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The History of EASTERN EUROPE with Jacob Mikanowski · The Smart Cookies podcast

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  Jakub Mikanovski is a freelance journalist and author whose writing has appeared in The
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  New Yorker, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The New York Times and many other publications.
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  However, I'm going to be talking to Jakub today because last year he published a phenomenal
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  book called Goodbye Eastern Europe, an intimate history of a divided land, which I really
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  swallowed like a hungry hippo.
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  Jakub, welcome.
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  Thanks so much for having me, Zota.
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  I got to tell you, you and your book are really godsend to this podcast.
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  I mean, I'm from Eastern Europe, from Slovenia to be more exact.
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  And so for the past 30 episodes, I talked to some really incredible people having these
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  amazing illuminating conversations about the secrets of space and the Ottoman Empire and
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  the heart problem of consciousness and the Mongol invasions making up for when I didn't
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  pay any attention in school.
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  But all along I was secretly hoping that I would eventually be able to also talk about
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  my own corner of the world.
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  But since the podcast is in English and since Eastern Europe, as we know, usually garners
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  little interest unless some new Chernobyl or a new war erupts there.
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  I thought fat chance, you know.
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  But here you are with this delicious book.
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  And I also got to tell you why I enjoyed it so much.
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  It was because reading it sometimes felt almost like reading an epic fantasy novel, like an
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  Eastern European Lord of the Rings or something.
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  There's just so many colorful characters and places and stories in your book.
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  Only they're real.
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  We just haven't heard of them.
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  On the other hand, even we who come from Eastern Europe often believe in this myth that Eastern
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  Europe is just a whole lot of gray.
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  And that includes our histories as well.
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  Your book shows that it's anything but.
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  So maybe let's start here with Eastern Europe as the undesirable label, as something you
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  usually want to run away from.
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  And let me read a couple of sentences from the beginning of the book real quick.
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  I think it's in the prologue.
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  Yeah, here we go.
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  A friend of mine, a professor of Polish and German history, once had a student ask in
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  all seriousness whether it was true that Eastern Europe was a gray place where no one ever
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  left.
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  With dour connotations like these, it is no wonder that people want to escape being associated
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  with Eastern Europe.
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  In the past 30 years, country after country has shed the label.
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  Even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland all declared
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  themselves part of Central Europe.
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  Well, first of all, absolute traitors.
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  And second of all, when and why do you think we acquired this image of being the trashy
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  Europeans coming from a very gray place?
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  That's an interesting question of when.
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  And that anecdote actually just a professor who had that student, I just saw him a few
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  months ago, reminded him of this.
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  Because actually that he told that story and kind of got me working on the book a little
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  bit.
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  And I think we need to find some way to lift that cloud of gloom.
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  Because there is a little bit of truth to it, but there's a lot more going on on the
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  surface.
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  Historically, there are a couple of answers to that, competing ones.
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  One is that it's all post-World War II that has to do with the Soviet Union and socialism
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  and the Iron Curtain that solidified this big gap, this big break between capitalist
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  West and socialist, increasingly backwards, increasingly kind of slow moving East.
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  There was a historian named Larry Wolf, though, at NYU, who makes the argument that it's actually
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  a lot older, that that prejudice of the West against the East goes back to the 18th century
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  and the Enlightenment.
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  And that when you started having France, especially France, but also Scotland, also Germany, being
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  kind of heartlands of philosophy and what they thought was the most modern progressive
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  European ideals of freedom and then the beginning Industrial Revolution.
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  But they started describing themselves as advanced and looking East and looking at bad
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  roads in Poland and bad agriculture, backwards agriculture in Hungary and Slovenia and old
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  kinds of old fashioned beliefs and vampires in Croatia and what used to be the military
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  boundary that they started defining that specifically Eastern idea.
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  So you could say it's pretty recent.
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  It's a 20th century thing or it's very old.
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  You could even find traces of it before that, that goes all the way back to the pagans that
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  there used to be, you know, Western Europe became.
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  Europe is really an idea that comes out of Christendom and Christianity.
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  And that Western Europe was the first to be Christian, the first to be increasingly homogenous
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  and Christian.
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  And Eastern Europe was this either Orthodox, which is different from Christianity, but
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  it stayed pagan lots of it much longer with Scandinavia.
