Why come to Slaka?

For those of you not in the know, which is probably most of you other than my children, Why Come to Slaka? is a book by Malcolm Bradbury. Learned heads have suggested that it was a pastiche of Communist Romania or Bulgaria. Personally, I always felt it was more like Yugoslavia, as it lacks Romania's cult of Ceaușescu and Bulgaria's brutal secret police, which were defining characteristics for the people living in those countries.

Anyway, as a result of reading that, "Slakan" has become the code-word Alison and I have for some of the more external elements of European Communism – covering Socialist Realist art, Brutalist architecture, excessive and overblown industrialisation, crazy and inefficient economic techniques, appalling living accommodation and poor living standards. Anything that defines the East under Communism relative to the West. One of the reasons for spending so much time in the Balkans is to get to see as much of Slaka as possible.

So we went to the Belgrade modern art museum. I don't generally like art museums of the twentieth century that much, but I am an absolute sucker for Slakan art. I went happily, expecting pictures of happy workers, resolute farmers and staunch women in simple Socialist Realist forms. It turns out that the artists of Yugoslavia were basically completely in line with Western Europe and there wasn't any sign of the stodgy Communist art I had expected. 

Some of it astounded me. Pieces that would have sent an artist to the Gulag within minutes if produced in any other country in the Eastern Bloc.

Comrade Tito, White Violet, Our Youth Loves You

It seems that Tito's very early falling out with Stalin meant that Yugoslavia never experienced anything remotely resembling Stalinist methods. Tito was still a dictator, and the economic system wasn't Capitalist, but the Yogoslavs didn't suffer anything like the same repression as the Soviet bloc. Art was not constrained to ideological straitjackets, religions were allowed to operate and there was freedom of movement.

However, all was not lost on the hunt for things Slakan. It turns out that our last day in Belgrade was Tito's birthday, 25 May. It seems it was his "birthday" in the same way the Queen luckily has a birthday on Queen's Birthday. Anyway, it is the day they celebrate him. So we trucked along to his tomb – fortunately he wasn't embalmed in the Lenin manner, but instead has a sarcophagus in one of his former residences.

Some people obviously miss the old man, and were there in their red caps and scarves, to pay their respects. Not that many, and almost all quite old, but certainly in the hundreds. We avoided paying our respects at the sarcophagus itself, and tried to keep our amusement quiet in the circumstances, but it was definitely a good day to visit the museum.

Tito fans. Not young. 

(For the record, although Tito certainly still has his fans, we saw no other sign that Belgrade and Serbia had ever been Communist. Some of the statues and monuments from that era remain, but all hint at their meaning has been removed from view. There's a statue downtown to Gavrilo Princip, the fool that shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and started WWI, but we saw not a single one to any political figure from 1945 to 1990.)

However, while Yugoslavia was spared the worst horrors of political Communism, it most certainly was not spared the architecture. Huge concrete tower blocks, most often in groups of three, dotted the skylines of Belgrade. The new suburb of Novi Beograd (New Belgrade) is a delight in that regard – for a certain meaning of delight.

Whole blocks, with imaginative names like Block 42, Block 43A and Akademika, are built entirely in a single style of concrete apartment building. Most not aging particularly well, it has to be said.

Block 33A. There seemed like half a kilometre of this style building, over several blocks.

To be fair, some of the public buildings from this era are remarkably successful, despite their Brutalist concrete techniques. The Modern Art Museum building is fantastic, and the Military Hospital is quite striking. Some of the others would be fine if they were maintained better.

We made a bit of a pilgrimage to the most famous of all the buildings from that era, the Eastern Gate. It's hard to judge really whether it is successful or not, being very much of its time, but it sure is quintessentially Slakan.

The Eastern Gate. The left half is residential, the right half is business (currently largely empty)

So, Belgrade was fun for us fans of Brutalist architecture.

I might get round to describing the modern city that the rest of you might visit. But probably not. 

The Great Hungarian Plain

Alison, the kids and I spent a week in Budapest a dozen years ago, so we decided that we would not go back there, because we felt it wasn't the best use of our time to repeat places. Budapest was a good place to visit, so Alison booked us in for two weeks in Hungary. We were coming from Romania, so it made sense to stay in the eastern side.

