Halfway down the Danube

Still more Ostheim

More about Ostheim.

It's an old town even by European standards. How old? Well, the first record is from 804 AD. Twelve hundred years. Probably more, but nobody was writing stuff down back in the Dark Ages.

That first record, BTW, is of a noble donating the village to the Church -- the Bishop of Fulda, to be precise. Ostheim would spend the next thousand years bouncing from one bishopric to another. (The last move was in 1975, so it may not be over yet.)

The donation included everyone in the village -- they were all serfs, bound to the land. Dark Ages, remember? The donor was a minor Carolingian nobleman.

The whole region was a frontier then, less than a century away from paganism. They'd been nominally converted by St. Kilian around 700, but in such a sloppy, half-pagan way that St. Boniface had to come back in the 730s to do it right. In 804, Ostheim was just a village in a half-civilized marcher region, The Saxons in the north had only just been defeated by Charlemagne; to the east, the Slavic Sorbs were just a day's march away.

(Something I had not known: the westernmost high-water mark of the Slavic expansion reached nearly as far as Ostheim. The Sorbs are described as living "beyond the Saale", and the Saale is just a few kilometers east of here. So, a fair chunk of what's now central Germany was Slavic, at least for a couple of centuries. The ethnic/linguistic border got rolled far back, of course, later in the Middle Ages.)

Anyway. Today Ostheim sits in the middle of the Rhoen, a lovely region of rolling hills, streams and forests. Alas, the Rhoen is one of the poorest parts of Bavaria -- it has a reputation as a nice place to visit for a few days of hiking and camping, but noplace you'd want to live. One doesn't generally think of western Germany as having poor bits, but here in Bavaria the Rhoen's reputation is almost Appalachian. The negative connotation is so strong that Ostheim's full, official name is "Ostheim vor den Rhoen": Ostheim before or in front of the Rhoen, not in it.

On the plus side, the town has a lively tourism industry, especially in September and October, when the hikers turn out in droves to watch the leaves turn, get lost in the woods, and buy kitsch from the shops along the main street by the river.

Tourism mostly shuts down in the winter, though, when the Rhoen has some of the nastiest weather in this part of the world. (I'm looking out the window right now. Six inches of snow after Christmas, followed by fog and freezing rain today. Ice everywhere.)

Oh, and: there's a bratwurst stand in front of the town hall. You can buy two sorts of bratwurst there: with a bun, or without. Oh, and you can add mustard or ketchup, or not.

And that's it. Ostheimers are proud of their brats, and have no interest in Yankee perversions like relish, cheese, onions, or -- lieber Gott -- chili. Even the bun is small: it's a holder, not part of the meal. You get the one sort of brat, and you eat it straight, and like it.

And I do. I'm not a wild enthusiast for sausages generally, but those are damn good brats. I'll eat them and smile.

My boys, on the other hand, absolutely gobble them down. You can practically hear the German genes firing in their little brains. "Daddy, bratwurst! I want a bratwurst, Daddy!" They demand them, they get them, they eat them all up.

Last bit of Ostheim trivia. If you're a fan of Lois McMaster Bujold, you've probably read her latest novel, _The Hallowed Hunt_. If so, then you may have noticed that the capital city is named Easthome.

Yep: it's Ostheim. Lois asked our Claudia for English translations of some of the old Germanic names in the Carolingian histories. Claudia gave them, and threw in some more. Lois liked "Easthome", and used it.

And that's about it for now, on Ostheim.

Carlos's non-fiction best of 2005

Another year bites the dust! Woo-hoo! And so it's time for another end of the year round-up reading list. It's a shorter list than last year's, partly because of my move (from Brooklyn to Brooklyn, by way of Brooklyn), and partly because journal articles have cut into my book reading. Still, some good stuff out there. (Here's last year's list, if you're at all interested.)

Bloggy goodness

Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, Julie Powell
Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper, Diablo Cody

Fellow New Yorker Julie Powell decided to work her way through Julia Child's The Art of French Cooking in a year while writing about it on the Internet. Fellow Midwesterner Diablo Cody decided to work as a stripper and peep-show girl for a year while writing about it on the Internet. Both women cuss a lot. A lot a lot. Both, alas, are married. And both have written extremely entertaining books.

(Yes, the Diablo Cody just came out. I got mine early. I heart NYC.)

Food

Mythology & Meatballs: A Greek Island Diary/Cookbook, Daniel Spoerri
A Mediterranean Feast, Clifford Wright
Maize and Grace: Africa's Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500-2000, James C. McCann

Daniel Spoerri, the Romanian-born artist now resident in Italy, wrote about his year on the Greek island of Symi. The Internet not having been invented yet, his diary was first published in French, then in English as part of an avant-garde art project in 1970. But today it reads like a charming and digressive weblog, right down to Spoerri's anecdotes about cats and his insane landlord.

A Mediterranean Feast, on the other hand, is a tome. Inspired by the Annales historian Fernand Braudel, Wright has written about the foodways of the entire Mediterranean basin as deeply as one likely can in a lifetime. This presents a slight problem: Wright's footnote apparatus impresses me so much that his recipes intimidate me. (Especially his recipe for bisteeya.) Still, many thanks to Sir Francis Burdett and the New York City Math Teacher for this suggestion!

