Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family Part 16

Next day, after divine service, the family a.s.semble around the dinner table, each bearing a lighted candle; and they say aloud, "Christ is born: let us honour Christ and his birth." The usual Christmas drink is hot wine mixed with honey. They have also the custom of First Foot.

This personage is selected beforehand, under the idea that he will bring luck with him for the ensuing year. On entering the First Foot says, "Christ is born!" and receives for answer, "Yes, he is born!"

while the First Foot scatters a few grains of corn on the floor. He then advances and stirs up the wood on the fire, so that it crackles and emits sparks; on which the First Foot says, "As many sparks so many cattle, so many horses, so many goats, so many sheep, so many boars, so many bee hives, and so much luck and prosperity.'" He then throws a little money into the ashes, or hangs some hemp on the door; and Christmas ends with presents and festivities.

At Easter, they amuse themselves with the game of breaking hard-boiled eggs, having first examined those of an opponent to see that they are not filled with wax. From this time until Ascension day the common formula of greeting is "Christ has arisen!" to which answer is made, "Yes; he has truly arisen or ascended!" And on the second Monday after Easter the graves of dead relations are visited.

One of the most extraordinary customs of Servia is that of the Dodola.

When a long drought has taken place, a handsome young woman is stripped, and so dressed up with gra.s.s, flowers, cabbage and other leaves, that her face is scarcely visible; she then, in company with several girls of twelve or fifteen years of age, goes from house to house singing a song, the burden of which is a wish for rain. It is then the custom of the mistress of the house at which the Dodola is stopped to throw a little water on her. This custom used also to be kept up in the Servian districts of Hungary; but has been forbidden by the priests.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 20: The most perfect confederacy of this description is that of the Druses, which has stood the test of eight centuries, and in its secret organization is complete beyond any thing attained by freemasonry.]

CHAPTER XXVI.

Town life.--The public offices.--Manners half-Oriental half-European.--Merchants and Tradesmen.--Turkish population.--Porters.--Barbers.--Cafes.--Public Writer.

On pa.s.sing from the country to the town the politician views with interest the transitional state of society: but the student of manners finds nothing salient, picturesque, or remarkable; everything is verging to German routine. If you meet a young man in any department, and ask what he does; he tells you that he is a Concepist or Protocollist.

In the public offices, the paper is, as in Germany, atrociously coa.r.s.e, being something like that with which parcels are wrapped up in England; and sand is used instead of blotting paper. They commence business early in the morning, at eight o'clock, and go on till twelve, at which hour everybody goes to the mid-day meal. They commence again at four o'clock, and terminate at seven, which is the hour of supper. The reason of this is, that almost everybody takes a siesta.

The public offices throughout the interior of Servia are plain houses, with white-washed walls, deal desks, shelves, and presses, but having been recently built, have generally a respectable appearance. The Chancery of State and Senate house are also quite new constructions, close to the palace; but in the country, a Natchalnik transacts a great deal of business in his own house.

Servia contains within itself the forms of the East and the West, as separately and distinctly as possible. See a Natchalnik in the back woods squatted on his divan, with his enormous trowsers, smoking his pipe, and listening to the contents of a paper, which his secretary, crouching and kneeling on the carpet, reads to him, and you have the Bey, the Kaimacam, or the Mutsellim before you. See M. Petronievitch scribbling in his cabinet, and you have the _Furstlicher Haus-Hof-Staats-und Conferenz-Minister_ of the meridian of Saxe or Hesse.

Servia being an agricultural country, and not possessing a sea-port, there does not exist an influential, mercantile, or capitalist cla.s.s _per se_. Greeks, Jews, and Tsinsars, form a considerable proportion of those engaged in the foreign trade: it is to be remarked that most of this cla.s.s are secret adherents of the Obrenovitch party, while the wealthy native Servians support Kara Georgevitch.

In Belgrade, the best tradesmen are Germans, or Servians, who have learned their business at Pesth; or Temeswar; but nearly all the retailers are Servians.

Having treated so fully the aspects and machinery of Oriental life, in my work on native society in Damascus and Aleppo, it is not necessary that I should say here any thing of Moslem manners and customs. The Turks in Belgrade are nearly all of a very poor cla.s.s, and follow the humblest occupations. The river navigation causes many hands to be employed in boating; and it always seemed to me that the proportion of the turbans on the river exceeded that of the Christian short fez.