Now most of you won't know much about Hungary, but it was settled by the Huns after Attila's death. They liked it, and were able to conquer it, because the open spaces suit a horse nomad nation. Later their medieval descendants were able to conquer the hilly parts around, but the east of the country is pretty much entirely the Great Hungarian Plain.

And it is pretty planar. There's none of that "rolling" plain nonsense. It's just flat.

Hundreds of kilometres of this.

However, while the countryside doesn't vary much in height, it is quite pleasing on the eye. It is far from empty – being fertile, it is full of towns – and the farming is mixed, rather than miles of just one crop. There are trees and forests too.

It also doesn't drain very well and there are only a couple of rivers, which means that there are frequent marshy spots, both big and small. I suspect most of the forest areas are left in trees because they are too wet to farm well. These wetlands areas support quite a lot of bird life, and we saw from the trains a whole host of bird species, as well as the occasional deer. The large number of shooting huts, raised on piles, reflect that abundance.

The towns we went to were a mixed bag. Hungary was long prosperous, didn't get too badly damaged in WWII, and the Communist government didn't build too many ugly tower blocks or boastful central city palaces. The result is that most of the town centres remain quite pretty.

Szeged, was particularly nice, as the centre is full of Art Nouveau buildings due to a flood in the late 19th century that required the rebuilding of almost the entire town centre. Almost all the government buildings were built in a consistent style of brick and plaster from the rebuilding that I found very pleasant.

Not many NZ high schools look this good. The inside is also Art Nouveau.

The towns we went to differed in their interest, but sometimes if they were weren't very interesting we were able to see some places nearby. So when in Eger, which has a famous castle and a few churches, but little else, we went to a a couple of nearby places.

However, it did depend on where the towns were relative to the plain. Eger is on the northern edge, so it backed onto hills, which meant vineyards and forests to walk in. Pecs is on the southern edge, so there was a castle on a hill in a nearby village and vineyards again.

However Szolnok is in the middle of the plain. We ran out of things to do there quickly, and everywhere around was also in the middle of the plain. It's not the worst place we have visited – Biela Podlaska in Poland (in the middle of flat Poland) takes some beating – but it is up there.

For us on this trip, days with not much to do aren't that much of a problem. Since we had spare time I had my hair cut, we got some washing done, and generally we caught up on everyday things that still need doing. Travelling for so long is exhausting, and it is actually quite a relief to have days when we don't charge from sight to sight.

For a short trip where using your time efficiently is important it would be different. If you do visit Hungary – and really there is no reason not to, apart from their bizarre language – it's probably best not to spend too much time in the towns in the middle of the Plain. The ones on the edge are where the interest is.

Travelling. Always travelling

One of the things that concerned us before planning a six month trip of Europe was that we would tire of all the travel – that we would get a couple of months in and have had enough. Well, fortunately there's no sign of that yet, and we are past a quarter of the way in, so I can't see it being a major concern.

Shifting towns every three or four days is less hassle than I thought it might be. Modern phone technology means it is hard to get lost or struggle to find things because we always know where we are, using GoogleMaps or equivalent. All our accommodation is pre-booked, so there's no problems on arriving (and we aren't generally going very far each time, so we arrive at a decent time and not tired). The local transport has proved to be very efficient and we haven't had too many dramas about buying tickets.

Changing towns might not be so bad, but changing countries is a pain. You just start getting comfortable with one place –  learning the currency, how the transport systems work, the key terms you need, what foods they have in the supermarket –  and then you move to another country. and have to start all over again.

Hungary has been terrible like that, because the language is so different from any we have any previous knowledge of. We haven't eaten at McDonalds, but I have shown a sample of a advert below to illustrate the problem – even though I know what they serve pretty precisely, I still cannot make out a single word other than "burger".

This is not helped by Hungarians speak surprisingly little English –  doing German at school from what we can gather. There is a lot of pointing, and some guessing. Sometimes pictures are helpful – getting the battery changed in my watch was quite easy once I used a picture of a watch battery to hold next to it.

