I forgot to pay my internet bill.

And I've been traveling. . . but man, there will be a lot of stuff coming up when that internet gets turned back on in my apartment . . .

Life Must Resume

I now return to the blog after a long, rakija-and-holiday-cheer fueled series of celebrations that would have no doubt destroyed a lesser man. Expect an update soon about the Vevcani Carnival, along with every other celebration that I should have written about the day after, but just couldn't bring myself to do so. I can't really blame the snow, either, though there has been a lot of it. It kept me inside. There are no excuses.

And pictures - there will be more pictures.

Holiday Festivities without End

My lack of posting is due to an interminable holiday season, beginning with American Christmas with my Peace Corps friends and extending through New Year's, Orthodox Christmas (January 7th) and 'Old' New Year's (based on the old calendar) on the 13th.

Midway through, and I am already exhausted. Wish me luck.

Amazon, Set Thy House in Order

A recently recieved email:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Dust have also purchased MACEDONIA IS GREECE on DVD. For this reason, you might like to know that MACEDONIA IS GREECE is now available. You can order yours for just $33.00 by following the link below.

MACEDONIA IS GREECE Prof. Paul A. Kapetanopoulos Price: $33.00

No, Amazon. I would not be interested in your Greek propaganda. Good lord, I've become a Macedonian partisan. . . .

Highly Recommended

Christopher Deliso, often referred to as 'the Lonely Planet Guy' in my various adventures in archaeology, has a really terrific interview here with Prof. Viktor Friedman on various Macedonian issues.

Prof. Friedman, of the University of Chicago, is the towering figure of Balkan linguistics, the adviser and mentor of Eric, and an all-around wonderful human being. He's spent the better part of his professional life studying the languages of Macedonia, and touches on almost every major political and cultural issue being thrown around today. Excerpt:

CD: From what I understand from different stories, this is because it is not helpful to advancement in Greek society, and can even be a strongly negative factor-

VF: Yes. The Greek government is effectively carrying out ‘linguicide’ on the Macedonians of Greece. And it has been a long-running policy. For another example, I have a photo of a sign in Greek, from the 1950s, printed up in blue-on-white, urging people to forbid anyone from speaking in ‘Vlahika, Makedonika etc.’ There used to be many such signs in Greek Macedonia.

CD: Really! That is quite compelling. Do people know about this?

VF: I don’t know-a friend sent the photo to me, I am finally getting around to publishing it in a review article in the journal Balkanistika next year.

But the Greek policy was always trying to kill the language. It was especially horrible in the 1930s. Macedonian kids would go to school, and if they spoke their language, the language they learned at home, numerous ‘corrective’ methods were used: teachers beat them, or stuck their tongues with needles, or rubbed a hot pepper on their tongues; anything to make them stop speaking Macedonian.

I really suggest you read the whole thing . . .

How Tito Killed Christmas . . . with Santa

When winter first rolled around, I noticed that the McDonald's in downtown Skopje began to put up a large, American-style Christmas tree. I just assumed that, since McDonald's is the unofficial American cultural embassy, they were just following the corporate line.

Since that time, Christmas shops - Western, Santa-and-sleigh, Rudolph and all - have been popping up all over Skopje. There is now a Christmas tree in the main square, and one in the main shopping center. People are selling Christmas cards (which say Mary Christmas - close enough) for charity.

This is all extremely unsettling - our American-style Santa isn't even that prevalent in Western European countries, as they generally have their own Santa-like traditions (or, in his place, a frightening goblin-demon that eats terrible children). So how did our over-commercialized, Holiday TV-special, Bing Crosby Christmas transplant itself wholesale to the Balkans? A professor at my institute was able to provide the answer:

The communists did it.

Communism is, of course, a materialist, atheist sort of philosophy that stomps out religion wherever it can. Yugoslavia was no exception. So imagine you are the communist dictator of a country full of deeply-ingrained religious and folk beliefs. Christmas, with all its traditional neo-pagan folk connotations and overt Christian meaning, is going to be tough to take down. You could pull a Stalin and just start shooting people out behind the barn, but that isn't your style. You need some help. Has anybody else successfully undercut the religious aspects of Christmas, and turned it into a completely secular, materialist holiday?

Can you see where I'm going with this?

The Yugoslav government adopted our secular Santa, our materialist 'X-mas', to help knock the Christ out of Christmas. Traditional Orthodox practices and folk celebrations were discouraged, subverted, or absorbed entirely into a new set of holiday 'traditions' in which good old Kris Kringle played a large part. He's known as Grandpa Frost here, by the way, since the real St. Nicholas was martyred in Turkey - a little too close for comfort.

Obviously, I find this absolutely hilarious, and not just because a nominally communist nation adopted the symbol of the most commercialized, capitalistic time of year in America. I find it very amusing that, in doing so, they were able to strip our Santa tradition down to the most fundamental elements - secularism and materialism - and use him to undercut a real religious tradition.

Because, after all, this is something that was put upon the people here by the communist government. We created and adopted this sort of Santa ourselves . . .

How does that reflect on us?

(Full disclosure: I'll be spending the evening at the British Ambassador's Residence, eating mincemeat pies, drinking port and mulled wine, and enjoying some Victorian Christmas caroling . . . the perfect start to the expatriate holiday season.)

Greece, again

I was reading this extremely interesting commentary on the Greek riots in the Telegraph today. In it, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard suggests that while the rioting may have been initially triggered by the shooting death of the teenager, it is being fueled by the tremendous debt pressures that most of Greece is under, due to the Euro. To summarize: Greece has the highest proportion of public debt in the Euro-zone, and while this was ignored for awhile due to the housing bubble, now that the bubble has popped everything is going to hell.

This confirms most of what Prof. John Younger told me during my time in Greece. The country hadn't been on the Euro for very long, the housing bubble was in full swing, and there were as many new Mercedes on the street as there were day-laborers waiting on the corner, desperate for work. It didn't seem to match up. Turns out that everybody was doing the whole 'mortgage + hope' equation, sinking themselves into debt, and expecting the rest of Europe to help fix things if they went badly. There are a lot of economic conditions a nation has to meet before it joins the Euro, and it's generally acknowledged that Greece fudged their numbers to join the currency before they were ready.

It's going to be interesting.