Maize, outside of the New World, has largely not become a major grain for human consumption. Romania is a European exception; Africa is the world's exception. McCann gives answers where I didn't even know there were questions. I like that.

New York

February House: The Story of W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, under one roof in wartime America, Sherill Tippins

There was also a trained chimp! The house was torn down to make way for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, although after reading the book one wonders if the Health Department had a word in the process.

Strangeness

Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, Jane Ellen Harrison
Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, Jane Ellen Harrison

Why read hundred-year-old scholarship? For the quality of the author's mind which it reveals. Harrison was the Edith Durham of Greek mythology, and her books still live and breathe.

Too Soon To Tell (But I Think I Can Anyway)

Terrestrial Ecosystems through Time, Anna K. Behrensmeyer et al.
Capture Dynamics and Chaotic Motions in Celestial Mechanics, Edward Belbruno

Okay, no one is ever going to read the Belbruno book for the prose style. But, damn, the new celestial mechanics is fascinating. Orbits like doodles on a Spirograph, that make the classical Hohmann "minimum-energy" transfer look spendthrift.

Terrestrial Ecosystems through Time goes back to deep time (a running interest of mine), to the beginnings of life on land on Earth. I'm halfway through the Paleozoic, and my brain is crackling.

Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach

Because you demanded it.

Last post, I mentioned that the little town of Ostheim had an interesting history. Here, we'll briefly glance at the what and why.

First, the map. (Warning: not for the faint of heart.)

Go easy, it's not as bad as it looks. This is a map of central Germany around 1850 or so. Bavaria is on the bottom, Bohemia -- the modern Czech Republic -- down and to the right.

See those awful green splotches? Those make up the Grossherzogtum, the Grand Duchy, of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. Yup, it's broken up into pieces: three big ones, and eight or ten little ones. That was normal, back then. (Did a lot of Central European history suddenly just click into place for you? Yah, me too.)

Now, look down and to the left. See the little green dot below the big green splotch? Ostheim.

Ostheim was the, um, capital of an enclave of about 10 square miles. There was one small town -- Ostheim itself -- and three or four villages. The total population, in the 19th century, was maybe 2,000 or 3,000 people.

But! While this enclave was small, it sat in a peculiarly strategic location. One, it straddled the valley of the Streu. The Streu is tiny -- more a creek than a river -- but its valley is the easiest north-south route into what would one day be called the Fulda Gap.

Two, the enclave was inside the powerful kingdom of Bavaria. Bavaria was Catholic, and had a history of being chummy with certain foreign powers -- Austria, France. Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, though, was overwhelmingly Protestant, and was historically friendly with Prussia. So, S-W-E and Bavaria viewed each other with a certain suspicion. Hostility, even.

The Streu runs through a region known as lower Franconia, which has been part of Bavaria since forever, but which remains culturally distinct and which has occasionally entertained secessionist yearnings. So, the Ostheim enclave wasn't just in Bavaria. It was a Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach foothold in an area which, while Catholic, was not too wild about being Bavarian.

-- "Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach" is rather ungainly, isn't it. But it's important to distinguish it from the Duchy of Saxe-Altenburg, the Duchy of Saxe-Meiningen, the Principality of Saxe-Gotha, and the tiny Principality of Saxe-Coburg... that last, of course, being the ancestral home of the current British Royal Family. I couldn't make this stuff up. Anyway, Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach was by far the biggest and most important of all of these; it was not just a Duchy, but a Grand Duchy. It was nearly as big as Rhode Island, and by the mid-1800s it was home to around a quarter of a million people.

Of course, that was only after Napoleon forced the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar (the two eastern pieces) to combine with the Duchy of Saxe-Eisenach (the western bit, including Ostheim). Before that, they'd been separate.

Where were we... oh, yes, Bavaria. The Dukes and Grand Dukes of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach tended to be plump, conservative, strongly Protestant, and Prussophile. The Kings of Bavaria tended to be skinny, liberal, Catholic, Francophile, and Prussophobe. (Excepting the ones who were barking, raving mad. Story for another time.)

One example. Back in the day, King Maximilian of Bavaria was Napoleon's most loyal ally. He stuck with the little Corsican for years, even through the disastrous Russian campaign. Didn't turn his coat until the eve of the Battle of Leipzig in 1813. And when he did, he sold his loyalty high: he demanded that Bavaria be treated as a full member of the anti-Napoleonic alliance, and not have to give up any territory or pay any indemnities. To countries like Britain and Austria, who'd been fighting Napoleon nonstop for a decade or more, this was pretty galling. They needed Bavaria to switch sides, so they agreed. But it left a rather bad taste.

This was far from the first time. The Bavarians had a long, long history of this kind of thing, going all the way back to the 15th century when they first grabbed Franconia for no better reason than that they wanted it, and could. So, the plump solid Protestant Dukes of Saxe-whatever had no reason to like or trust their sly, Catholic neighbors to the south.

Which brings us back to the slightly oversized architecture of Ostheim. Here we have a town of less than 3,000 people. In the 1600s, it was more like 1,000 people. But it already had a huge town hall -- big enough for a small city -- an enormous fortified church, and a castle sitting on a hill just a mile away, looking down over it all.