A few sacrifices have been made. We didn't have a lot of stuff even from the start of the trip, because we had only a 28 kg limit on the flights to and from Cyprus (bag and hand luggage combined), but quite a lot has been shed since then. Lifting heavy bags to overhead storage on the trains and up and down stairs got to be a bit too tiring. I chucked out a whole bunch of clothes, shoes and books that still had a bit of life in them, but were six kilograms I didn't have to cart round. Alison shed our emergency towels and a couple of other things at the same time. A useful side-effect is that my bag is now extremely easy to pack each shift of town, because it has room to spare, rather than a puzzle about how to fit it all in.

We have also been walking quite a lot – Alison's phone thinks she has done 1,000 km since we left NZ, and that seems about right –  with a cost in blisters and worn out shoes.

Today's our last day in Hungary, as tomorrow we go to Belgrade. I'll write up something on Hungary when we get there, as it is a week's stop, so time to catch up a bit on things. 

Unfortified Transylvania

Transylvania is really quite pretty, and deserves to be better known as a tourist destination really. Its quite easy to get around and because Romanian is far easier to deal with than the surrounding languages for a person with some French or Italian shopping and ordering food is much easier than Bulgaria or Hungary.

The Carpathian mountains are nice to look at and relatively easy to avoid having to go through too much. The rolling hills do slow down cars and trains, but are far more interesting than the great plains of some of the neighbouring areas. Bucharest is quite cool to visit, but the surrounding areas isn't just flat, it's also more or less empty of anything much interesting to look at.

I've mentioned in the previous post about how it is loaded with the remains of military architecture. Well it's equally stacked if you are into churches. There are large numbers of adherents of Romanian Orthodox, Catholic and Lutheran religion, as well as a few smaller branches, and each village tends to have a church in more than one of the flavours, most often all three. Since the building traditions and interior decorating for each is wildly different it adds a variety not found in areas of Europe where the winners of the Wars of Religion imposed far more uniformity.

The Lutheran churches are the ones Alison and I prefer aesthetically. They are basically identical to their North German and Scandinavian models, with quite stripped back interiors. I kept thinking that their steeples are taller than I'm used to though.

The Catholic ones are generally like French ones (nothing too Baroque or Rococo) except for the ones that changed affiliation and lost their decoration during their protestant phases. (Cluj cathedral went from pre-reformation Catholic, through Lutheran, Calvinist, Unitarian and back to Catholic again). Again, there seems to be an emphasis on height.

Cluj Catholic Cathedral. That is one tall nave.

The Romanian Orthodox are in the standard Orthodox tradition. Generally a Greek cross floor plan rather than a nave and topped with domes. Many of them are considerably taller than they are wide, which leads to a sort of reverse vertigo in the biggest ones -- they are just too tall to be pleasant.

Cluj Orthodox Cathedral. The central dome and pillared support 

would be a decent church height in its own right.

I wonder if the height of the local Lutheran and Catholic spires and naves isn't at least in part a response to these enormously tall competing buildings being built across town from them.

The interiors of the Orthodox are all much more heavily decorated than any western church. Icons are present in large numbers, and believers pray in front of them as a matter of course (often giving them a kiss on the way out). The very best ones are covered entirely in highly coloured pictures on every flat surface (usually saints rather than scenes from the bible). Alison and I had seen Orthodox churches in the Baltic, but these are much more decorated.

The Romanian Orthodox was favoured by the Romanian Communists relative to the other religions, although any genuinely religious clergy faced repression. It therefore came out of that era much wealthier than the other churches and they seem determined to show it. Cluj has a monstrous new cathedral being built which seems far larger than anything it could actually need.

Cluj new cathedral under construction

But the most dramatic is the cathedral being built in Bucharest. This new church, which is near completion will be the largest Orthodox church in the world (currently the holder is one in Moscow which is so heavy it is sinking into the ground). Vast doesn't begin to cover it.

Amusingly it is behind Ceausescu's ridiculously large "Palace of the People" (the second largest administrative building in the world, behind the pentagon, and a ridiculous white elephant). Well, many people don't think it particularly amusing, including quite a few Romanians, because it is just too big and expensive to be justified in any reasonable way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_People%27s_Salvation_Cathedral

Fortified Transylvania

We're up to our third city in Transylvania – Brasov, Sibiu and now Cluj-Napolica. They're all reasonably big, but I'd barely heard of them, despite the occasional dip into Romanian history.

