Field of the Blackbirds

In Black Lamb and Grey Falcon they have now reached the Kosovo Polye (or Polje), aka “Field of the Blackbirds” – the scene of the defeat of the Serbs against the Turks in 1389. Losing at Kosovo Polye meant centuries under Turkish rule for the Serbs. It wasn’t just a defeat – it was the cessation of their civilization. It’s no mistake that Slobodan Milosevic would choose Kosovo Polye as the place to launch his deadly plan for his country. He stood on the edge of the plain, surrounded by crowds, and said, “We as Serbs will never be defeated like that again.” The memory of 1389 fresh and raw, still. And – of course – we all know what happened next. The revival of national pride under Milosevic became a genocide.

I’ve read a lot about Kosovo Polye, and I thought I’d share some of Rebecca West’s thoughts about the place, and the history of it – as she stands on the edge of it, looking out, trying to picture all that had occurred there.

It is flattery of nature to say that it is indifferent to man. It grossly disfavors him in quantity and quality, providing more pain than pleasure, and making that more potent. The simplest and most dramatic example is found in our food: a good oyster cannot please the palate as acutely as a bad one can revolt it, and a good oyster cannot make him who eats it live forever though a bad one can make him dead forever.

The agony of Kossovo could not be balanced by the joy that was to be derived from it. The transports of the women who built the church must dull themselves in continuance, and even if they generated the steady delight of founding a new nation that itself was dulled by the resistance offered to the will by material objects, and by the conflict between different wills working to the same end, which is often not less envenomed than the conflict between wills working to different ends. But the agony of Kossovy must have been purely itself, pain upon pain, newly born in acuteness for each generation, throughout five centuries. The night of evil had been supreme, it still was supreme on a quantitative basis.

Above the plain were the soft white castles of the clouds and a blank blue wall behind them.

Into this world I had been born, and I must resign myself to it; I could not move myself to a fortunate planet, where any rare tear was instantly dried by a benediction. This is my glass, I must drink out of it. In my anxiety to know what was in the glass, I wondered, “The world is tragic, but just how tragic? I wonder if it is finally so, if we can ever counter the catastrophes to which we are liable and give ourselves a workshop of serenity in which we can experiment with that other way of life which is not tragedy, but which is not comedy. Certainly not comedy, for that is merely life before tragedy has fallen upon it, ridiculous as a clown on the films who grins and capers without seeing that there is a policeman behind him just about to bring down a club on his head. That other way of life must transcend not only comedy but tragedy, must refuse to be impressed by its grandiose quality and frustrate it at every point.”

But I found my mind wandering from the subject, which was surely the nature of tragedy and the points at which it attacked man, to indulge in some of that optimism which serves us in the West instead of fortitude. Life, I said to myself, was surely not as tragic as all that, and perhaps the defeat of Kossovo had not been a disaster of supreme magnitude. Perhaps the armies that had stood up before the Turks had been a huddle of barbarians, impressive only after the fashion of a pack of wolves, that in its dying presented the world with only the uninteresting difference between a live pack of wolves and a dead pack of wolves. That is a view held by some historians, notably the person so unfortunately selected by the editors of the Cambridge Medieval Hitory to write the chapter on the Serbian Empire; and it seems to receive some support when one drives, as we did after we left the church, along the fringes of the plain. The population of Old Serbia is sunk far deeper in misery than the Macedonians, and at a superficial glance they justify the poor opinion of the Christian rayahs held by 19th century travellers. Their houses turn a dilapidated blankness on the village street; their clothes are often dirty and unornamented by a single stitch of embroidery; and they gape at the stranger with eyes empty of anything but a lethargic fear which is quite unapposite to the present, which is the residue of a deposit left by a past age, never yet drained off by the intelligence.