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  So you could say 50 years ago, 70 years ago, 200 years ago, or even a thousand years ago.
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  Do you think the pendulum will swing the other way?
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  For example, these days, Western Europe or the West in general, you know, has to deal
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  with its colonial legacy a lot, which is something that most countries in Eastern Europe, especially
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  the smaller ones, don't have to deal with.
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  And also, it's a little bit ironic because with our generation, it's quite often the
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  opposite.
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  We look at our parents' photos when they were younger and we see the relative prosperity
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  that they enjoyed after the Second World War in Yugoslavia, the holidays in Croatia, the
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  apartments they bought for peanuts, the jobs waiting for them after graduation, the friendships
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  with the with the people from the other republics.
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  There's even a name for it back home.
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  We call it Yugo Nostalgia.
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  We miss it even though we haven't really lived in it.
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  That's interesting.
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  I think it really varies.
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  I think the word absolutely that Yugo Nostalgia, I was in North Macedonia, Macedonia, on Lake
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  Ochre in a cab, a gypsy cab, like an unofficial cab, you need to get to Albania with a bunch
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  and you know, you pile in and we had some people from Serbia, some people from Macedonia,
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  some people from Croatia, everyone staying around the lake.
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  And I can understand Serbian enough to, actually Macedonian I can't understand at all, but
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  Serbian I can kind of follow from Russian.
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  And it was absolutely that conversation of like under Tito, it was great that we had,
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  we all came here for vacation and everyone was friends and everyone played by the lake.
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  These are people who had been coming to Lake Ochre, you know, since for 40 years pensioners
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  and that that feeling of back in the day, it was better.
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  That's much, you know, but that's much stronger in former Yugoslavia.
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  In Poland, you almost never hear that.
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  Right.
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  There's very little because also the economy was so bad in the 80s, kind of wiped out most
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  of those feelings.
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  So you have, it ranges where people feel the most affection as a past.
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  It's been interesting to see in East, I don't really write about East Germany very much.
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  I kind of avoid it, but this year there's been a real kind of debate about the East
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  German past and people, and it does kind of divide generationally, people who are very
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  young when the wall came down.
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  Do look back in this book by Katja Hoyer, who looks back really fondly at the incredible,
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  the really solid social services, the really like cheap apartments, great childcare, solid
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  vacation time and say, you know, this seems great.
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  And then there are like a different generation, older is like, well, you don't, you know,
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  you don't see the Stasi, you don't see the border patrol, you don't see how the surveillance
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  and it really divides in terms of the memory is disputed in a lot of places.
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  Romania, you kind of get both.
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  So it's interesting.
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  So the reevaluation is going on.
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  And I admit, I have some of that ambivalence because I do look, you know, there's a part
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  of that past, especially the part where you had solid housing and solid employment that
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  seems very attractive.
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  So I think people are re-evaluating it, but it depends who and really divide the people
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  break down based on country and generation.
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  Maybe it's also a, yeah, like you said, a generational thing because the generation
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  of my parents, they were the ones looking towards the West and the ones who are kind
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  of driving this movement for independent, the establishment of independent countries
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  and so forth.
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  But interesting, you mentioned Germany because I lived in Berlin for many years and I remember
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  talking to a gentleman who was about 50 years old and he actually escaped from East Berlin
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  to West Berlin when he was 16 years old, along with his two brothers.
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  But these days, he said he also feels nostalgic for Eastern Germany.
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  He said there was more sense of solidarity and sort of brotherhood and neighbor was helping
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  neighbor, sort of like maybe looking at the past with rose tinted glasses, but it's hard
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  to just ascribe it to that, you know.
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  I don't know.
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  It's an interesting debate.
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  I think a lot of the post-89 national narratives are very much about rejecting that past, very
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  much in Hungary, very much in Poland, very much in, I think, the former Baltics, you
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  know, the post-45 past, really rejecting push away.
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  There's also an achievement, like an ambiguous achievement.
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  I found looking at kind of socialist realist art in that era.
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  I went to Albania.
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  Nice.
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  They have a museum of just fantastic, actually museums closed because of an earthquake, but
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  when you could go, Albanian National Museum, just full of socialist realist, like Hoja
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  era art.
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  Every painting is, you know, burly men building power lines or working in a steel forge or
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  women with Kalashnikov's teaching literacy or doing exercises.