Whereas Bulgaria surprised for the amount of Roman stuff, Transylvania has surprised for the huge amount of military architecture. We've seen a Dacian hillfort, some medieval castles, several walled towns and early and late star forts. Alison puts up with it, but I've absolutely been in my element!

However, much as I enjoy Iron age forts, castles and bastion fortresses, the unique feature of the area is the "fortified churches". Actually the churches themselves are standard Lutheran churches, although some of the bell towers doubled with a military use, but they are surrounded by defensive walls.

The simplest ones are a church surrounded by a high stone wall with ramparts.

A fairly standard one. On Sibiu to Sigisoara Road

Some of them are veritable castles, with two rings of high walls and regular towers. A few are virtual Disney efforts.

Biertan

There are 150 left, out of perhaps 300. Basically virtually every village in eastern Transylvania had one.

They are all Lutheran, because the villages (and towns) were "Saxon", which means in this context ethnic Germans. (There are a couple of ethnic Hungarian Szekely churches too, but they are also Reform.) German settlers were imported into Transylvania to help build its economy in the Middle Ages, and because they had to defend themselves against the Turks they were permitted to build these fortifications. The village folk, when threatened, moved themselves and their movables into the church for safety.

The towns were walled on the same basis, often with individual guilds building separate towers, which leads to every tower in the defensive scheme being different.

Oddly there aren't many actual castles here. Those there are were mostly lordly residences, with only secondary defensive features. We went to Bran castle – which is sold as Dracula's but is no such thing. It was both expensive (in local terms) and not that good – we saw many similar in Switzerland.

The fortified churches, however, have been fascinating, even though we haven't been able to visit more than three (although we have walked around a few more).

We've had two weeks here, looking at this and that. A fan of fortifications might want a month though, there is so much to see. 

Some thoughts on Bulgaria

Bulgaria is a nice place to visit and we're glad we went – there were lots of interesting places we didn't have time to get to and a person could spend a month there (you'd probably need a car though).

We found reading the Bulgarian language not too bad. I recognise the letters and the technical words tend to be the same as other European languages. A lot of people didn't speak any, but we were never stymied (except the day we had to order random burgers because the waiter didn't know how to translate the ingredients).

While the feel is basically that of a modern European town, with the same sorts of shops and people looking mostly similar, still a lot remains from the Communist era. Bulgaria simply doesn't have the money to go round knocking down things unless it needs to.

The most political of the statues, like Lenin and Dimitrov (the first leader of Communist Bulgaria and a hard-line Stalinist) were removed (a few were collected in a special museum we visited). However loads of stuff remains which isn't too obviously Soviet – until you examine the style, in which case they're very obviously Soviet Realist.

And one of the reasons they remain is that they are huge. Far too large to dismantle easily. 

Here's Alison at the base of the one above, to show just how stupidly big it is.

They also still have most of the main Communist administration buildings, which are now government offices. They did blow up the Dimitrov mausoleum (similar to the Lenin one in Red Square) but had nothing to put in its place, so there sits a flat bit of concrete in the middle of Sofia.

Another great building civilisation, but this time in a good way, was the Romans. Bulgaria is largely the ancient province of Thrace and had been linked to the Greek world for 500 years before the Romans got there, so was heavily colonised. All the sizable towns are ex-Roman (and most ex-Thracian before that).

Plovdiv had the partial remains of the wall, a theatre, an ancient stadium (for chariot-racing) and an aqueduct – which in typical Roman fashion shifted water 30 odd kilometres to a town which was built on a river. The coastline around Varna had only bits and pieces because the modern parts are built on the ancient ones, but a clear history from Thracian times through to the Byzantines.

The surprise was Sofia, which has much of the ancient town excavated, literally two levels down from the modern city, so you find bits of it on show as you wander around the Metro.

What seriously impressed me though was the road the Romans built south of Plovdiv, from Asenovgrad down to the Greek coast. There are large sections still clearly visible, which we walked.