Most of the porters on the quay of Belgrade are Turks in their turbans, which gives the landing-place, on arrival from Semlin, a more Oriental look than the Moslem population of the town warrants. From the circ.u.mstance of trucks being nearly unknown in this country, these Turkish porters carry weights that would astonish an Englishman, and show great address in balancing and dividing heavy weights among them.

Most of the barbers in Belgrade are Turks, and have that superior dexterity which distinguishes their craft in the east. There are also Christian barbers; but the Moslems are in greater force. I never saw any Servian shave himself; nearly all resort to the barber. Even the Christian barbers, in imitation of the Oriental fashion, shave the straggling edges of the eyebrows, and with pincers tug out the small hairs of the nostrils.

The native _cafes_ are nearly all kept by Moslems; one, as I have stated elsewhere, by an Arab, born in Oude in India; another by a Jew, which is frequented by the children of Israel, and is very dirty.

I once went in to smoke a narghile, and see the place, but made my escape forthwith. Several Jews, who spoke Spanish to each other, were playing backgammon on a raised bench, and seemed to have in their furs and dresses that "_malproprete profonde et huileuse_" which M. de Custine tells us characterizes the dirt of the north as contrasted with that of the southern nations. The _cafe_ of the Indian, on the contrary, was perfectly clean and new.

Moslem boatmen, porters, barbers, &c. serve Christians and all and sundry. But in addition to these, there is a sort of bazaar in the Turkish quarter, occupied by tradespeople, who subsist almost exclusively by the wants of their co-religionists living in the quarter, as well as of the Turkish garrison in the fortress. The only one of this cla.s.s who frequented me, was the public writer, who had several a.s.sistants; he was not a native of Belgrade, but a Bulgarian Turk from Ternovo. He drew up pet.i.tions to the Pasha in due form, and, moreover, engraved seals very neatly. His a.s.sistants, when not engaged in either of these occupations, copied Korans for sale. His own handwriting was excellent, and he knew all the styles, Arab, Deewanee, Persian, Reka, &c. What keeps him mostly in my mind, was the delight with which he entered into, and ill.u.s.trated, the proverbs at the end of M. Joubert's grammar, which the secretary of the Russian Consul-general had lent him. Some of the proverbs are so applicable to Oriental manners, that I hope the reader will excuse the digression.

"Kiss the hand thou hast not been able to cut."

"Hide thy friend's name from thine enemy."

"Eat and drink with thy friend; never buy and sell with him."

"This is a fast day, said the cat, seeing the liver she could not get at."

"Of three things one--Power, gold, or quit the town."

"The candle does not light its base."

"The orphan cuts his own navel-string," &c.

The rural population of Servia must necessarily advance slowly, but each five years, for a generation to come, will,--I have little doubt,--alter the aspect of the town population, as much relatively as the five that are by-gone. Let the lines of railway now in progress from Belgium to Hungary be completed, and Belgrade may again become a stage in the high road to the East. A line by the valleys of the Morava and the Maritsa, with its large towns, Philippopoli and Adrianople, is certainly not more chimerical and absurd than many that are now projected. Who can doubt of its _ultimate_ accomplishment, in spite of the alternate precipitancy and prostration of enterprise?

Meanwhile imagination loses itself in attempting to picture the altered face of affairs in these secluded regions, when subjected to the operation of a revolution, which posterity will p.r.o.nounce to be greater than those which made the fifteenth century the morning of the just terminated period of civilization.

CHAPTER XXVII.

Poetry.--Journalism.--The Fine Arts.--The Lyceum.--Mineralogical cabinet.--Museum.--Servian Education.

In the whole range of the Slaavic family there is no nation possessing so extensive a collection of excellent popular poetry. The romantic beauty of the region which they inhabit, the relics of a wild mythology, which, in its general features, has some resemblance to that of Greece and Scandinavia,--the adventurous character of the population, the vicissitudes of guerilla warfare, and a hundred picturesque incidents which are lost to the muses when war is carried on on a large scale by standing armies, are all given in a dialect, which, for musical sweetness, is to other Slavonic tongues what the Italian is to the languages of Western Europe.[21]

