After our little, ahem, attendance, we were significantly delayed, so we had to emend our plans to visit a picturesque little Macedonian village. We didn’t mind too much, though, since this meant we could eat lunch—at a quintessential ski resort restaurant on the edge of a mountain. Nevertheless, it was an odd sensation to walk into an elegant log-built chalet, take a seat at tables with thick white cloth napkins, revel in the postcard-esque view of a crumbling one-room church at the edge of a massive lake—and realize that we were the only non-residents for miles around. The town in which we stopped, like so many others through which we passed, was completely deserted. No doubt this was because of the season (few people like to go to a ski resort in summer), but it was eerie nonetheless. Of course, beautiful rainbow platters of roasted vegetables and salad put our minds at rest—and we got great service. :)
But the floor was Kosta’s, and he used it to deliver a concise, yet fascinating look at the history of the Balkans. I will confess I do not remember a quarter of his narration—in addition to being a perceptive Macedonian native, Kosta’s dissertation research explored the history of the Macedonian church—but I clearly recall being amazed at the centuries of military back-and-forth the region has undergone. Everyone lauds Cyril and Methodius, the Christian brothers (and now saints) who gave us the “Cyrillic” alphabet in the ninth century, but there is little agreement on anything else. One empire after another has swept through the Balkans, and as Kosta narrated, I could almost imagine a force of battle-hardened troops sweeping over the mountain headed toward us across the valley. But then the incongruence of imagination and memory compared to the present: my eyes fell on the series of national flags outside of the resort, and I was again reminded of the stillness that pervaded the entire valley, and of the materialism that renders even political differences moot.
Then it was off to Tetovo, where we stopped to view the celebrated “Painted Mosque.” After my travels to India with Princeton’s Religious Life Council, Islamic houses of worship are not new to me, and the mosque itself wasn’t that large. Yet it was impressive for the incredible quantity of artwork adorning its walls. To be honest, it reminded me of a house built of colorful playing cards; I half-expected it to collapse at any moment.
Perhaps this recollection of my RLC days was what made the subsequent experience feel so, well, academic. Kosta had been in contact with the leader of the Bektashi Muslim sect quartered in Tetovo, and he had arranged for us to meet the dervish (a Bektashi community leader—he doesn’t whirl, though) and be introduced a little more to Macedonia’s religious climate. The visit certainly did that. Kosta warned us that he had no idea what to expect, other than dinner and an interesting experience. What we got was far more. We arrived at around seven o’clock, by which time it was already dark. But it doesn’t seem that Bektashis are big fans or electricity, or maybe their “inner light” is enough, for Benny, our host, led us around the complex in darkness. First he showed us the open building where they prayed in community. But the Bektashis are also one of the least powerful Muslim sects, and the official discrimination that Benny (and Kosta) acknowledged appears in the form of Muslims of other sects coming and using the building for their own prayers. As a result, the Bektashis are outnumbered in their own prayer-room. But they, espousing a seemingly genuine desire for peace, refuse to make restrictions—even if such restrictions would not, as I presume, be deemed justification for further discrimination against the group.
Then Benny introduced us to the dervish, the highest-ranking Bektashi member present in the absence of the Baba. They then led us to a strange little wooden structure housing the grave of the founder of the Bektashi community. This, I think, was where I and the rest of the group began to feel just how distinct we were from our amiable, yet definitely un-Christian hosts. They instructed us to take the step into the building with our left foot, for the right was unlucky. Then we were to enter the grave-room, also with the left foot, where we saw the cloth-draped coffin of the religious leader, surrounded with candles and a colorful portrait. Frankly, it was awkward. Not only did I make a mistake and enter the room with the wrong foot, but they invited us to maintain a silence and say a prayer if we wished. I don’t know about the others, but I felt no urge to pray—except perhaps that Benny and the dervish would see what foolishness such demagoguery was. I felt distinctly aloof from the entire proceedings, like when I visited the Jain and B’hai temples in India. I pitied Benny, the dervish, and the other Bektashis, for they could not see how futile it was to reverence a man who was only man. I felt, I now realize to my extreme shame, almost a slight disdain, for such reverence paled before the God that I knew, a God that was intimately man, yet simultaneously and infinitely God. As Benny told us to exit the room, bowing, keeping our fronts to the grave, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for people whose faith is premised upon so much requisite ritual for a corpse that will never rise.
