ISSUE XXXVIII January 2025
Balkan Poetry edition
edited by Rui Cóias
THE BALKANS
GEOGRAPHY, MEMORY, POETRY
by
Rui Cóias
It is difficult to define an image of the Balkans, or even a map, or a beginning in the West and a limit in the Southeast.
What are the Balkans, where do they begin and where do they end, what memory do they leave us and what is carved in our eyes and our memory?
They start at the Lubjlana bridge, as in the famous video by Slavoj Žižek, which many of us have already performed under the grayish and cold fog, like burnt paper, of the city from where we can see the Julian Alps and then, beyond, the lands of Carinthia, in Lower Austria? Or Slovenia, however, is still part of the Central European axis, as defined, in an ellipse, by the words of Tony Judt.
Where do the Balkans begin and end?
In Istanbul (Constantinople), along the pale streets in the night, in the remote and secret neighborhoods visited by Gautier and which reflect the presence of something missing, something lost and fluttering through the smoke of the Bosphorus steamers?
On the Black Sea, in Tomi (Romania), where the poet Ovid died in exile and completely alone?
What shape, what strange entity, that hovers within us as a poetic disposition that evokes passions, landscapes, disappointments and a destiny that attracts a crossroads of ruins and History, constitutes the Balkans? (whose word means “mountains”, originating from Turkish expressions).
If we look at a map or a territory in this way, and listen to the voices so that we can merge our state of mind with our life, there is no other center, other than ourselves, other than the old postcards of the Balkans, there is no part of Europe more melancholically sung than this path of endless pleasures, where the East, the West, Asia, the Empires, Russia, all the marks and frontiers that allow us to love what is left behind, cross us --
I had to step up at the far
end of the Stone Bridge
to climb on the left
bank of the Vardar River
why I have to remember
stalls and vendors
near the Triple Bridge
in Ljubljana nasal voice
of a young man on the middle
bridge one moment he is
a beggar then agitator and
performer nervous and restless
I'm thinking about all that
again in almost empty bus
as we are waiting for admittance
on the border crossing
Miloš Djurdjević (Croatia)
Like poetry itself, or the very words from which beauty springs, everything else is fixed as if illuminated in a mysterious twilight, or under the sun that strikes the brilliant Adriatic (as melodiously described by Predrag Matvezevitch), like all these travels which, in the end, can only be consolations for all our sufferings --
But, the sea is still somehow calm.
Adriatic is being silent with us.
It’s as if suddeny there is hope. The sea is really calm
and lonely lighthouses announce different days.
The illusion of someone’s unexpected arrival.
Pavle Goranović (Montenegro)
Consolations for all our pasts, for all our presents.
All the mountains, roads, villages topped with minarets, and bridges, as described by the great bosnian writer, Ivo Andrić.
From the Danube to the Dardanelles, the Balkans are at the same time the gusts of Crivat or the Bora winds, beating on the oppressive Romanian plains of Wallachia (Panaït Istrati) or from the Northwest; cutting winds in the anonymous points of the lands of the Rumeli, Ottomans, Slavs by where I have been, and which are subdivided into dialects, regions, black or blond hairs, kings, hajduks, migrations, poems as hard as Cadmus' teeth scattered and impossible to group, just like the provinces, borders and territories themselves.
I saw it in North Macedonia, and in Vojvodina, in the unforgettable hinterlands of Herzegovina, where solitude grows and perpetuates itself in the spikes of the hills, and in the great, crushed eyes, as well as in the ballads that allude to catastrophes, lost loves, and defeats.
Before whose door did you leave me to despair
With a body that cannot fly and a soul that like smoke drifts
Why didn’t you leave on the cruel Herzegovian mountain
That even on St. Elias’s Day is covered with hoarfrost.
Mile Stojić (Bosnia e Herzegovina)
When we talk about this, about this uncertain geography, are we not really talking, in essence, about memory and, therefore, about its and our own understanding, through poems?
Yes, without an artisan’s knowledge, all
is doubly lost.
As presence & as memory.
Let these hours now gush up
The challenge is the passing:
To find a way to pass through
even a buttonhole, no
Not so you advance, but so that you
Take place.
Katerina Iliopoulou (Greece)
Where do the Balkans really begin and end?
In Romania, but with less massacred feelings, in Oltenia, with disparate feelings, the same ones that perhaps devastate the North, Bukovina, Bessarabia, and then finally the border, the limit, with greater Russia, on the Dniester River, where they prayed the Latins along the peasant paths?
In Moldova, which definitely belongs to the East, or in Transylvania, Hungarian and Romanian, which is mixed with the West?
