Summer Reading

While shopping for souvenirs in the kitschy tourist block of Kruja, Albania, I spotted a book with a title in English, Faith and Fairies: Tales Based on Albanian Legends and Ballads, by Mustafa Tukaj. I didn’t know I was supposed to haggle, so I overpaid for my used, water-damaged copy. The English translation is quite new – it just appeared last year. Perhaps it should have been delayed to allow an actual English speaker to proofread it before publication – some of the translations are unintentionally hilarious. Of the ten tales in the volume, the last five concern the heroes of Jutbina, Gjeto Basho Muj and his brother Halil. The book begins with a scholarly essay summarizing the main themes and motifs that run through Albanian folk tales. The primary virtue exalted in these tales is faith (besa, in Albanian) – keeping one’s sworn pledge of honor.

Before I found Faith and Fairies, I was reading Arabian Fairy Tales by Amina Shah, who comes from “an ancient Afghan family of writers and savants.” The Arabian stories feel, somehow, more familiar and less austere than the Albanian tales. Perhaps living in Britain has taught the author what an English-speaking audience expects. Or perhaps The Thousand and One Nights has become so much a part of the English canon that tales from that culture no longer seem particularly exotic.

At St. Vlad’s, returning students can check out books for the whole summer. After I learned about this privilege, every time I found a book I thought I might want to read over the summer, I filled out a check-out slip for the book. On the second-to-last day of the semester, I took my pile of slips to the stacks, located all my books, and checked them out.

First on my list was Edessa ‘The Blessed City’ by J.B. Segal, a thorough, detailed history of this city, which was central to Syrian Christianity. Here was where Greek, Semitic, Persian, and Armenian cultures met and mixed. Originally home to Antiochene theologians who followed Theodore of Mopsuestia, Edessa’s theological school later switched sides and adopted the theology of Cyril of Alexandria. The city was also home to King Abgar and the famed Edessa icon, known as the mandylion.

Continuing that last theme is Veronica and Her Cloth: History, Symbolism, and Structure of a “True” Image by Polish artist Ewa Kuryluk, an examination of the veronica, the mandylion, and other “true images” of Christ from a postmodern feminist perspective.

Tangentially related to these is Image and Liturgy: The History and Meaning of the Epitaphion, the 2008 M.Div. thesis of St. Vlad’s staff member Tatiana Penkrat. The epitaphion is an embroidered icon of the burial of Christ that is used in Byzantine services of Holy Friday and Saturday, particularly the Lamentation service. I am eager to read this work for multiple reasons:

• The Lamentation service has always been my favorite Byzantine service.
• Many recensions of the epitaphion display the Troparion of St. Joseph of Arimathea in the border and place St. Joseph himself at the feet of Christ, making this my patronal icon.
• Penkrat considers the possibility that the epitaphion is a recension of the True Shroud of Jesus, which some equate to the mandylion translated from Edessa to Constantinople in 944.

Finally, a book that has nothing to do with Edessa and its icon: Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo, by Ger Duijzings. Identity politics in the Balkans has interested me since my 1992 stint on a joint military intelligence task force that followed the Balkans. Since then I have followed Kosovo with special interest; Slobodan Milosevic made the province a particular focus of Serbian identity politics, and the Kosovar Albanians responded creatively to his provocations. Duijzings questions the assumption that ethnic and religious identities in the Balkans are clear-cut and fixed. Indeed, I have long been aware that Balkan villages have historically changed their language and ethnic identity when it was expedient to do so, much as they converted to Islam under pressure from the Ottomans. The whole idea of nationalism, as we understand it, is an invention of the 19th century, and it is even more inappropriate to project it further into the past than it is to maintain it in the present.