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  I think it's very Hoja, Maoist art, and it looked great.
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  There's something that was like, it used to be, I think, like 30 years ago, you'd be like,
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  well, this is just the emptiest, most of the rote propaganda.
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  And now it's so different from aesthetics of the present.
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  Divorce from message, divorce from, you know, supporting message.
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  It looked, it was like really neat and people were just really enjoying it.
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  It looks so cool.
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  It's so interesting.
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  You go to like places that have that massive socialist realist architecture.
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  I went to like a, she tortured my wife by going to places.
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  We go on vacation and be like, we're going to go to wine country.
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  We're going to do a little bit of spa, but in between, I have to go visit some Gulags
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  and I have to visit some old steel mills for my book.
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  And we're like, so we'd go to like a Stalinist era steel mill, city that used to be called
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  Stalin Barosh, not Dunay Barosh, but was Stalin's towns where they built, you know, from nothing,
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  from just mud, they built these giant steelworks to create the new man and create the new sense
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  of being.
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  And I think for a generation, it was like, well, this is horrible.
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  And now you see the state and they built the factory and the factory is also this kind
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  of almost temple.
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  You know, it has porticoes, it has columns and has huge statues and murals of workers
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  and peasants and people across time building and baking and forging.
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  And it's visually, I think really phenomenally striking.
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  But the movement in Poland, for instance, has been to very much to destroy, condemn,
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  tear down.
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  And I'm really against that.
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  And I think it all belongs, not that the period was good or positive or that people's lives
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  were great, but that story is worth preserving.
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  And the visual impact, I actually loved it in Albania that they actually very much reject
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  the political legacy of that dictatorship.
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  But they have made space for the cultural product of it and that you can still kind
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  of see and appreciate and have that layered history of various epics, each with their
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  own style.
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  But it's very dynamic what's happening in the Baltics and Hungary.
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  The move is very much to exclude and destroy.
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  Czechia and Slovakia will kind of go back and forth on what they do.
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  But that past is, Hungary probably is the most under contention, Romania too.
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  But it keeps changing how people regard it.
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  And I think it will continue to keep changing.
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  My hope is that eventually it can become, it's now really part of politics.
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  It's a football that you can pass around, that it becomes history and that you can have
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  some distance towards and both preserve, appreciate and criticize all at once.
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  Have you ever been to Berlin?
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  I lived in Berlin for a summer trying to learn some German.
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  Oh, okay.
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  Wow.
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  And got...
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  As Oscar Wilde said, life is too short to learn German.
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  So I understand.
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  I didn't do very well, but I got to where I could read the newspaper and I passed a translation
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  exam.
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  As a historian, you have to know some German.
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  So yeah, I lived right on the border between Kreuzberg and Newcombe.
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  Oh, nice.
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  Very cool location.
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  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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  Everybody wants to live there.
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  But so you've probably seen the Soviet Memorial there in Traptova Park.
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  That's another example of this communist baroque kind of...
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  I just think it looks absolutely badass.
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  This giant park and then on top of it, this huge statue of a Russian soldier with a sword
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  standing on a broken swastika with a German child that he saved from the melee of the
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  combatant.
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  I like them.
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  I mean, former Yugoslavia has that tradition of the spomenics, which are now they become
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  kind of very cool and people really look for them, but the Tito era abstract sculptural
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  monuments that look kind of like spaceships.
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  Yeah, those are amazing.
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  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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  The Jasenovac, for example.
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  Yeah.
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  That's the flower.
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  And then they're all over the former.
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  And they started to be dismantled, destroyed, forgotten.
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  So now there's a movement to try and get them back.
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  And there's a great photo book about them.
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  If anyone, if any listener is like, it's spomenic, S-P-O-M-N-I-K, and there's a great photo book.
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  And they kind of look like these alien geometrical objects that will crash landed in the Balkans.
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  But they commemorate the mostly World War II monuments, but done in this abstract figurative
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  style of starbursts and strange kind of flower shapes and modern art, but Titoist politics
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  and very, very, very cool.
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  And I hope that they stop being torn down.
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  Some places they're created with a lot of respect.
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  Some places they've been allowed to really just fall apart.
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  And some were destroyed in the wars in the 90s.
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  How is it in the United States being associated or coming from Eastern Europe?
