Culture

I’m in Greece at the moment, first in Thessaloniki and then in Athens staying at the parents’ place of my Rotary scholarship supervisor from the US.

He’s been giving me a walking and culinary tour of the country. I have to agree with him that the food is magnificent—it seems impossible to me the amount of deliciousness people wring out of eggplants here—but the walking tour inspires a lot of critical comments from him about Greece.

My own impression is that Greece is pretty much just like Macedonia, except denser and richer, so the things that would surprise most Americans don’t really surprise me after a year of exposure. Lack of pedestrian, much less wheelchair access, cars parked on sidewalks, dangerous nonchalance about traffic rules, loud conversations—they’re all so normal for me now that I keep finding myself somewhat puzzled that my host is pointing them out. I’ve even grown to like these usually negative qualities for adding “Balkan flavor.”

But I’m not stuck eating Balkan flavor every day, for years. It makes sense for it to seriously irritate my host. I can leave the Balkans at any time. He had to work extremely hard for the chance to resettle in the US. I take a certain pleasure in the grittiness and slipshod, somewhat dangerous freneticism of the Balkans because it is so different from my home and the novelty colors my whole experience. I can turn an inconvenience into an adventure.

Sometimes though, inconveniences are just inconveniences. I think I understand, or I at least have an inkling, why my host wanted to get away.

For me though, Greece hasn’t surprised me yet except in its size. From atop the Acropolis, I was not expecting Athens to extend in all directions to the horizon the way it does. Actually, the city reminds me a lot of Los Angeles in topography and size, sometimes even in architecture. Los Angeles streets are far wider and more orderly, though.

I think Athens is what LA would be if all of its traffic was routed into narrow, single-lane alleys that twisted and turned like a thousand worms’ boreholes through the core of the city. A lot more people walk, because like hell if you’ll be getting anywhere by car.

If you know me, you know a comparison to LA means that a city is not endearing itself to me under most circumstances. I think LA spoils the West Coast. But I kind of like Athens.

Maybe Balkan flavor for me is enough to disguise a rotting taste for others.

Macedonians have a superstition that putting your bag on the floor gives you bad luck with money, so you’ll never earn much.

I carry a bike messenger bag with me everywhere because the idea of being without a book or two on my person for even a moment fills me with horror.

I very rarely set that bag down anywhere else than the floor. It gets Macedonians all out of sorts.

I guess I’m doomed to several decades of poor earnings.

Good thing I’ve been planning my life around the gentle poverty of a grad student budget anyway.

The culturally salient Macedonian expression of the day is faќa seir.

Literally it means “to grab a seir,” with seir being an originally Turkish word that means something like “look” or “view.” The word pops up in the Albanian expression të bëjë seir, so it’s pan-Balkan.

To faќa seir is kind of like people-watching. But while people-watching is a passive activity—you sit, you watch, you absorb the world as it goes by and bask in the strangeness of people without forming any real connection to them—faќa seir denotes a degree of engagement. When you faќа seir, you take a seat in a café, preferably with a friend, and watch people with an eye for things to gossip about. Even better if those are people you know. “Hey, check out the silicone on that new chick, the one Dragan’s got on his arm!” or “Christ have you ever seen Prof. Popoviќ not talking on his cellphone?” It signals a more active, kind of catty engagement with what you’re watching.

My professor gave an example of some situation when people would faќa seir in a typically Balkan sort of way as a fight on the street. Rather than intervening, Macedonians prefer to just gather round and make sardonic, detached comments about the fight. That’s how she summarized the meaning of the expression and its cultural relevance.

It’s difficult to put the gestalt into words, but faќа seir neatly encapsulates an activity I would think of as quite typically Balkan. Not that Americans or Frenchmen or whoever don’t do it as well, just that Macedonians in particular do it with style.

The main representative of the EU here and the American ambassador have both heavily criticized the attack on the students’ protests and the government’s handling of the incident. The government now appears prepared to investigate those who attacked the students, not just the students themselves, although its representatives maintain that the students are to blame for the incident and that they are responsible for the counterprotest. I haven’t heard anything more detailed about the event. It turns out the friend I thought was there only saw the aftermath, not the protest itself.

Now an unrelated, but interesting little thing I’ve picked up here in Macedonia: when something good happens to you, you celebrate the event by paying for other people.

So, as a theoretical example, with birthday parties, your friends don’t throw you a party, you throw your friends a party and buy them drinks and food. They also do not bring you gifts. Americans here are often careful to clarify that they’re throwing what we end up calling American style parties, in which there’s an expectation that partygoers will either bring drinks and food or chip in for them. It’s not a matter of absolutes–I’m pretty sure there are Macedonian parties where people bring things to contribute and there are American parties where no one brings gifts–but rather a matter of where on the spectrum the norm falls. In Macedonia, the celebrating person generally does things for others. In America, others generally do things for the celebrating person.