And Greece, tumultuous and yet eternal comforter of our doubts, serene and impossibly blue and sweet, is it not itself the great mouth of the Balkan volcano?
And, in the end, how can we speak of Bulgaria, from the distant depths of the Carpatho-Balkan-Byzantine community?
To try to speak easily about the Balkans, we have to do so mainly from the outside, as foreigners, a bit like the travelers who arrived in Constantinople in the 19th century, to melancholically evoke Ruskin's “picturesque” in the destroyed and hidden neighborhoods, like the feeling that the historical remains and ruins awaken in the inhabitants, is not how we, who come from outside, as Walter Benjamin wrote, really see it.
Stories of places, loves and wars, rivers from the springs of the Julian Alps; the Sava and the icy water of resounding light and deep shadows; physical borders and imaginary lines, ardent Bosnian ballads, Sevdalinkas (which comes from the Turkish word sevda, or from the Arabic sawda; longing, from the Portuguese saudade) or the song of the Muezzin and the beautiful and unattainable melody — pursued by Byron, Nerval, Rebecca West, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Mathias Énard — that haunts us side by side with the choirs of the monks of Ohrid and Bitola in the mystical darkness of the Orthodox churches, where we still contemplate the icons of the Archangel Saint Michael, as fugitives from the world.
After all, of many ideas of Europe, the Balkans are Europe itself; even since the apostle Saint Paul and the medieval kingdoms, layer upon layer, they are a destiny and a cartography; peninsulas and regions, from solar Istria, as the name suggests, to Moldavia and the Black Sea, to Illyria (Dalmatia and Albania), Thrace (Greece and Bulgaria), to Zadar, Sarajevo — embedded in the hills of the great existential interiority — to Korce, Skopje , Belgrade, Bucharest, Sofia, Istanbul, Balkans are the ruins of centuries and civilizations.
Fast is the century. We survive the weak earthquakes
watching towards the sky, yet not towards the ground.
We open the windows to let in the air
of the places we have never been.
Wars don't exist,
since someone wounds our heart every day.
Fast is the century.
Faster than the word.
If I were dead, everyone would have believed me
when I kept silent.
Nikola Madzirov (North Macedonia)
For me, who always loved the Balkans, I have the impression that many beginnings, and faces that I have known and met again throughout my life, and streets, central stations, shadowy cafes and ochre and orange buildings — which seems to come from Central Europe, from Slovakia — everything leads, as Claudio Magris says, to this indefinable love for the Balkan world, the distant world of the Carpathians, the flow of the waters of the Vardar, the Drina, to the lakes and arid mountains carved under the phosphorescent heat of August.
All the poems and all the songs tell us about this search and redemption, almost like a primitive, medieval (orthodox) Christianity. There is an imponderable cause that crystallizes our search; destiny, determination, return, whatever it may be, or, a place to which we link the idea of isolation, anxiety, something that haunts us, that always follows us. As if we were weaving a map, something we follow and, in the closed valleys, cut out at an almost ideal distance in the lakes of Prespa (Albania), as the shadow we leave surrounds us --
My father was not a sorcerer, but he could see things that the rest of us could not see. He spent his humble life as a seaman sailing the Mediterranean coasts. What especially caught his eye on these voyages was not the people of the coasts or the mountainous landscapes, which, to his surprise, had made the emptiness even more profound, nor was it the endless waters or the skies that seemed, for the most part, to be slumbering in the dark. Being a seaman in communist Albania meant that you were given the opportunity — one that was quite limited — of seeing things that others would never see. What mattered to us was not what the sailors exported to those shores; what was important was what they brought home. But what did my father get home from those journeys? Silence. Mostly.
When I asked him to tell me one of the most amazing things he had seen, he said it had been the lights. “The lights of the harbors where we could never go ashore, and the lights of the ships that we passed and hailed ceremoniously from a distance, exchanging volleys of signal lights as if we were at war.” Over time, my father’s silence became more profound, but I continued to see the Mediterranean lights through his eyes.
Arian Leka (Albania)
I did not know it, but it is true that as night hangs over the waters of the black Drin traveling northwards, in Macedonia and Albania, the voices call to us, the adhan and the Orthodox choirs, facing the gutted and bare facades of buildings, the dimmed lights of the inner streets as if it were this appeal that refined the poems or, impassively, was their maximum beauty or, obviously, the ultimate destiny of the words.
Where did this mid-May snow in Sarajevo come from?
It looks as though the weather is acquiring people’s bad habits.