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  I remember your former first lady who is Slovenian, Melania, for a long time, she pretended that
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  she was Austrian and she even spelled her surname in a different way.
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  She added an S and a U instead of a Slovenian V. So instead of Knaus, she was Knaus S-S.
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  But then I think there was too much spotlight on her when her husband became the president
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  or was a candidate and she couldn't pretend to be Austrian anymore.
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  And I also, I didn't know this before, but I had an American friend when I was living
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  in Berlin.
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  She was awesome.
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  Shout out to Linda from Colorado.
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  And we were talking one day and she said, you know, you're not really white, white,
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  you're ethnic white in the States.
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  She said, my mom would be kind of scared of you.
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  So it's different.
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  And I never heard that before.
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  It was such an interesting comment.
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  And then I kind of loved it.
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  And then I watched the documentary about it and about the immigration from Eastern Europe
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  to the United States.
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  And there really was such a thing as an ethnic white, you know, Polish, Czech, whatever.
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  And these people usually relegate it to the worst jobs because there were some racist
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  theories going around that they can handle menial jobs better because they're more resistant
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  to dirt and mud and all sorts of like these kind of stereotypes.
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  Is that image still there?
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  A little bit?
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  I would say barely.
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  But you know what?
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  There's a little bit of it.
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  I'll say it's, let's say maybe this is too finicky, but a hundred years ago, a little
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  over a hundred years ago, that first big wave of Eastern European migrants, they really
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  were treated.
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  And I come from, I grew up in a part of Pennsylvania that had a ton of that migration, actually
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  a lot of Slovenes, a lot of Slovaks, Slovenes, people who came to work in coal mines in iron,
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  there's a big coal area.
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  So very difficult menial work that tons of Slovenes, Slovaks, a little bit Hungarians,
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  Czechs, Poles.
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  And that they were kind of at the bottom of the pecking, kind of the bottom of the white
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  pecking order, they were ethnic whites.
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  And that there was the difference between Wasps, like white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, very
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  kind of man and traditional, what white people are.
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  And then a level below that Irish and then kind of a level below that Eastern European,
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  there's an old term called Bohunk.
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  I don't think anyone's ever heard that, but that's Bohemian-Hungarian.
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  And they would like, you would get Bohunks and they would have the worst, they wouldn't
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  know any, no one would be able to communicate with them and they'd have to carry like,
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  like molten steel, the stuff that's really like hazardous because it's Pennsylvania steel
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  country.
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  But that's a hundred years ago.
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  And those people are mostly now, like Pittsburgh is full of third, fourth generation Slovaks
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  and Slovenes who still go to church and have ethnic food.
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  But that sense of difference from Protestant Anglo-Americans is very slight because it's
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  been so long.
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  Where there is newer immigrants, and when I was a kid, that was us, we actually had
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  neighbors who called us the beasts from the East and we're kind of, I had some schoolyard
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  problems and eggs would throw under the car and there's a little bit of anti-immigrant
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  animus in that, but also hard to pin down exactly.
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  But I think there are associations, especially with the Balkans, the kind of vaguely Balkan,
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  that the Balkans are kind of being criminal.
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  The Poland area is people who work in still fresh arrivals from Poland.
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  You have a lot of cleaning ladies from Poland.
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  And actually my mom and aunt worked at times as cleaning ladies or as nannies.
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  My cousin worked as a nanny.
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  So those jobs and that there's something kind of menial about part of the area and kind
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  of somewhat criminal about the other part of the area.
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  And people who don't, but people will, and movies are bad with that.
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  Like there's a movie series called Taken and the dancers are Albanian.
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  People don't know where, but people will be like, where is Albania?
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  And I'm very affectionate.
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  I really love Albania and I've written about it and spent a lot of time there.
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  But these are almost floating names for people.
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  They're very, for a lot of Americans, they couldn't find it on a map.
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  But somehow that kind of former Yugoslavia zone, Albania, Bulgaria, means something kind
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  of gangsterish and Poland is sort of menial labor made, something like that.
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  And then Russia is vaguely is threatening in a different way.
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  And then parts of it, honestly, like Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, people just have no idea.
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  That's just a question mark.
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  So there are prejudices still floating around, but they're a little bit vague and not very,
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  I don't think there's a lot of discrimination based on that, but there are prejudices.
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  Yeah.