As a practical example, when I was out to lunch with a colleague, I asked if I could pay for the meal to celebrate her family’s success with a recent business venture. That was the surface motivation; the underlying motivation was that she had already paid for me a few times before at different outings and I felt embarrassed by the disparity. I think she recognized my underlying motivation, but she argued to at least change the surface motivation. Instead, she wanted me to pay to celebrate my success with improving in Macedonian language abilities, which was simultaneously a nice way of giving me a compliment and also a means of changing the celebrant focus back on to me. That way, who ended up paying for the meal was properly aligned with Macedonian cultural expectations.

Now here is where I get into some folk anthropology–readers better trained in anthropology may be able to deconstruct this argument into nonsense. Nonetheless, I’m interested in why there’s such a difference in expectations surrounding ‘treating’ someone else between American and Macedonian culture, and I think I may have an explanation. Macedonian culture is what I think you might call an envy culture, similar to other Central and Southern European cultures. This is not to say that Macedonians are all stalked by green-eyed monsters or something. Rather, it is to say that the cultural system discourages unmitigated displays of success. I have heard a story both in the Czech Republic and in Macedonia about a man whose neighbor has a prize goat. Through some sort of magical circumstance, the man is given a wish. Instead of wishing for a goat better than his neighbor, he wishes for his neighbor’s goat to die.

I’ve also had a Macedonian acquaintance riff on this story by saying it’s more likely the fabled Macedonian man would ask for his neighbor to die so he could take the goat.

Basically, the idea is that because Macedonian culture is so community and family oriented, with the addition of a stronger class system and a pervasive feeling that one is powerless to affect or change one’s social station, it isn’t encouraged to show off too much good fortune or wealth. So at times when you are celebrating a success, you ’spread the wealth around,’ to prevent resentment. Thus you pay for all of your friends at your birthday party.

In the US, we’re heavily invested in the idea that our culture is meritocratic and rewards hard work. Success is considered a sign of your good character. Everyone, given a lot of elbow grease and a little bit of good luck, is supposed to be able to achieve their dreams. So seeing other people achieve success is a good thing, it’s something you want to endorse and perpetuate, since it signals the same status you one day see yourself achieving. This has consequences for everything from Americans’ famous reluctance to heavily tax the very upper class even though the vast majority of the US makes nowhere near that amount of money to the types of stories we like telling in our history books. No American kid has gone without hearing about his (or someone else’s) immigrant ancestors who started as illiterate shopboys and eventually rose to fabulous wealth through hard work and fearless pursuit of the American Dream.

You may be able to tell by the way that I’m talking about this cultural construct that I’m somewhat skeptical of it. I think Americans overestimate how meritocratic our culture is and underestimate the strength of forces that maintain wealth gaps and social ostracization. But in any case, this cultural construct of Success Indicates Moral Goodness and Should be Rewarded is what leads to the difference in gift giving and celebrating customs, I think. If it’s your friend’s birthday, you want to celebrate her significant day, so that in turn others will celebrate your significant day when it comes around.

So in Macedonia, success appears to be a zero sum game in which one person’s good fortune may be said to cause someone else’s bad foturne. The Wheel of Fortune really is a wheel, there are opposite ends and for one person to move up, someone else must move down.

In the US, success isn’t perceived as a limited good. It’s more like an oil rush: if one person strikes it big, there must be more there for others to find, you just have to go looking for it. Everyone can succeed given the right combination of good character and good luck–others’ success doesn’t prevent your own.

Thus ends the armchair anthropology. In any case, my colleague’s correction of the motivation for letting me buy her lunch was a valuable lesson in how we could both recognize the same underlying problem while coming up with very different surface solutions.

Three things.

The group of professors plus me the nervous but eager student who meet together an evening or two a month for burek and rakija has decided to call itself the “Macedonian Crisis Group.” In light of the serious economic situation which we all face, our central tenants are that linguistics is awesome, insecure nationalism is not, and if you are incapable of pronouncing the normal Macedonian toast “na zdravje,” it is acceptable to say “nice driveway” instead.

A joke one of my Macedonian professors told me: God was creating the world and the devil was watching. He came up to God and said, “Come on, be fair, you can’t make everything, give me some little portion to make for myself.” So God gave him a little plot of bare land called Macedonia and the devil made monumental forested mountains, winding, pure rivers, the crystal blue waters of lake Ohrid, the bits of sanctuary in the gorges of Mavrovo, the beaches, the honey, grapes and wine in the summer, the snow and the silent nights in the winter. God saw what the devil was making and asked with utter confusion, “What are you doing?! This is beautiful! It’s not in your nature to make a land so serene and beautiful!” The devil replied, “Ah, but wait until you see what sort of people I’m going to populate it with!”