Everything in history repeats, say the men at the pub.
The Balkans are a swollen vein
which Europe slices open every few decades
to purify its aging blood.
Aksinia Mihaylova (Bulgaria)
For all I have seen, for all I have thought, for all the Balkans and all the winds, steps of minarets and accumulated ruins and traces of happiness and then under the compositions of uzún (Turkish) that will devastate us, for me personally, the publication of this issue of Verseville — dedicated to the Balkans — constitutes a very important step, a map, a landmark, certainly a moment of life, a silent splendor of the Balkan soul, the wonder of an axiom that, before us, moves us and makes words suspend themselves to the point where they almost stop.
But isn't that the meaning, what we want to achieve, the one who sows his seed, poetry, into the earth and into life?
Wouldn't be this amirror, a reflection of time and, above all, of the landscape that surrounds us, as if by speaking of it, we were speaking of ourselves?
Love, a lost Balkan land,
oh queen, wearing your name
like a wooden shield, masked as a shadow
I roamed sounds’ domain
Spent my life in bitter myrrh
Unaware as well of death’s value
while I lived it was a dark tattoo
the golden rune of joy on my brow
Gökçenur Ç (Turkey)
For all this, my deep gratitude to the authors, poets, essayists, from Slovenia, Serbia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Greece, North Macedonia, Turkey, Romania, Albania.
I would also like to remember, with special emotion, the Bulgarian composer and musician Milen Panayotov, from whom I learned a lot about the Balkans, about his beloved Bulgaria, as we talked on the still evenings looking from the terraces of Kavala at the black, velvety waters of the Aegean, with the island of Thasos on the horizon of discoveries, of youth, of Greece, and of the martyred future.
I would also like to mention the Serbian poet Miodrag Jakšić, a friend of Emir Kusturica, and the stories he told during kafana nights, endless nights of excessive sounds and dances, like the Balkans themselves, their life and their History, his life always dedicated to friendship, authors, culture, words, peace, the true Balkan spirit and, therefore, European spirit.
I also mention, with friendship and admiration, the presence over the years of the great Bulgarian poet, Aksinia Mihaylova, as well as Ion Deaconescu, a great figure of Romanian and european culture.
Finally, I cannot fail to mention and thank Sonnet Mondal, editor in charge of Verseville, for the opportunity of this edition and for her magnificent international work promoting poetry and poets.
GEOGRAPHY, MEMORY, POETRY
by
Rui Cóias
It is difficult to define an image of the Balkans, or even a map, or a beginning in the West and a limit in the Southeast.
What are the Balkans, where do they begin and where do they end, what memory do they leave us and what is carved in our eyes and our memory?
They start at the Lubjlana bridge, as in the famous video by Slavoj Žižek, which many of us have already performed under the grayish and cold fog, like burnt paper, of the city from where we can see the Julian Alps and then, beyond, the lands of Carinthia, in Lower Austria? Or Slovenia, however, is still part of the Central European axis, as defined, in an ellipse, by the words of Tony Judt.
Where do the Balkans begin and end?
In Istanbul (Constantinople), along the pale streets in the night, in the remote and secret neighborhoods visited by Gautier and which reflect the presence of something missing, something lost and fluttering through the smoke of the Bosphorus steamers?
On the Black Sea, in Tomi (Romania), where the poet Ovid died in exile and completely alone?
What shape, what strange entity, that hovers within us as a poetic disposition that evokes passions, landscapes, disappointments and a destiny that attracts a crossroads of ruins and History, constitutes the Balkans? (whose word means “mountains”, originating from Turkish expressions).
If we look at a map or a territory in this way, and listen to the voices so that we can merge our state of mind with our life, there is no other center, other than ourselves, other than the old postcards of the Balkans, there is no part of Europe more melancholically sung than this path of endless pleasures, where the East, the West, Asia, the Empires, Russia, all the marks and frontiers that allow us to love what is left behind, cross us --
I had to step up at the far
end of the Stone Bridge
to climb on the left
bank of the Vardar River
why I have to remember
stalls and vendors
near the Triple Bridge
in Ljubljana nasal voice
of a young man on the middle
bridge one moment he is
a beggar then agitator and
performer nervous and restless
I'm thinking about all that
again in almost empty bus
as we are waiting for admittance
on the border crossing
Miloš Djurdjević (Croatia)
Like poetry itself, or the very words from which beauty springs, everything else is fixed as if illuminated in a mysterious twilight, or under the sun that strikes the brilliant Adriatic (as melodiously described by Predrag Matvezevitch), like all these travels which, in the end, can only be consolations for all our sufferings --
But, the sea is still somehow calm.