Why? Because this was the Dukes' way of saying to the Bavarians, Don't even try it, creeps. The Ostheim enclave might be small, but it was heavily fortified, and it sat right on the best invasion route. It could even, in a pinch, appeal to Franconian separatism against the Bavarian crown. In a war, that big town hall could end up being a military headquarters for a surprisingly large region. It happened, more than once.

I should add that there are still traces of all this today. Ostheim is still mostly a Protestant town; a Catholic church was built in the 1960s, but it's small. Just a few kilometers away, though, towns like Fladungen and Mellrichstadt are strongly Catholic. Even the architecture is slightly different.

Oh, and Franconians still hate being called Bavarian. Especially Franconians here in Ostheim.

But that's a story for another post.

Ostheim again

So we're back in Ostheim for Christmas.

Long-time readers of this blog will know that Ostheim is a small town in northern Bavaria. It's where Claudia's parents live. Claudia is an important person there: her mother is the Deputy Mayor, her father was principal of the local high school. So, I am "Claudia's Mann" for the duration.

Ostheim is on a little river -- a creek, really -- called the Streu (pron. "Shtroy"). It would be thematically consistent if the Streu eventually emptied into the Danube. Alas, we're just a bit too far north; the Streu flows into Saale, which flows into the Main, which flows into the Rhine.

Ostheim does have one connection to Romania, though: it has an enormous fortified church, just like the ones in Transylvania. It's a little spooky. Fortified churches were a Saxon thing; Ostheim was an enclave of Saxony, about 100 miles east of the rest of the kingdom. The Saxons of Transylvania, same-same, except 1200 miles away and in the opposite direction.

Anyway, today Ostheim is a pleasant market town of about 3000 people,set in a hilly rural area in Lower Franconia. That's big enough to have a lot of conveniences -- a supermarket, a bookstore, several restuarants, some nice parks -- but small enough that people still greet you as you pass on the street.

It's a great place for small kids. On Boxing Day (the day after Christmas, for our American readers), Alan and I went for a walk along the Streu. We brought bread, and had a happy ten minutes feeding the ducks. Then we got up on the New Bridge (it's the youngest of the town's three bridges, dating from 1898) and watched the old mill wheels turn and turn. Then we walked under another bridge, and yelled into a culvert: hellooooo! is there a troll in there? Then Alan got a little uneasy with the whole idea of the troll (he's been a very brave kid, but recently he seems to be experimenting with the concept of "scary"), so we walked to the Town Hall -- the Rathaus.

The Rathaus is a huge, half-timbered building; it was built in 1562, and has been meticulously kept up for four and a half centuries. It looks like it belongs to a much bigger town. There are historical reasons for this that I'll go into if anyone is really interested in the complicated history of northern Franconia and western Thuringia, but for now let's just say that it's a big impressive building.

There's a huge Christmas tree in front. I told Alan that Oma (grandmama) worked there, and that she was a very important person. He nodded, understanding: of course she is, and a fifty-foot Christmas tree is entirely appropriate. Right then the old clock in the Rathaus tower struck the half-hour, as if punctuating.

Then we walked up through the center of town (lots of little winding, cobblestoned streets) to the old fortified church. This is sort of hard to describe, but try this: take a small castle, with thick walls, corner towers, a drawbridge, window-slots for shooting out of and all that good stuff. Then, remove the castle and replace it with a big old church. But keep the walls and the towers and all. Okay? Like that.

The inside used to be a place of refuge during the endless wars of religion. The Ostheimers dug deep cellars under the church to store food and to live in. Today, they're used as root cellars, and for storage -- sort of like a Public Storage or Penske in the US, except that they're hundreds of years old and are owned by the (Protestant) church.

It's a great place for a little boy to run around and explore. Stairs going up and down, odd little cul-de-sacs, the towers looming over you. ("Is that a dragon tower?" asked Alan at one point. Oddly enough, there is a Dragon Tower in Sighisoara, where we visited last summer. I wonder if he remembered it.)

Across the street is a big park with a sports field. By this time it was after 3:00, and our shadows were stretching far ahead of us on the snow. We walked around the park for a little bit, nibbling on snow (Alan loves to eat snow) and looking at different plants and things. See these red berries? They were roses. See, they still have thorns. And look, this seed pod is like paper -- crumple it and the little seeds fall out.

The grandparents live on the edge of town, up on a steep hill; from their yard, there's a spectacular view across the valley, with the town nestled between fortified church and stream below. This is very nice, but it means that there's a half-mile hike uphill to reach them. Alan had never done this before; I'd always carried him the last few hundred yards on my shoulders. But he did very well, slowing a bit but marching along sturdily. Overall we walked four or five kilometers, down hill and up, in a bit over two hours, which is not bad for a kid who's still several months short of his fourth birthday.

I have a strong suspicion that Ostheim is the sort of place where the teenagers gather in the park at night to smoke cigarettes, be sullen, and complain that there's nothing to do. But for now... it's all right. It's really all right.