Alison on the Roman road, with cliffs above and below.

It ran through the hills for some 150 kilometres, much of it carved out of cliff faces to cart width. Because the river bed area is prone to flooding the road runs several hundred metres higher than the river. It had been a trade route for centuries, but only the Romans went the full way and built a proper road – they certainly built things once, to last.

Of course we learned quite a lot more about Bulgaria, too much to relate here. There were oddball things – at all the restaurants we went to they served the dishes at random times, so we didn't get to eat together. There were solutions to things that had bothered me – I had always wondered how Alexander the Great and his father had conquered such a hilly country so quickly, but it turns out that the Thracians were a lot more civilised than I had thought and had sizable towns to conquer and that most of the country isn't that hilly. And so many churches with so many icons!

So now we are in ancient Dacia, modern Romania, and it's intriguing the similarities and the differences. More of that later.  

Wombling around Bulgaria

So far we're having a great time in Bulgaria, even if the locals don't seem to know the first thing about Wombles.

Varna and Plovdiv both have lovely pedestrian zones with photogenic old buildings, and lots and lots of slightly less photogenic soviet-era and more recent apartment buildings. They both also have LOTS of casinos - we haven't ventured into any them though they might be interesting spots to watch the mafia pass by.  All the people we've seen are perfectly nice and non-gangster-looking, but apparently the Plovdiv Lokomotiv football club lost 5 managers in 12 years by assassination, so it does sound as if there are some tough types out there.
 

 

Plovdiv will be the 2019 European City of Culture, and is in the middle of branding and merchandising for it. One effort is Plovediv - printed on mugs, t-shirts etc - which does seem to be risking retaliation in the form of Plovdive (which wouldn't be fair at all).

Yesterday we decided to leave town and head for the nearest hills, the Rhodopi mountains. It's only 20 km by (slow) train from Plovdiv to Asenovgrad, so that's where we started. About 2 km out of Asenovgrad there is a ruined fortress and church perched dramatically atop a rather steep hill, so we set out to walk there.

Up until now Google Maps has largely been my friend, but lately it's been acting like the sort of friend who promises to give you a ride home from a party but then has too much to drink and falls asleep in the corner. GM assured us that the way to walk to the fortress was to walk along the main road ... and GM was wrong (unless we wanted to stand on the main road and admire the fortress from below, or scramble up a couple of hundred metres of scree). Luckily we followed the road signs instead (sorry, GM) and made it to the fortress with no problems at all other than a bit of robust discussion.

I'd read that from the fortress it's possible to walk to the next village, Bachkovo, where there's a famous monastery. All I could find on the internet was one brief mention of a roman road that would take about three and a half hours to walk (with an even briefer mention of a steep cart track at some point), and GM was just baffling. I know it's not always wise to walk along main roads ("main" being a relative term here), but GM seemed to have a serious snitch against walking on the local road.

  

In a spirit of "what could possibly go wrong" we set out anyway, along a lovely smooth portion of old Roman road that led to a nearby chapel. From there the track clearly continued, but with no signpost to say where it was heading. We figured it would be easy enough to scramble down to the main road if the track turned out to be heading away from the village (ha!), and carried on. All we knew was that there would be the steep bit, and a ruined Roman bridge, and that at parts the track might be a bit hard to find. All of that was certainly true. We saw no other people at all on the trail, though the occasional cigarette butt and pile of donkey dung reassured us that other people do occasionally pass along it. After a while we realised that there actually were trail markers, white and green stripes painted on trees and rocks, and the occasional arrow where the trail forked. And about halfway to the village there was even a sign saying Bachkovo, which was definitely a Good Sign.

The Roman road portions of the track were lovely easy walking - flat and wide with stone walls supporting the edges. Other bits were pure bush track. And the "steep cart track" was slabs of concrete and then stone set into dried mud at about a 25 degree incline ... almost bearable up to what appeared to be the crest of the hill, but of course there was more, and then more, and I made the mistake of using some of my breath to curse out loud at the sight of more climb to come. Luckily that was in the first hour of the walk, so there was plenty of time to recover and enjoy the walk after that.