Interesting fact: there is no native word for ‘arrogant’ in Macedonian. In subtitles for English movies, if someone says something like “You arrogant bastard!”, the Macedonian is “Ti arogantno kopile!” The word had to be borrowed.

If you want to get by in Macedonian with only a couple words, you could do worse than to start with ajde.

The frequency with which you hear ajde in Macedonian is remarkable. It fills in for the meaning of “let’s,” as in ajde da odime u park “Let’s go to the park.” It can mean “why don’t you,” as in ajde sedni sedni, ne brzaj “Why don’t sit down, don’t be in such a rush.” It can mean “gimme a break” or “c’mon,” as in ajde be, kaži nešto “C’mon man, say something!.” Macedonians often use ajde to preface goodbyes, both to signal that they’re about to depart and to precede the actual word for goodbye (either čau or prijatno. So for example, ajde, ajde kje se vidime, ajde čau “Alright, I’ll see you around. Later!. Combine ajde with the word važi “okay” and you can have one entire side of a conversation. I’ve heard people on their cellphones going something like this:

Allo? A, zdravo, kaži…. važi. Važi. Važi važi važi… važi. Važiiii. Ajde…. važi. Ajdeee. Ajde čau čau.

While not directly equivalent, I think ajde is comparable with English “alright” or “okay” in terms of how often it’s used. Getting a grasp on it makes your Macedonian sound more natural and friendly.

I wouldn’t jump to conclusions about this, but it’s interesting to compare these extremely common words for inviting the speaker’s attention or agreement between various languages.

English’s “alright” or “okay” establish a baseline. They mark off a section of common ground between the speaker and the hearer. You can use them to signal change of topic that way. By marking off the old common ground, you can highlight the fact that you’re going to attempt to establish new common ground (or that you’re about to end the discourse. So both “Okay, we’ve got our lines down, now we just need to rehearse staging” and “Okay, I should be going, but I’ll see you soon!” are appropriate uses of “okay.” “Okay” doesn’t really invite the speaker to anything—it assumes the common ground is already acknowledged rather than asking the hearer to join the common ground. In that way, it’s different from ajde.

Japanese has a similarly frequent marker, ne, which attaches to the ends of sentences. The use and meanings of ne are extremely complicated and not even fully analyzed in formal linguistics, but the word basically means “isn’t it so?” or “isn’t that right?” One of the ways it’s used is to ask for the hearer’s (implicit) confirmation, same as ajde, but unlike ajde it signals the desire for confirmation of new information going into the common ground. That ‘new’ information isn’t necessarily something new to the hearer, but it may be considered important enough by the speaker to highlight as information needing confirmation. No actual confirmation is generally necessary for ne-tagged information, though. The mere invitation itself serves to make clear the speaker’s emphasis, without any real expectation that the invitation will be acted upon.

Being a linguist who focuses on pragmatics and especially discourse pragmatics, these are all the little words that keep my braincogs spinning away. They may seem simple and intuitive at first glance, but words like okay, ne, and in Macedonian’s case ajde hide a lot of complexity in the ubiquity.

Diseases in Macedonia enter through the throat.

Actually, this doesn’t just happen in Macedonia. Diseases enter through the throat throughout the entire Slavic world, as I’ve found out by talking to some of the other Slavs visiting or studying here. So, for example, letting a kid go out during the winter without a scarf in the Czech Republic is considered tantamount to child abuse.

Macedonia takes this health mythology one step further, though, and prescribes throat-based cures. For added Balkanness, pretty much all the cures involve that omnipresent Balkan brandy, rakija. Rakija does everything. It’s a drink! It’s a disinfectant! It makes making julienne fries a lot more enjoyable! And it’s the key to a proper cold cure here.

So three ways of using rakija I’ve heard so far:

Mix rakija with water and sugar. Heat it up (which is gross–-rakija is drunk cool or at room temperature) and down it. This custom has been updated for the modern era with an explanation that fits into the germ theory of disease. The bacteria supposedly go swarming for the sugar in your throat. But then the rakija comes through and kills them all off. This image was delivered to me by a Macedonian over (guess what) shots of rakija with highly amusing sound effects I wish I could reproduce here.

Rakija and cold (cold!) beer. Drink one gulp after another from each. Wake up the next morning cured of all flu/cold/whatever. The theory here is that the shock of heating rakija and cooling beer to the throat confuses the germs and they commit suicide from identity angst.