The dreidel is always rigged

This is not widely known, but back in 1976, Robert Feinerman proved the following theorem about the dreidel:

Let X_n be the payoff on the nth spin of the dreidel and let p be the number of players. Then, the expected value of X_n, E(X_n), is:

(p / 4) + ((5 / 8) ^ (n - 1)) * ((p - 2) / 8)

That is, if there are more than two people playing a game of dreidel, there is a noticeable first player advantage in gelt. (I suspect at least one regular commenter knows this through empirical study.)

However, in 1996, Felicia Moss Trachtenberg came up with a simple way to tweak dreidel to give fair payoffs: adjust the penalty to ante ratio so that it is equal to the number of players divided by 2. Thus, if there are three players, the penalty should be three chocolate coins and the ante two chocolate coins (or six and four, or thirty to twenty, et cetera). If there are four players, the penalty could be two chocolate coins to an ante of one, since 2 / 1 = 4 / 2 .

More recently, Doron Zeilberger of Rutgers University conjectured that the length of a game of dreidel was of the order of the number of nuts (chocolate coins, whatever) squared. This was proved by his Rutgers colleagues Thomas Robinson and Sujith Vijay last year.

Y'all know what to do.

Non-linked references:

Feinerman, R., The American Mathematical Monthly, vol. 83, no. 8, (October 1976), pages 623-625.

Trachtenberg, F. M., The College Mathematics Journal, vol. 27, no. 4, (September 1996), pages 278-281.

Both papers are available on JSTOR, if you're lucky enough to have access.

And for the rest of us...

Wisconsin governor Jim Doyle is celebrating Festivus this year. An aluminum fixture company in Milwaukee provided the Festivus pole. No word on who has won the Feats of Strength yet.

Back in New York, I saw these cool Eid stamps for sale at the local post office. According to Snopes, some people in the US think this is part of a plot. Santa is bringing them coal this year.

And finally, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there happened a great miracle.

A Christmas poem

Been busy lately. But here's a seasonal poem that y'all might like that I found recently:

To Jesus: Moon

Since you receive light from another source

Since you rise into the high skies,
while many people watch

Since you receive light again,
even though your body dies

Since you remove the darkness of the world
by your light

Since you conceal your large form
in a round white disk

Since you carry a blemish

Since those who look at stars
sought you

Since you give light for everyone,
being appropriate for supplicants

Since the hero of my poem, the Lord who was born of a virgin girl
who conceived through the Holy Spirit
is like you,
moon of the beautiful sky,
it is right that you immediately agree
to rejoice and happily play.

With him who is united with Tamil
that flows like a waterfall,
O moon, come to play.

With the son of God seated
on the right side of gracious God,
O moon, come to play.

This poem, by Arul Chelladurai, was taken from Paula Richman's article, "Tamil songs to God as a child," in the Princeton compilation, Religions of India in practice, edited by Donald S. Lopez. While modern, it's written in an ancient Tamil form, the pillaitamil, where the poet addresses a deity as if it were a baby. Often, as in this poem, the moon is beseeched to come be its playmate.

Anyway, I thought it was cool.

First snow

Out sick

Everybody got sick this weekend.

Intestinal bug: vomiting, headache, chills. We got it from the boys, who picked it up at school. They raced through it in a day or two. We grownups seem to take a bit longer.

Normal blogging will resume at some point.

UCK

I was going to do that second post on independent Kosovo.

But I discovered that you can't understand internal Kosovar politics without understanding UCK. (UCK is the Albanian name for the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army.) And UCK is complicated and interesting enough to deserve a post of its own.

But it's longish, and all history, so I'm putting it below the flip. Skip it if this stuff doesn't interest you.

UCK started small. Back in the mid-'90s, it was just a few dozen angry guys. It wasn't very well organized, and they didn't have weapons beyond a few guns. Some were Yugoslav Army vets, some had fought in Bosnia and Croatia, and some had received training at a secret camp in Albania (about which more later), but we're not talking Green Berets here. Angry guys with basic guerrilla training and some guns.

They started off by attacking the police. This made sense because, after 1989, the Albanian police had been replaced by ethnic Serbs. The Albanian population hated the Serb police, seeing them as brutal and corrupt.

(I can't easily judge how much of this is true, but I think the closest analogy, from an American POV, would be the bad old days when all-white police forces were patrolling all-black urban neighborhoods. If you're old enough to remember Rodney King? Think a Rodney King riot every week or so.

(Additionally, the Albanians say that the Serb cops were grossly corrupt -- thieves and bullies who were much more interested in holding up Albanians for bribes than in keeping order. Hard to judge at this distance, though at least some foreign eyewitnesses agree.)

So the early KLA/UCK started off shooting at cops. And they killed a few of them. But it didn't do them much good. There were plenty of underemployed Serbs willing to work as cops in Kosovo, and the Albanian population just wasn't ready to rise up yet. We're talking 1996, 1997 here: most of the Kosovar Albanians were still sticking with Ibrahim Rugova and his nonviolent resistance. I think this was less from inherent Albanian pacifism than from a sense that the Serbs were too strong to fight, but whatever the reason, few people were willing to take their chances with UCK.

Another problem they faced was the clannish and fissiparous nature of traditional Albanian society. In some ways, this helped them... fierce family and village loyalties made it very hard for the Serbs to get good information on UCK. But, on the other hand, it also meant that there were constant divisions and crosscurrents. Almost as soon as UCK formed, they were killing other Albanians (allegedly for collaborating with the Serbs).