But then we went into dinner. On a purely carnal level, it was story of tantalization. We sat down at long tables, decked with more national flags and surrounded by pictures of the Baba with heads of state ranging from European presidents to American ambassadors. Just as interesting to me, though, was the heaping bowl of fresh apples—which one of our hosts promptly removed. It felt like a long time since lunch, and apples are, after all, my favorite. But they were cleared away, and before our places were set and the dinner was served, we had to go through what seemed an exceedingly long and laborious ceremony. Prayers were said, and then a bowl of salt was passed from one person to the next (with the left hand), into which we dipped our fingers for a pinch of salt. As several people said afterwards, this ceremony exemplified the extreme regulation characterizing the entire meal. We were given precise instructions on how to pass the salt, eat the salt, move our left hand, hold our right hand, focus our eyes, etc. And then we were given raki (or rakia), a clear, hard liquor containing up to 60% alcohol (when home-brewed)—yikes!—that that could only be drunk—and must be drunk—whenever the rather silent dervish gave permission. And when it was drunk, it was drunk in sets of three, symbolizing some Bektashi tenet that I don’t remember anymore. In this controlled atmosphere, I suppose it was not surprising that we were made to wait forever for the meal; it was probably done purposefully to encourage discipline.
On the one hand, this extreme control felt very relaxing. It is comforting sometimes to eat slowly and swell on mundane, if esoteric actions to keep the mind from wandering to more anxious or less edifying thoughts. I will admit, I felt very peaceful when the evening was concluded.
Yet on the other hand, the regulation forced us to participate in a ceremony that was actively, explicitly unchristian in origin. Benny encouraged us to pass off overtly Bektashi rituals as Christian ones. “Drink to the Trinity,” he said, for example, when he was dictating the triune sips of raki, which several of us had only managed to abstain from after extended pressure. In a way, though, this felt even more religiously uncomfortable than silently going along with the Bektashi mode of thinking; it seems blasphemous to associate the Trinity with what Bonolo—fittingly, I admitted later—deemed a drinking game. Because of my experiences on the RLC, to which this felt infinitely similar, I probably felt less uncomfortable with the entire evening than many of the group; I have learned to “turn off my Christian brain,” so to speak, and imbibe foreign culture as just that: culture. Yet even the very words I have used to describe this speak to the danger in which this places me. Imbibing too much of such pluralistic, non-Christian jargon and feeling risks dulling the senses to the very tangible differences between our faith, our God, and the one worshipped by Benny in mysticism and ritual. They are not the same, and I’m glad my Oxford group was there afterward to remind me just how distinct they are. Benny and the dervish were really disappointed that the Baba couldn’t be there to meet us and take a picture with us, so they proposed meeting us Sunday morning. But, of course, we had church. So they said they would meet us there. At first, we thought, “What a great evangelistic tool!” But after considering overnight, Kosta and Nada called the tekke and decided it was probably better that the Baba doesn’t show up on the church’s doorstep. Not only did we have no idea what they would do when confronted with a churchful of fervent evangelical Christians, but we were all loathe to become a part of the gallery adorning the walls of the dinner room. To my mind, becoming immortalized on the Baba’s wall would have been tantamount to condoning his beliefs and all that he represents. I am all for standing up for a discriminated minority, but it is much more complicated when that minority’s beliefs are antithetical to your own.
The following day’s visit to Kosta’s orthodox priest friend the next day thus felt, by contrast, cathartic. The tekke felt rigid, controlled, and empty; even the people preparing food for us in the kitchen were kept largely out of sight. But at the orthodox church, the center of the priest’s efforts to promote religious revival among his parishioners by a return to the Scripture itself, we felt instant welcome, abundant joy, and immeasurable blessing. Our fare there was simple by comparison, just some light snacks of biscuits (aka small, hard cookies), nuts, and other sundries. But I still maintain that the spirit of love there was palpable, embodied in the warm smiles of the matronly women assisting the priest. In the tekke, as in the monastery, the dervish had been called away by a cell phone call; here, our host ignored it, and proceeded to outline in detail his dream of educating his flock in the tenets and active, fervent faith espoused in the Bible. Commitment, he said via Kosta’s translation (though occasionally the priest himself, knowing some English, corrected the latter), is a profound issue within the Orthodox church, and intimately connected with the lack of knowledge regarding what the Bible actually says. So, on his own, this priest put together something similar to an Alpha course, a progressive religious educational model where his parishioners learn to appreciate the historical roots of the Orthodox Church while appreciating even more the Christian faith on which that Church is founded. It was an amazing project, one in which Kosta is actively involved. And it was rendered all the more amazing by the contrast it formed to the Bekhtashism we encountered the previous evening.
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