Adriatic is being silent with us.
It’s as if suddeny there is hope. The sea is really calm
and lonely lighthouses announce different days.
The illusion of someone’s unexpected arrival.
Pavle Goranović (Montenegro)
Consolations for all our pasts, for all our presents.
All the mountains, roads, villages topped with minarets, and bridges, as described by the great bosnian writer, Ivo Andrić.
From the Danube to the Dardanelles, the Balkans are at the same time the gusts of Crivat or the Bora winds, beating on the oppressive Romanian plains of Wallachia (Panaït Istrati) or from the Northwest; cutting winds in the anonymous points of the lands of the Rumeli, Ottomans, Slavs by where I have been, and which are subdivided into dialects, regions, black or blond hairs, kings, hajduks, migrations, poems as hard as Cadmus' teeth scattered and impossible to group, just like the provinces, borders and territories themselves.
I saw it in North Macedonia, and in Vojvodina, in the unforgettable hinterlands of Herzegovina, where solitude grows and perpetuates itself in the spikes of the hills, and in the great, crushed eyes, as well as in the ballads that allude to catastrophes, lost loves, and defeats.
Before whose door did you leave me to despair
With a body that cannot fly and a soul that like smoke drifts
Why didn’t you leave on the cruel Herzegovian mountain
That even on St. Elias’s Day is covered with hoarfrost.
Mile Stojić (Bosnia e Herzegovina)
When we talk about this, about this uncertain geography, are we not really talking, in essence, about memory and, therefore, about its and our own understanding, through poems?
Yes, without an artisan’s knowledge, all
is doubly lost.
As presence & as memory.
Let these hours now gush up
The challenge is the passing:
To find a way to pass through
even a buttonhole, no
Not so you advance, but so that you
Take place.
Katerina Iliopoulou (Greece)
Where do the Balkans really begin and end?
In Romania, but with less massacred feelings, in Oltenia, with disparate feelings, the same ones that perhaps devastate the North, Bukovina, Bessarabia, and then finally the border, the limit, with greater Russia, on the Dniester River, where they prayed the Latins along the peasant paths?
In Moldova, which definitely belongs to the East, or in Transylvania, Hungarian and Romanian, which is mixed with the West?
And Greece, tumultuous and yet eternal comforter of our doubts, serene and impossibly blue and sweet, is it not itself the great mouth of the Balkan volcano?
And, in the end, how can we speak of Bulgaria, from the distant depths of the Carpatho-Balkan-Byzantine community?
To try to speak easily about the Balkans, we have to do so mainly from the outside, as foreigners, a bit like the travelers who arrived in Constantinople in the 19th century, to melancholically evoke Ruskin's “picturesque” in the destroyed and hidden neighborhoods, like the feeling that the historical remains and ruins awaken in the inhabitants, is not how we, who come from outside, as Walter Benjamin wrote, really see it.
Stories of places, loves and wars, rivers from the springs of the Julian Alps; the Sava and the icy water of resounding light and deep shadows; physical borders and imaginary lines, ardent Bosnian ballads, Sevdalinkas (which comes from the Turkish word sevda, or from the Arabic sawda; longing, from the Portuguese saudade) or the song of the Muezzin and the beautiful and unattainable melody — pursued by Byron, Nerval, Rebecca West, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Mathias Énard — that haunts us side by side with the choirs of the monks of Ohrid and Bitola in the mystical darkness of the Orthodox churches, where we still contemplate the icons of the Archangel Saint Michael, as fugitives from the world.
After all, of many ideas of Europe, the Balkans are Europe itself; even since the apostle Saint Paul and the medieval kingdoms, layer upon layer, they are a destiny and a cartography; peninsulas and regions, from solar Istria, as the name suggests, to Moldavia and the Black Sea, to Illyria (Dalmatia and Albania), Thrace (Greece and Bulgaria), to Zadar, Sarajevo — embedded in the hills of the great existential interiority — to Korce, Skopje , Belgrade, Bucharest, Sofia, Istanbul, Balkans are the ruins of centuries and civilizations.
Fast is the century. We survive the weak earthquakes
watching towards the sky, yet not towards the ground.
We open the windows to let in the air
of the places we have never been.
Wars don't exist,
since someone wounds our heart every day.
Fast is the century.
Faster than the word.
If I were dead, everyone would have believed me
when I kept silent.
