The story of “deda” Mirko in the mirror of the Balkans
Last March "deda" (grandfather) Mirko would have turned 126 years old. The story of Alessandro Napoli
Last March deda (grandfather) Mirko would have turned 126 years old. He was born in a village in central Serbia a few kilometers from Kragujevac. Outside the village he had been there a few times, for example in the capital, but only to carry out bureaucratic procedures, or to meet his son when he was a military conscript of the Yugoslav royal army, sent to a village near the Karavanke. As if to say, in a completely different place, among those Alps that were to its hills almost like a Scandinavian forest of conifers is to a forest of Mediterranean oaks.
He was a handsome man, deda Mirko. Tall, wiry, straight black hair swept back and heavily glittered, blue eyes. It is said that there were many women fascinated by him, the gossips of the village claimed that it was mainly because of his uniform. Deda Mirko actually wore a uniform, complete with an ordinance hat: he was a bus driver on effective permanent duty.
But deda Mirko was a man of sober habits: no female adventures, little attendance at the kafanas, those typical places of the Balkans and of the whole ex-Ottoman territory, traditionally frequented by men only, where coffee, tea and alcoholic beverages are served. He was allergic to card games. In the end he was almost a vegetarian: he fed on tomato and cucumber salads, a little kajmak, a milk derivative, and a lot of bread. On holidays, when the whole family devoured everything, Deda Mirko indulged in what she considered an overdoing: a pljeskavica, a meatball, washed down with a couple of glasses of rakì. No one ever saw him bite into chickens, lambs or piglets on a spit, much less hams or sausages
His son, the one later sent to join the military under the Karavanke, was the complete opposite of his father: rather short, blond hair always in disarray, black eyes, a few extra pounds. All his mother, it was said, with that bit of subtle backbiting common in the villages, founded on the principle of the certainty of motherhood and the non-provable paternity. Unlike his father, he loved spending his evenings at the kafana playing with friends and drinking. His name was Miloš and his weakness was his passion for women, which caused him quite a few problems, including daring escapes across the rooftops chased by husbands who had caught their wife in the act of adultery. Like a Don Giovanni, he wasn't too subtle: all of them suited him, as long as they wore a skirt.
The Nazis invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in April 1941. Miloš was recalled and sent to the northern border. But the regular army did not hold. The dilemma then arose in Miloš: go with the Chetniks, with the communist partisans or hide.
Deda Mirko, like many people from his parts, was a staunch royalist. At the head of her bed she had a portrait of the young king Peter II, icons stood from other parts of her house. In fact, as well as being a monarchist he was also very religious, and especially at that time the two sentiments coincided. His wife Olga had a reputation as a great cook: in fact, there was no family in the village who did not want to entrust her with the preparation of dinners for a wedding party, a svadba, and she contributed so much to the income of Deda Mirko's family. A family that had reached a certain level of well-being (to define it wealth would be excessive) compared to the standard of living of the fellow villagers.
To resolve the dilemma it seemed natural to Miloš to turn first to his father. "What do you advise me to do, tata?", was the question, addressed using the second plural, as was customary with the male parent, and not the second singular, reserved only for communications with well-known peers or strangers of clearly younger age. Deda Mirko listened to her son and smoothed her hair with her right hand, looking at the sideboard in the living room, the dnevna soba, and not at her son's eyes.
Deda Mirko didn't hold the communist partisans in high esteem, let's even say that he considered them a danger more or less like the Germans. “If you hide in the middle of the hay, in our little stable or in that of a neighbor, sooner or later they find you”, replied Deda Mirko, “you might as well expose yourself directly, and I tell you that we have to defend the king; that's what I would do if I was ten years younger and if they still wanted me”. And so, out of obedience to his father rather than out of conviction, Miloš registered with the resistant royalist army and never joined the partisans.
Meanwhile the Germans occupied the village, while Deda Mirko continued to wear his driver's uniform and drive the bus. He adapted to the hardships of war without great effort: he was used to eating like a pticica, a bird, and luckily there was no shortage of rakija, just as it wasn't a big deal to find tomatoes, kajmak and eggs, all he needed to survive . And then he had Olga by his side, who from those few and poor raw materials could produce, if not a king's lunch, at least one for a knez, a prince.
The war was ending, and it did. The liberators weren't the ones Deda Miloš preferred: they were communist partisans (for the sake of reporting, she called them "chicken thieves"), but the day they all started dancing in the street (and did much more in the kafana , later) he was there too, Deda Mirko. There was no news of Miloš yet, and there would be no more.
The Germans had been driven out, the Communist partisans had won, the Chethniks had lost. Above all, the world was no longer the one that Deda Mirko had known, the one before the war. It was starting to be a new world, where there wasn't the space before for people like deda Mirko, čika Pera (the owner of the kafana), tetka Marija (the seamstress) or tetka Aleksandra (the owner of the butcher shop).
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/storia-deda-mirko-balcani/ on Sun, 06 Aug 2023 05:17:22 +0000.