I fucking love the Balkans!

I fucking love The Balkans. That's right. A kid from suburban California, stuffed full of Scandinavian and Northern European genetic material now living his life as a walking, talking Northwest stereotype loves the Balkans. The place, the people, the food, the music. The booze! Public toilets in Serbia? Not so much.

How did, I, a liberal, grunge loving metalhead, and one time political theory student from the wilds of San Jose end up falling in love with Balkan folk music, rakija, cevapi, kajmak, Nikola Tesla, and Slovenian pizza?

Jebi ga! Where to begin?

1992. That's where.

I was a junior at UC Santa Cruz. A political theory and art major. You know, a sensible, forward thinking academic focus with gainful employment foremost in mind. I was taking a lower division world politics class to fulfill a requirement. Super easy class. Just memorize a lot of place names, governmental structures, and names of political leaders.

Well, the Yugoslavian Dissolution War was in full force at this point. The Soviet Union had fallen.. not that these two things really have anything to do with each other besides their effect on the cartographic makeup of the European continent.

Pro tip when you make an Ex-Yugo friend... never conflate the USSR with Yugoslavia. If you do, you will hear the full breadth of vulgarity that the Serbo-Croatian language has to offer.

Anyway...

The map of Europe was changing almost every single day in May of 1992, particularly in the Southern part of the region. What was one country was now 6... or 7 depending on who you talked to. And three of those countries were fighting each other in a gruesome fashion. I'm not going to get into the details because it's messy messy stuff with no clear protagonist and antagonist as well as a great way to piss off an entire section of a continent.

I was particularly moved by the events in Bosnia. It's a sad sad story. It was a modern country with a very rich history. A place where you could see the twentieth century on full display in a city like Sarajevo, drive 50 miles along a stunning, azure river and feel like you stepped into the early 19th century.

A lot of innocent people, just trying to live their lives, bore the brunt of this complicated, messy war. It struck a chord with me on a very real level.

I was in a band at the time with Pat, Chris, Brendan, and sometimes Jim. We went by the problematic name Fisthorse. I described our music as ADD metal. It was all over the place, but swam through the river of metal all along the way.

If you can believe this, I was the vocalist! I "played" bass, but not in the band. Brendan was by far a better bassist than I would ever be, but it provided me an opportunity to work out some song ideas. I wrote a song about a Bosnian family dealing with the bitter reality of war and the loss that accompanies it.

This was the most approachable song we had. Most of our stuff switched styles at breakneck speed, designed to annoy more than entertain. Then I wrote this song. It had a melodic hook. It was pleasant. The biggest metal fan in the band writes our one pleasant song about a bloody, messy, senseless tragedy.

We named it "Digestable" because we were a bunch of assholes and liked to fuck with people.

Fisthorse played some shows. Confused and annoyed a small number of people. We laughed about it a lot because what we were doing was absurd.

I moved to San Francisco in the summer of 93. The band continued on without me. There were some member changes. A name change. Musical direction changes. It was all fraught with emotional weight commensurate with what 21 year old white dudes from the suburbs can handle. There were fights and hurt feelings, and for the life of me, I can't remember what any of it was about 26 years later!

I move to Seattle in 1995, following Brendan. We drink a lot. Explore the Pacific Northwest. See a lot of shows at the Croc, Showbox, Offramp, Weathered Wall, Rockcandy, insert list of places that no longer exist in Seattle. Discover a ton of great local music. Grow up a bit. Just a bit. MOstly we drink local craft brews and go to shows.

I've regaled you all with the tale of meeting Gino and Mario in 1999. I won't go into that here, but I had no idea that that casual introduction at The Showbox after a show would be so momentous. Such a huge change in direction for my life.

I go to 8 million Kultur Shock shows. Get to know and become dear friends with everyone in the band and around it. They're family!

In 2009, I decide to make a documentary about Kultur Shock. I'm still working on it, trying to figure out the narrative angle because the band is a never-ceasing moving target of narrative opportunity. It's hard to pin down a focused story angle.

In 2011, I have the opportunity to go on the road with them in the fucking Balkans! We'll visit Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, and Bulgaria with a weird detour into Hungary. There is no better source of material for the documentary than going on the road with them on their turf!

I FUCKING LOVE THIS REGION OF EUROPE!

The Balkans are not monolithic in their culture, geography, and people. Slovenes are very different from Croats. Serbs are different from Bosnians. Bulgarians are like an entirely different species! However, they are all bound together by a deep shared history and there's a great deal of cultural overlap. They love food and coffee and booze. Espresso in the Balkans is an otherworldly experience. Everywhere you go, the food taunts you. The countries are gorgeous. Croatia is like 3 countries in one. Slavonia, the Peninsula, and Dalmatia are wildly different places!

The thing that binds all this craziness together is the people. I've never been to a place with the same level of generosity that you'll find in the Balkans. Almost without exception, the people I met were generous to a fault. Many of them had lived through war and siege. For some, their earliest memories were of war and scarcity. Mortar and bullet holes remind you almost constantly of the fact of war. Land mines! You have to be wary of land mines! I can't think of a more brutal, terrifying reminder of a dark time!

These people would give you the shirt off their back... knowing full well, replacing said shirt would be a financial burden. I have couches to sleep on in Mostar, Ljubljana, Zrenjanin, Novo Mesto, Split, and Sarajevo. So many friends' mom's places with whom I have a standing invitation for dinner.

With what happened there in the 90s, I consider myself stupidly lucky to even have had the chance to meet these people! There was a good a chance that a land mine, stray bullet, starvation, or mortar round might have made that impossible.

There is a palpable sense of welcome and love in this region that is intoxicating. There's also an undercurrent of very dark humor that runs through every vein of every Balkan person. A survival tactic for a region that has known war and hard times for centuries. When things are horrifying in a Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness Colonel Kurtz sort of way, humor is a deeply necessary survival mechanism. To not be able to laugh is to cease living. And if you're not living, no cevapi, or rakija, or sopska, or pizza, or wonderful music in odd time signatures and scales. Things that make life here unique and worth living for!

I've been back to Slovenia twice since this trip and Croatia once. Though the experiences in each place are different from the other, that common thread of generosity and welcoming is always there.

I haven't been to Europe yet this year and I'm getting the itch. Probably not going to happen for me for a visit to the Balkans, but I desperately in need of spending some time in Sarajevo, Mostar, Split, Dubrovnik, Hvar, Rijeka, Krk, Zadar, Belgrade, Skopje, Podgorica, Pristina, Pula, Motovun, Banja Luka, and an ongoing list of places I have yet to visit. And then there's Bulgaria!

So much to see. Too little money and time.

Hvala!