Soon after that, they were being framed for killing other Albanians. The Serbs were perfectly happy to blame violent deaths on UCK "terrorists". So, soon you had people dying who may or may not have been "collaborators", and who may or may not have been killed by UCK, and who UCK might or might not take credit for killing -- in pretty much every possible combination. It got pretty murky, and the net result was not a groundswell of public approval for the men of UCK.

But they kept at it, and after a while they had some breaks.

In 1997 Albania -- then under the erratic and not particularly competent rule of President Sali Berisha -- collapsed into utter chaos. A pyramid scheme caused most of the country's savings to disappear overnight. The economy imploded, and the population rose up in massive and destructive riots.

The Albanian police couldn't possibly handle it. So Berisha called on the army... and the army simply shrugged and walked away. Berisha had been starving the armed forces for years, and had packed the upper ranks with cronies and incompetents. The officer corps loathed him, and the common soldiers were so poor and hungry that joining the rioters made much more sense than shooting them.

Berisha ended up being forced out of office. (Though not for good. He just got back in, after an eight year hiatus, in August of this year.)

One interesting side effect: the soldiers left the state armories unguarded, and the population quite thoroughly sacked and looted them. Hundreds of thousands of rifles, AK-47s and grenades, and milllions of rounds of ammunition, fell into private hands. For months afterward, you could walk into any open-air market in Albania and -- in between the spinach and the pumpkins -- buy AK-47s for $20 each.

This had significant effects on Kosovo.

Up until the autumn of 1997, UCK was still just a couple of hundred angry guys, still poorly armed and equipped. They were killing the occasional policeman, but were in no way a threat to Belgrade's power. But after the Albanian riots, three things changed.

One, most obviously, UCK suddenly had access to a lot more weapons.

Two, they had a secure haven, sort of, across the border. Northern Albania was hit hardest by the anarchy, and didn't really recover for years. From '97 until well after 2000, it was a lawless region run by local gangsters and clan lords. UCK/KLA could move back and forth across the border, and bring in supplies, and the Albanian government couldn't stop them even if it wanted to.

(I mentioned the Albanian training camp. Sali Berisha seems to have been of two minds about resistance in Kosovo. It appears that he wanted a resistance there, if only to distract the Serbs. But he didn't want armed Kosovars running loose in Albania. So, he set up a training camp... but also periodically busted UCK's leaders and threw them into Albanian jail for a little while, just to get the point across.

(This actually seems to have worked. But once Berisha went down, the new government had almost no control over the wild North of Albania, and UCK could do as it pleased.)

Three, it helped shake the Kosovars loose from Rugova. For years, they'd been secretly dreaming that Albania would come to their rescue. After all, it was a real country, with an army and everything! Seeing the Albanian state collapse, and the Albanian army disintegrate like wet paper, helped convince ordinary Kosovars that they'd have to help themselves.

The net result of this was that UCK was able to drastically expand its operations in autumn and winter of 1997. And the result of /that/was that, starting in March 1998, the Serbian state responded with ever more brutal and heavy-handed crackdowns... massacres, burning villages, you name it.

This led directly to the Drenica massacre of Adem Jashari and his family, which caused support for UCK to explode yet again. By autumn 1998 there were roughly twenty _thousand_ UCK/KLA fighters in Kosovo, and the Serbs, increasingly desperate, were on their way to full-blown ethnic cleansing.

By this time UCK had become a serious guerrilla force. They had codes and procedures, a radio station and a news agency, offices, officers, and a general staff. They had Kosovo divided into seven operational zones.

(Students of Yugoslav history may find some of this strangely familiar. Deliberately or not, by 1998-99 the KLA bore more than a passing resemblance to Tito's WWII Partisans. Not too surprising, when you consider that everyone in Yugoslavia grew up watching Partisan war movies and reading about Partisan campaigns in school.)

All of this required money, and some of that money came from pretty dubious sources: drug dealing, smuggling, human trafficking and forced prostitution.

This is because by 1998, Albanian "clans" had pushed out older Italian and Turkish gangs in the heroin and cocaine trade all over Europe. (Some of these clans evolved directly out of the old Albanian Communist Secret Police, the Sigurimi. When Communism fell in Albania, the Sigurimi simply shifted gears and almost overnight converted themselves into Europe's newest organized crime family.) Many of the "clans" were major contributors to the KLA. And there's little doubt that the KLA leadership knew where this money was coming from.

On the other hand, there's also little doubt that the KLA itself wasn't in the drug business. The clans might be willing to support the KLA in the name of Albanian freedom, but they would have never let it take over any of their territory or profits. The KLA received donations from drug lords, but it does not seem to have peddled drugs itself... not because of moral scruples, but because that niche was already occupied.

The drug money was only part of the flow of cash. Albanians in the diaspora also contributed millions. The "Homeland Calling" fund, operating in Europe and America, raised huge amounts of cash for the KLA; diasporids also purchased guns, radios, and other supplies as needed.

So, by the time of the NATO bombing, the KLA was a fully mature and functional guerrilla organization. And in its own eyes, it was the legitimate government of Kosovo before ever the first NATO soldier crossed the border.