And the old classic, the total favorite approved by babas and dedos everywhere: pour rakija on a cloth, put some pepper on it (peppercorn pepper? red pepper? I still don’t know), wrap it around your neck and go to sleep. You’ll wake up the next morning stinking of alcohol, but at least your sinuses will be clear enough that you can tell.

As far as health mythologies go, it can be amusing for an American to hear about these wonder cures. But the fact is that, unless you’ve gone through medical school or you’re spectacularly well-read in the area of human anatomy and metabolism, everyone has ridiculous ideas about how disease works, no matter the culture. The American folk model of disease, in which ‘toxins’ are ‘flushed’ or ‘neutralized,’ is equally inaccurate and equally unlikely to survive empirical testing (and not just ‘the test of experience’: one of the lessons of the Enlightenment is that experience lies). From that perspective, curing everything with rakija is just another interesting way we tell ourselves stories about our bodies.

And who knows? Maybe double-blind studies will someday uncover a statistically significant advantage to dousing yourself with brandy for recovery from common viruses and infections! It’s certainly no less likely than finding out the same about chicken soup.

A very brief list of things that strike me as odd here in Macedonia:

• Rat-tail haircuts: Children have them. Teenagers have them. Distinguished professors have them. The rat-tail never died here in Macedonia. In fact, it’s flourished and undergone variation. There are loose, traditional rat-tails, rubberband-tied rat-tails, braided rat-tails, rat-tails sprouting from higher off the head almost like top-knots, long luxuriant rat-tails, and that’s only what I can remember off the top of my head. I can assure you that it is a singularly surreal experience to be listening to an erudite and somewhat stuffy lecture from a typically professorial man adjusting his glasses, shuffling his papers, staring off into space as if deep in thought, and occasionally brushing his sizeable rat-tail.
• Three-quarter length pants: They’re not shorts. They’re not pants. They’re not capris, thank gods. What they are are like normal, maybe somewhat tight European style pants that just… stop. Before they ever quite make it. Why? Is fabric unusually expensive here? Is excessive ankle warmth a serious problem?
• Belly thumping: I think this is considered somewhat crass, but it’s definitely an everyday sight on the street. Macedonian men will pull up their shirts just to expose their bellies and then walk around like that. Usually they’re rather prominent guts, since you need some protrusion to hold the shirt up like that for any period of time I think. Some bizarre compromise short of just taking their shirts off. Then, occasionally, they’ll thump their bellies with satisfaction.

I’m pulling from different social levels and customs here. Don’t get the wrong impression: I’m sure any average European could put together a similar list of everyday things seen on the street in the US. But those are the things that have had me puzzled in any case.

Pazar seems to feature big in Macedonian culture.

The way that I’ve heard the word, pazar (same root as the English word bazaar) can refer to pretty much any kind of marketplace. But often it seems to particularly designate a kind institutionalized outdoor market. These mostly sell fruits, vegetables, and home industry products like rakija brandy in re-used Coke bottles, but you’ll also find plenty of stands with stuff like Dolce & Gabana underwear, lycra stretch pants, plastic Chinese toys, and curtain rods. At some of the bigger pazari, you supposedly can find blackmarket stuff too, but I haven’t gone exploring for that yet.

At the pazar, people tend to call to you as you pass by. Or at least they do to me. Maybe it’s because I clearly look foreign (my nose and my gait are both pretty un-Macedonian, not even counting the way I dress) and so might potentially be spending more money, but I’m pretty sure the call-outs are indiscriminate. They usually say something like “Povelete dečko!,” roughly translating to “How can I help you, kid?” Universally, Macedonians here who don’t know my actual name call me either dete or dečko, both of which are along the lines of “kid, boy, child.” I was a little surprised by it at first, but there’s no denying that I do look young. I think pretty much anyone in their early twenties gets that treatment.

Anyway, this sort of pazar behavior doesn’t stop at the edges of the outdoor market. People in indoor, ‘modern’ stores do it too. In a department store, having somebody walk up to you and ask “can I help you?” wouldn’t be too surprising, but here people approach you no matter where you are. Standing outside of a bicycle shop looking at bikes, checking prices on stuff in a grocery store, walking past a plant store—all over. In a sense, it’s kind of cool. It belies the stereotype that post-Communist countries have awful customer service (though that’s not an egregiously inaccurate stereotype; ask me how getting an internet connection working in my apartment is going). But sometimes storekeepers will just sort of follow you around, hovering there waiting for you to request something. In which case I just sort of want to say, “Um, thanks but… could you just let me browse a bit?”

But of course, I never actually say this. I don’t even know how to say this. Instead, I just try to adjust.

And maybe shop a little faster.