidentally cycling together with circular stone table with engraved letters of `proglas`, the codex of the slavs, or at the base of Corrgone, statue, where is the sphere,and other assotiations, , also the cycling echoes in the round shape of old rotunda.Only the bone of saint Cyril, in th e reliqia case draw our attention in, with the help of crosses in circles in chalky- bony white walls of the church. We were listening to story about nearby village `Pastovce` originally `Pastuh`
meaning Pastor, where Cyril was passing as first prophet of christian religion…..
We were heading to this plaace, but it was alredy getting dark, so we jumped across river Danube, the blue dusk, near Estergom cathedral, an stay overnight in Pilis mouintains, ancient land of Celts, Slavs and Huns, we are awaiting meeting with other part of our expedition soon…

Slavonice

Preparation and starting our journey, just one day after the anniversary of beginning of expedition by Zikmund and Hanzelka,/famous Czech travellers/ sixty years ago. We started our pilgrimage journey , tracing partly lost and partly remembered slavonic Glagolic script.Leaving Prague, the mother of the cities, was not meant in the messy and dusty connotation of the metropolis. All of us left freaking thoughts behind, and drawned into the landscape, which we gradually started to perceive as a territory of the great Moravian Empire,tousand years ago. City of Slavonice in its rennaisance beuty with few bored people around a pub accepted our car with expectation.We washed the car just after our arrival, so that we can add some letters from the glagolic or cyrilic alphabet, on each of our stops.There was not many people on the square, some did not stay long,even few members of the city hall were attracted by watching our projection on the screen of the car,concerning the concept of our expedition.We were sitting later, after the projection with few locals in half empty pub, speaking about word and sign.The slavonian people decided for the representing sign, or letter A from glagolic alphabet because they feel similarity with human body, the second letter reminds a building, , so we can consider this fact as a community living in harmonic environment, sometimes missing dynamic excitement, …we left our first stop - this harmonic city after short sleep in local cultural house from the communist era, surrounded by circus Pacific early in the morning to arrive to Nitra University in time…..