This would have consequences for the subsequent history of Kosovo.

Rashomon in the Balkans

Or, we still don't know who tried to kill Radovan Papovic.

Here's a really obscure bit of Balkan history. On January 16, 1997, at about 8:00 in the morning, Radovan Papovic was driving to his job as rector of the Serb University of Pristina. The Serb University was what Pristina University turned into after the Serbs took over in 1990. Pristina University had been an Albanian school with no Serbs; SUP was -- you guessed it -- a Serb school with no Albanians.

(Of course, since the province was 90% Albanian, there weren't enough Serbs to fill the classrooms. So most of the Serbian students were from elsewhere in Serbia, brought in by free housing and other subsidies. But that's another story.)

Papovic seems to have been a pretty obnoxious character. He was a Member of Parliament for the right-wing nationalist Serbian Radical Party. He saw his job as cleansing the University of the Albanian taint and re-colonising Kosovo with eager young Serbs. He seems to have loathed and disliked Albanians -- he referred to them as "enemies" and "monsters" -- and to have gone out of his way to antagonize them. It was his administration that donated the university quad for the "church built in anger".

Needless to say, the Albanians returned the sentiment. Papovic was one of the most hated Serbs in Kosovo. Which, in 1997, was saying something.

So, he's driving to work one morning, and -- kaBOOM! -- a bomb goes off in a car nearby. A big one: an estimated 10 kilos of dynamite, detonated by remote control. Both the bomb car and Papovic's sedan were totally destroyed. By a fluke, both Papovic and his driver just barely managed to survive, though both men were badly injured.

But who had planted the bomb?

Background: a couple of things were happening around this time that helped make the whole business murkier.

One, there had been municipal elections in Serbia a couple of months earlier... and Milosevic's Socialist Party had done shockingly badly. They'd lost many towns, including Belgrade. When Milosevic refused to recognize the results of the elections, there were massive street protests and demonstrations against him.

Two, Milosevic had been negotiating, in his usual coy on-again, off-again way, with the Albanians. Specifically, he'd been negotiating with Ibrahim Rugova (the pacifist leader of the Albanians) about re-opening some Albanian language classes at the University. Surprisingly, the two had reached an agreement, and it was due to be implemented; Albanians were supposed to come back to the University sometime in 1997.

Papovic, of course, absolutely hated this idea. He seems to have considered Albanians a particularly dangerous sort of subhuman: gypsies with guns. He had zero interest in carrying out Milosevic's compromise.

(Of course, Milosevic may not have wanted it, either. He lied a lot, and it would have been perfectly in character for him to sign an agreement he had no intention of implementing.)

It's important to note, BTW, that Milosevic was not an absolute dictator. Strongman, party boss, with all sorts of ways to enforce his will, but his power was not even close to absolute. So a recalcitrant university rector could cause him some trouble.

So. Whodunit?

Here's a quote from Stacy Sullivan's excellent book on Kosovo, Be Not Afraid, For You Have Sons in America.

Serb newspapers reported immediately that the attempt on Papovic's life was the work of "Shiptar secessionists", and the KLA promptly took credit for the terrorist attack, saying that the rector was a "sworn enemy of the Albanian people". But Milosevic, who wanted to discredit the tens of thousands of demonstrators still threatening his rule, claimed that the blast was the work of the "hoodlums and criminals" who had organized the protests in Belgrade and wanted to destabilize Serbia. The Serb mayor of Pristina, who wanted to discredit both the Albanians and the demonstrators, claimed that the Albanian terrorists had planted the bombs with support from the demonstrators. And finally, the demonstrators claimed that Milosevic and his cronies had planted the bomb in an attempt to draw attention away from the protests by destabilizing Kosovo...

Rugova pointed out that the KLA's fax claiming responsibility for the attack was written in Albanian so grammatically incorrect that it could not possibly have been composed by a native speaker. The opposition leaders in Belgrade pointed out that planting a remote controlled bomb was not in keeping with previous KLA operations; this was a far more sophisticated operation that required military or police expertise.

Sullivan's right as far as she goes, but I'd add a couple of points. One, it's pretty ridiculous to think the demonstrators had anything to do with it... most of them were hundreds of miles away, and there's zero evidence that any of them had the expertise to pull something like this off. Two, there are at least a couple of additional suspects.

Someone close to Milosevic, in the secret police or paramilitaries, may have done it in order to sabotage the agreement with the Albanians. That may sound odd, to wreck an agreement by attacking its loudest enemy; but if you turn that enemy into a martyr, it can work. And as it turned out, the attack on Papovic was indeed used as an excuse to shut down the agreement.

Finally, someone on the Serb side may have wanted to take out Papovic himself. The Serbian Radical Party was deeply intertwined with gangsters on one side, and paramilitary killers on the other. They had some fairly nasty internal rivalries. And Papovic doesn't seem to have been a very lovable character. In this version, the point is to kill Papovic; trashing the educational agreement was just gravy.

So. Do we know?

Nope. And we probably never will.

I hate to be anticlimactic, but that's sort of the point. The 1990s were a dark time in the former Yugoslavia. There are a lot of mysteries that won't be solved for years; there are a lot that will never be solved.