Nikola Madzirov (North Macedonia)
For me, who always loved the Balkans, I have the impression that many beginnings, and faces that I have known and met again throughout my life, and streets, central stations, shadowy cafes and ochre and orange buildings — which seems to come from Central Europe, from Slovakia — everything leads, as Claudio Magris says, to this indefinable love for the Balkan world, the distant world of the Carpathians, the flow of the waters of the Vardar, the Drina, to the lakes and arid mountains carved under the phosphorescent heat of August.
All the poems and all the songs tell us about this search and redemption, almost like a primitive, medieval (orthodox) Christianity. There is an imponderable cause that crystallizes our search; destiny, determination, return, whatever it may be, or, a place to which we link the idea of isolation, anxiety, something that haunts us, that always follows us. As if we were weaving a map, something we follow and, in the closed valleys, cut out at an almost ideal distance in the lakes of Prespa (Albania), as the shadow we leave surrounds us --
My father was not a sorcerer, but he could see things that the rest of us could not see. He spent his humble life as a seaman sailing the Mediterranean coasts. What especially caught his eye on these voyages was not the people of the coasts or the mountainous landscapes, which, to his surprise, had made the emptiness even more profound, nor was it the endless waters or the skies that seemed, for the most part, to be slumbering in the dark. Being a seaman in communist Albania meant that you were given the opportunity — one that was quite limited — of seeing things that others would never see. What mattered to us was not what the sailors exported to those shores; what was important was what they brought home. But what did my father get home from those journeys? Silence. Mostly.
When I asked him to tell me one of the most amazing things he had seen, he said it had been the lights. “The lights of the harbors where we could never go ashore, and the lights of the ships that we passed and hailed ceremoniously from a distance, exchanging volleys of signal lights as if we were at war.” Over time, my father’s silence became more profound, but I continued to see the Mediterranean lights through his eyes.
Arian Leka (Albania)
I did not know it, but it is true that as night hangs over the waters of the black Drin traveling northwards, in Macedonia and Albania, the voices call to us, the adhan and the Orthodox choirs, facing the gutted and bare facades of buildings, the dimmed lights of the inner streets as if it were this appeal that refined the poems or, impassively, was their maximum beauty or, obviously, the ultimate destiny of the words.
Where did this mid-May snow in Sarajevo come from?
It looks as though the weather is acquiring people’s bad habits.
Everything in history repeats, say the men at the pub.
The Balkans are a swollen vein
which Europe slices open every few decades
to purify its aging blood.
Aksinia Mihaylova (Bulgaria)
For all I have seen, for all I have thought, for all the Balkans and all the winds, steps of minarets and accumulated ruins and traces of happiness and then under the compositions of uzún (Turkish) that will devastate us, for me personally, the publication of this issue of Verseville — dedicated to the Balkans — constitutes a very important step, a map, a landmark, certainly a moment of life, a silent splendor of the Balkan soul, the wonder of an axiom that, before us, moves us and makes words suspend themselves to the point where they almost stop.
But isn't that the meaning, what we want to achieve, the one who sows his seed, poetry, into the earth and into life?
Wouldn't be this amirror, a reflection of time and, above all, of the landscape that surrounds us, as if by speaking of it, we were speaking of ourselves?
Love, a lost Balkan land,
oh queen, wearing your name
like a wooden shield, masked as a shadow
I roamed sounds’ domain
Spent my life in bitter myrrh
Unaware as well of death’s value
while I lived it was a dark tattoo
the golden rune of joy on my brow
Gökçenur Ç (Turkey)
For all this, my deep gratitude to the authors, poets, essayists, from Slovenia, Serbia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Greece, North Macedonia, Turkey, Romania, Albania.
I would also like to remember, with special emotion, the Bulgarian composer and musician Milen Panayotov, from whom I learned a lot about the Balkans, about his beloved Bulgaria, as we talked on the still evenings looking from the terraces of Kavala at the black, velvety waters of the Aegean, with the island of Thasos on the horizon of discoveries, of youth, of Greece, and of the martyred future.
I would also like to mention the Serbian poet Miodrag Jakšić, a friend of Emir Kusturica, and the stories he told during kafana nights, endless nights of excessive sounds and dances, like the Balkans themselves, their life and their History, his life always dedicated to friendship, authors, culture, words, peace, the true Balkan spirit and, therefore, European spirit.
I also mention, with friendship and admiration, the presence over the years of the great Bulgarian poet, Aksinia Mihaylova, as well as Ion Deaconescu, a great figure of Romanian and european culture.
Finally, I cannot fail to mention and thank Sonnet Mondal, editor in charge of Verseville, for the opportunity of this edition and for her magnificent international work promoting poetry and poets.