The journalism of Servia began at Vienna; and a certain M. Davidovitch was for many years the interpreter of Europe to his less enlightened countrymen. The journal which he edited is now published at Pesth, and printed in Cyrillian letters. There were in 1843 two newspapers at Belgrade, the _State Gazette_ and the _Courier_; but the latter has since been dropped, the editor having vainly attempted to get its circulation allowed in the Servian districts of Hungary. Many copies were smuggled over in boats, but it was an unremunerating speculation; and the editor, M. Simonovitch, who was bred a Hungarian advocate, is now professor of law in the Lyceum. Yankee hyperbole was nothing to the high flying of this gentleman. In one number, I recollect the pa.s.sage, "These are the reasons why all the people of Servia, young and old, rich and poor, danced and shouted for joy, when the Lord gave them as a Prince a son of the never-to-be-forgotten Kara Georg." A Croatian newspaper, containing often very interesting information on Bosnia, is published at Agram, the language being the same as the Servian, but printed in Roman instead of Cyrillian letters. The _State Gazette_ of Belgrade gives the news of the interior and exterior, but avoids all reflections on the policy of Russia or Austria. An article, which I wrote on Servia for an English publication, was reproduced in a translation minus all the allusions to these two powers; and I think that, considering the dependent position of Servia, abstinence from such discussions is dictated by the soundest policy.

The "Golubitza," or Dove, a miscellany in prose and verse, neatly got up in imitation of the German Taschenbucher, and edited by M.

Hadschitch, is the only annual in Servia. In imitation of more populous cities, Belgrade has also a "Literary Society," for the formation of a complete dictionary of the language, and the encouragement of popular literature. I could not help smiling at the thirteenth statute of the society, which determines that the seal should represent an uncultivated field, with the rising sun shining on a monument, on which the arms of Servia are carved.

The fine arts are necessarily at a very low ebb in Servia. The useful being so imperfect, the ornamental scarcely exists at all. The pictures in the churches are mostly in the Byzantine manner, in which deep browns and dark reds are relieved with gilding, while the subjects are characterized by such extravagancies as one sees in the pictures of the early German painters, a school which undoubtedly took its rise from the importations of Byzantine pictures at Venice, and their expedition thence across the Alps. At present everything artistic in Servia bears a coa.r.s.e German impress, such as for instance the pictures in the cathedral of Belgrade.

Thus has civilization performed one of her great evolutions. The light that set on the Thracian Bosphorus rose in the opposite direction from the land of the once barbarous Hermans, and now feebly re-illumines the modern Servia.

One of the most hopeful inst.i.tutions of Belgrade is the Lyceum, or germ of a university, as they are proud to call it. One day I went to see it, along with Professor Shafarik, and looked over the mineralogical collection made in Servia, by Baron Herder, which included rich specimens of silver, copper, and lead ore, as well as marble, white as that of Carrara. The Studenitza marble is slightly grey, but takes a good polish. The coal specimens were imperfectly petrified, and of bad quality, the progress of ignition being very slow. Servia is otherwise rich in minerals; but it is lamentable to see such vast wealth dormant, since none of the mines are worked.

We then went to an apartment decorated like a little ball-room, which is what is called the cabinet of antiquities. A n.o.ble bronze head, tying on the German stove, in the corner of the room, a handsome Roman lamp and some antique coins, were all that could be shown of the ancient Moesia; but there is a fair collection of Byzantine and Servian coins, the latter struck in the Venetian manner, and resembling old sequins.

A parchment doc.u.ment, which extended to twice the length of a man, was now unrolled, and proved to be a patent of Stephan Urosh, the father of Stephan Dushan, endowing the great convent of Dechani, in Albania. Another curiosity in the collection is the first banner of Kara Georg, which the Servians consider as a national relic. It is in red silk, and bears the emblem of the cross, with the inscription "Jesus Christ conquers."

We then went to the professor's room, which was furnished with the newest Russ, Bohemian, and other Slaavic publications, and after a short conversation visited the cla.s.ses then sitting. The end of education in Servia being practical, prominence is given to geometry, natural philosophy, Slaavic history and literature, &c. Latin and Greek are admitted to have been the keys to polite literature, some two centuries and a half ago; but so many lofty and n.o.ble chambers having been opened since then, and routine having no existence in Servia, her youth are not destined to spend a quarter of a lifetime in the mere nurseries of humanity.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 21: To those who take an interest in this subject, I have great pleasure in recommending a perusal of "Servian Popular Poetry,"

(London, 1827,) translated by Dr. Bowring; but the introductory matter, having been written nearly twenty years ago, is, of course, far from being abreast of the present state of information on the subjects of which it treats.]

CHAPTER XXVIII.

Preparations for Departure.--Impressions of the East.--Prince Alexander.--The Palace.--Kara Georg.