That doesn't mean there aren't lessons to be learned from this little episode, of course. Here's an obvious one: in a guerrilla war, everyone is a target. It's not just that people are shooting and bombing. It's that someone may decide to take you out for reasons completely unconnected to the war, and then blame it on the other side.

Anyway. It's an obscure episode, but it did make a difference. The agreement collapsed; no Albanians went back to school. Rugova, and his policy of peaceful negotiation, were to some extent discredited. So Kosovo was pushed that much closer to the war that would come in 1998 and 1999.

-- Papovic? Oh, he survived, and he's still around.

You may remember us blogging about Serbia's awful Minister of Education last year? The unpleasant nationalist one who wanted to introduce creationism into the school curriculum?

Well, she resigned. But before she did that, she appointed Papovic -- who had survived the NATO bombing and escaped from Pristina before the fall -- to run the Serb University of Mitrovica. Which is, you may recall, the northern 10% or so of Kosovo, the part that's almost entirely Serbian now.

Papovic has run this just about the way you'd expect: firing staff and professors, replacing them with cronies and people who share his hardline views. This being Mitrovica, he's pretty popular -- people there view him as a hard man, a hero who survived being singled out for death by the hated KLA.

Which is fine, except that Papovic seems to be really horrible at actually running a university. (I know. Who would have guessed?) He's so blatantly awful that the European University Association has suspended Mitrovica's accreditation, and ordered a boycott of the school.

So there will be no exchange programs, no visiting professors, no give and take with the wider European world. And the students at Mitrovica, already going to school in the poorest part of a poor country, will be even more isolated than they already are.

I suppose I should try to tell a Kosovo story with a happy ending some time.

Spiderman -- with muscles!

Here is our picture of the day. Alan in his Spiderman costume - and he's got muscles!

To see a larger version of this picture, click here.

One cup a day

I'm drinking one cup of coffee per day.

Some of you may recall that I went off coffee altogether back in July. This was not a great success. So, after forty days, I went back on it again -- but only allowed myself a single cup per day.

This has been a success. Sort of.

The good news is, I'm getting about 90% of the good effect with maybe 20% of the caffeine. As long as I have that one cup, I'm not usually sluggish, absent-minded, or just plain stupid. (Or no more so than usual.) The difference between one cup and no cups is very striking... when I went off coffee altogether this past summer, I spent five weeks in a state of seriously reduced competence.

The less good news is, I still get cravings. Alarmingly strong ones, sometimes.

Still, I'm pretty satisfied with the one-a-day regime. It's "my addiction is under control" rather than "I'm not addicted", but I'm okay with that. Maybe I'll try to go off again when the baby starts sleeping through the night. Maybe.

Meanwhile, consider this an open thread. What do you guys want to talk about?

(And what do you want to see more of? Baby pictures? Obscure bits of Balkan history? Kosovo? We're service-oriented here at HDtD, so please let us know.)

Hell's iPod

So I have a new twist on insomnia: waking up in the middle of the night with songs running through my head and a headache. The top three:

Convoy, C.W. McCall

Der Kommissar, After the Fire

Peach, Plum, Pear, Joanna Newsom

You tell me.

Meanwhile, back in Romania

Because we do still live here, and not in Kosovo or Albania.

Things that are going on here:

-- It was National Day yesterday, and we managed to miss the big parade for the third year in a row. Boooo.

In our defense, it was miserable weather again... chilly rain falling in sheets from a steely sky. Not to ring the American bell, but there is something to be said for having the national patriotic holiday in the summer.

-- Condoleeza Rice is coming to town next week, to sign a treaty allowing the construction of US bases here in Romania. This has been in the air for a while now, but it's finally going to happen. Base construction will start next year.

-- Meanwhile, potential scandal continues to simmer around the issue of secret CIA bases in Romania. Many of you may recall that, a few weeks back, the Washington Post broke a story about the CIA using unnamed "Eastern European countries" to detain terror suspects -- holding them without trial and (everyone assumes) torturing them.

But while there are some very suspicious records of CIA flights in and out of Romania, there's no smoking gun: nobody can point to such a base, nor has anyone come forward and testified that it exists. And without hard evidence, it looks like this one is going to blow over.

-- Romania's projected economic growth for 2005 will be around 4.5%. This is not bad, but it's the lowest since 2001; the average 2001-2004 was over 6%, and last year saw a blazing 8.3% growth rate.

Growth has slowed in part because of the terrible floods this past summer. Agriculture is a big part of Romania's GDP, and the floods (and accompanying bad weather) probably knocked 2% off GDP. Also, several important Romanian exports -- things like steel and concrete -- saw prices level off or fall in 2005. And the strong leu has slowed export growth.

But it may also be that Romania has picked all the "low hanging fruit" in terms of economic reforms, and that growth will slow unless deeper changes are made. We won't know for a while yet.

Me? I'm cautiously optimistic. It looks like most of Eastern Europe had a weakish year. Several of Romania's neighbors -- Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary -- saw a drop of 1%-2% in growth since last year. The projection for next year is around 5.5%, and that hasn't changed.

And that was the Friday news update from Romania.

The Church Built in Anger

There are a lot of ruined churches in and around Pristina.

