The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans - By Simon Winchester Page 0,2

hay, the early harvests from the higher fields, which swayed precariously down into the villages. Their drivers were invariably men with rather narrow, dark, pinched faces: A few of them, usually the older ones, wore white and smoothly thimble-shaped hats.

We were making first for the old town of Pec, where I had read there was a collection of stupendous Orthodox churches and monasteries, some of them six hundred years old and more, and with frescoes on their walls that dated from the fifteenth century and presented the wild pantheon of saints* and kings and godly scenes that make the canons of Orthodoxy seem to the western mind so very strange.

The long and chessboard-flat plain that stretched shimmering for mile after scorching mile ahead, and that looked so very much like the holy flatlands of northern France near Chartres, was, by coincidence, a religious heartland as well. This was what once was called Old Serbia, and crosses were everywhere, and beards were as long and metropolitans as grand and ponderously venerable as in any sacred place. But they were not so numerous as I felt they should have been, and that was the first puzzle.

For it just seemed odd, to a stranger who had read that this plain was the holy heartland of old Orthodox Serbia, that rising from the Pec old town like a forest of needles, there were just so many minarets as well, and that there were these men, scores of them like the peasants hauling the harvests home, who were wearing the white caps of Islam, and whose women scurried beneath the modest concealments of veils and thick scarves. If this was Old Serbia, and if these surrounding wheatfields were as precious to Serbian Orthodoxy as the fields around Canterbury were precious to Anglicanism and those around Chartres to the idea of Catholicism—then why, I wondered, was this particular and holy town so self-evidently Muslim?

It was a question born out of ignorance, and one that would not be asked today—for this part of Old Serbia is Kosovo now, and the fact that so sacred an Orthodox heartland supports a vast majority of men and women for whom Mecca and the kaaba are the religious lodestone is one source of all the terrible mayhem to which, in twenty-odd years’ time, I would return. I had more than a hint of it that summer’s day, however. It came when I was filling the Volvo with gas: The attendant who was topping off the tank was a slow, genial sort of man who spoke a little English and who had asked me a few questions—where I was from, where bound? He spoke Serbian—after a number of days on the road I could recognize some of the basics—and so I remember assuming that he was indeed a Serb.

It was as he was closing the gas cap that we both noticed a group of the same darkish, thin-faced men passing along the road, two or three of the older ones in white skullcaps, the rest with long, light-brown hair. These were the people by whom this part of the world seemed to be largely populated: Though this was Serbia, according to the maps and the history books, the Serbs were clearly outnumbered by these others, these darker Muslims. The gas station owner gestured toward them, then looked at me—and suddenly spat with a twisted smirk of contempt and disdain, which he was not at all shy of demonstrating to me.

“Albani,” he said, and then, to underline the point for me, “Albanians!” He spat again, and without the group being able to see him, shook his fist from behind the car with what to me was astonishingly unrestrained passion. “Absolute bastards! I hate them. Crooks, all of them. Bloody bastard Albani!” His venom was extraordinary, I thought—too impassioned for a languorous summer day of hay wains and the creak of wooden cartwheels and sunflowers nodding in the heat. I paid and hurried away. I never asked him to explain, and for many years, whenever I looked back at this incident that lingered powerfully in my mind, I imagined merely that the hatred was reflective of some private problem suffered by this man alone. Perhaps the men had stolen money from him or seduced his daughter. That’s what it must have been: a private feud.

It was many years before I came to understand that this view—“Albanians—all bastards! I hate them”—was in fact the collective view of many tens of thousands of the Serbs who