The French philosopher and scientist Blaise Pascal once suggested that we "imagine a number of men in chains and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows and wait their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. It is an image of the condition of man."
It is also the image of Kosovo and the rest of the Balkans painted so vividly by Albanian poet and writer Ismail Kadare in his masterfully imagined "Three Elegies for Kosovo". As the book's title suggests Three Elegies consists of three inter-related stories centered on a famous battle that took place in Kosovo more than 615 years ago. On June 28, 1389 a combined army of Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians and Romanians waged a fierce battle against an Ottoman-Turkish army in Kosovo on the Field of the Blackbirds. The battle was seen as one in which the combined Balkan armies fought on behalf of Christian Europe to halt the surging westward expansion of the Islamic Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman army, led by Sultan Murad I was victorious. The Sultan was killed on the day of the battle and was buried in Kosovo. Ironically, despite their victory the Turks never followed up on this victory and did not return to the region for another 150 years.
The first story takes us from the night before the June 28, 1389 battle and through the battle itself. In the camp of the combined army on the eve of the battle peoples who have long fought each other prepare to fight a common enemy. Old animosities are forgotten temporarily. The soldiers and officers, drinking perhaps too much, demand that their minstrels sing songs to prepare them for battle. The minstrels (who serve as narrators of the first two stories) sing battle songs but they are songs in which the Serbs speak of the horrid Albanians, and the Albanians sing songs of the hated Serbs. When asked why they rely on these old songs the minstrels respond that songs take long to change than alliances.
The second story begins at the end of the battle. The minstrels, along with the others, are devastated by the loss and begin wandering west. The Balkans were considered the 'fringe' of Europe by Europeans even them. As they wander, some of the old animosities come back. They face hunger, suspicion, persecution and the occasional act of kindness.
The third story, "The Royal Prayer" is the most moving of the three. As noted, the victorious Sultan Murad I was killed at the battle and buried in Kosovo. This story is narrated in the voice of Murad's spirit, locked in his tomb. We read of his watching as the same battles rage around him, unresolved, for six hundred years. He catches snippets of information from newspapers tossed aside near the tomb. "From these I learn what is going on all around. The surprising names of viziers and countries: NATO, R. Cook, Madeline Albright. The slaughter of children in Drenice." The more things change.
Kadare has said, in commenting on the symbolic importance of the 1389 battle that "on the six hundredth anniversary of the battle in 1989, Milosevic launched the first massacre of Kosovars, and started the explosion of Yugoslavia." Kadare says, in the second elegy, that "[t]he Serb's eyes were filled with the same tragic laments. Both men were prisoners, tied to each other by ancient chains, which they could not and did not want to break." As seen through the eyes of Ismail Kadare the chains that bind the people of the Balkans are old, strong, and not easily broken. The beauty of his prose highlights the tragedy of what he describes.
Some may challenge Kadare's viewpoint or suggest he bears, as an Albanian, the prejudices of his ancestors. As an outsider all I saw was an exposition on a tragedy whose beginning cannot be traced and whose ending cannot be seen.
Three Elegies for Kosovo is a beautiful little (87 pages) book and one well worth reading.