(Ruined Orthodox churches, that is. About 50,000 Kosovar Albanians are Catholic, so there are a couple of nice little Catholic churches. Nobody bothered them.)

Short version: when the Serbian armed forces pulled out of Kosovo in 1999, the Albanians rose up in wrath and attacked the Orthodox churches and monasteries. Many of the churches they attacked were hundreds of years old. Some were treasure houses of art... medieval frescoes, Byzantine mosaics, beautiful carved icons going back hundreds of years. The Albanians attacked them all, damaging most and destroying many, smashing, burning and spraying the interior with bullets.

Then, in March 2004, they did it again. About a dozen more churches were attacked, and several were effectively destroyed.

The list of damaged churches is long, and it makes for depressing reading. Few of them have been repaired or rebuilt. Drive in from Pristina Airport, and you can see one just off the road; it's surrounded by barbed wire. Even the churches that survived -- like the magnificent Italo-Byzantine monastery at Gracanica -- have stayed intact only because they're surrounded by heavily armed soldiers from KFOR.

That's the short version, and it's accurate as far as it goes. But -- this being the Balkans, where truth is fractal -- it's more complicated than that.

Right in the center of Pristina, just across from the library, is a large Orthodox church. And I mean large: it's about 25 meters or 80 feet tall, and could probably hold a thousand people.

It's unfinished, this church. Just a brick shell, with empty holes for the doors and windows, and a big golden cross on top. But even unfinished, you can see that it was never going to be beautiful. Orthodox churches tend to look squat and fortress-like to Westerners. But even indexing that out, this church was really... well, squat and fortress-like. It looks like a big ruined bunker.

This church is known to the Serbs as the Church of Christ the Savior, Pristina. The Albanians have a different name for it: they call it "the church built in anger".

To understand what's up with this church, I have to digress for a moent to talk about Pristina University. Bear with me.

Pristina University was founded in 1970, and the Albanians were very proud of it. By 1989 it had over 22,000 students, which was not bad for a province of just 2 million people. And it was an Albanian university; over 90% of the students and faculty were Albanian

When Milosevic took over Kosovo, purging the University was almost his very first act. It was a hotbed of Albanian nationalism, no question; he may also have thought that shutting it down would cripple Albanian political development. Whatever the reason, within two years 90% of the faculty and 98% of the students had left or been expelled.

What remained was a much smaller skeleton of a university, populated entirely by Serbs. Albanians simply disappeared from the campus. Hardline Serb nationalists took over the administration, and a semester or two teaching at Pristina U. became a badge of honor for a certain sort of Serbian academic.

So when the Orthodox Church asked the University for land to build a church, the Serb nationalist administration was happy to oblige. They gave them the university's only large green space, right in the middle: what a British American college would call the Quad.

The Serbs broke ground in 1998. But they hadn't finished by the time of the NATO bombing campaign. So when Belgrade lost control, the church was still unfinished. Someone tried to dynamite it in July 1999, in the chaotic days just after the NATO victory. But the bunker-like appearance is not misleading. The church withstood the attack.

KFOR warned the Albanian leadership sharply not to try that again. The church might be ugly, it might be unfinished, it might be sitting on one of the last pieces of open space in central Pristina, but having it blown up would be just too embarrassing. (And probably a public menace, too; charges big enough to destroy it, laid by unskilled hands, would probably throw pieces of brick and concrete all over the downtown.)

So, for six and a half years, there it has stood. At one point someone moved some Roma refugees into the "quad" area; the Roma used part of the church as a shelter and part of it as a toilet, which led to pretty much the sorts of stories you'd expect.)

The university wants its quad back, and wants the church torn down. No one, they point out, has ever used it. And the Serb community doesn't need it; nobody knows how many Serbs are left in Pristina (they keep a very low profile), but it's not more than a couple of hundred.

Various compromise plans have been floated, such as turning the church into a museum or some such. Nobody's been able to agree.

-- It turns out the Church Built in Anger is far from unique. That list I linked to? If you actually read through it, you'll notice that a number of those churcheswere built during the 1990s. Since the Serb population of Kosovo was not exactly booming during these years, it seems reasonable to assume that these, too, were built more for nationalist than religious reasons.

(I noticed one church that was built in 1992 "as a foundation of the Karic family". I'm pretty sure that has to be Milosevic crony Bogoljub Karic. The Karic family was from Kosovo originally.)

From what I've been able to tell, this seems to be another issue that that Albanians and Serbs can't talk about.

The Albanians insist that all the churches were political. Even the ones that dated back to medieval times, they say, were centers of Serb nationalism, used for political purposes as much as religious. I haven't been able to get an Albanian to admit that some, at least, were real religious centers. Nor that destroying centuries-old churches and religious art was an appalling act of cultural vandalism.

The Serbs, meanwhile, insist that their victimhood is absolute. All their churches, even the ugly shell of the unfinished Church of Christ, were churches , dammit. No exceptions: the Albanians are just barbarians. What kind of savage bombs, burns, loots harmless churches?

Meanwhile the Church of Christ the Savior just sits there. Students have worn trails in the grass around it; pigeons nest inside. Eventually erosion will bring it down if nothing else does. But that may take a while.