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  Yeah.
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  I mean, yeah, it's funny that people from the Balkans and Hollywood usually kidnap Liam
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  Neeson's daughters.
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  Unfortunately.
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  Yeah.
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  It really should.
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  But to be honest, I mean, it's similar in Western Europe.
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  Let's not just blame America because when I was working in Berlin, after three years,
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  my German boss would still introduce me as Zaza from Serbia.
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  Oh, no.
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  You know, I was like, okay, I'm, you know, yeah, here we go.
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  But it's fine.
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  Or even sometimes even Siberia, which was quite, quite amazing.
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  Anyway, let's rewind all the way back to the beginning.
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  The big question, where do Slavs come from and how is it possible that the biggest ethno-linguistic
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  group in Europe just kind of teleports itself onto the stage from seemingly out of nowhere
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  and then occupy such a large chunk of land?
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  That's the $10,000 question.
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  Yeah.
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  That's a question.
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  No, no good answer and a hundred, hundred bad ones.
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  If you really start reading into it, it's a morass of competing theories and not very,
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  very little evidence.
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  And I actually think that is going to...
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  That's one of these questions that I think might be answered in our lifetime.
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  I think there's hope that a lot more will be discovered and is being discovered right
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  now, especially because of work on ancient genetics where you can pull out, you know,
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  sequenced genes of bodies that were buried 1500, 1600 years ago.
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  And the more of that work that gets done.
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  And a lot of it was this big study that just came out by Ambas University, but of medieval
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  dark age Balkan genes that we're actually going to be able to figure out a little bit
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  what that movement of Slavs looked like and where it came from.
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  But right now it's a mess because honestly every country, every Slavic country traditionally,
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  especially the Northern Slavic countries claim themselves, like will just put themselves
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  as a home, put themselves forward as a homeland.
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  Yeah.
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  Poland says they come from Poland, Ukraine says they come from Ukraine, Russia will say
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  they come from Russia.
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  And the evidence is so sparse because they just...
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  In the written record, they just show up all of a sudden and they show up where people
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  write about them is mostly in Greece and close to the Byzantium.
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  And they had no idea where they were coming from.
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  So there's a theory that they were all over, but that idea of some kind of more collective
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  unity or collective identity, if it existed, started happening because they were fighting
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  for and against the Byzantines.
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  And so paradoxically, there's a fear that happened kind of in that along the Danube
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  where Bulgaria and Romania are now.
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  But that really, it's a lot of speculation.
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  There's also signs now from that genetic work that there was a lot of people moving from
• 25:30
  North to the South, which has been doubted at the past.
• 25:34
  But from where and how?
• 25:39
  I have a few more thoughts about it, but that's the big thing.
• 25:42
  In the book, you do mention a theory that Slavs actually come from Romania where ironically
• 25:46
  there is no Slavs now.
• 25:47
  So that's the idea is that when the Byzantium, the Byzantine Empire was fortifying itself
• 25:57
  and starting to really try and defend the Balkans, try and create that new frontier,
• 26:03
  create a line along the Danube, Justinian re-fortified it and started hiring us mercenaries.
• 26:11
  And it was having a lot of attacks.
• 26:13
  And so it's on that border, what's now Southern Romania, that something like Slavdom coalesced.
• 26:21
  And that is where the first mentions of Slavs all kind of happened there.
• 26:25
  There are attacks from Romania, from what's now Romania that had no concept back then
• 26:31
  towards Thessaloniki.
• 26:33
  And that area is where something proto-Slavic was happening.
• 26:38
  And it's a guy named Florin Curta, who is Romanian, but he's maybe the most cutting
• 26:43
  edge and a very respected scholar at University of Florida, a very kind of cutting edge book
• 26:55
  on the origin of the Slavs, but also a very controversial one and kind of to me a surprising
• 27:00
  idea.
• 27:01
  Because I grew up reading Polish books that were clear that Slavs came from the Slavs
• 27:08
  who were basically Poland and Ukraine and then moved south.
• 27:13
  I find, if you actually read his book, it's Curta's book, I found it very persuasive,
• 27:18
  but it doesn't have a smoking gun.
• 27:20
  There's no single document or letter or artifact that conclusively proves that case.
• 27:30
  So it's one of these historical mysteries that I find hugely compelling.
• 27:35
  I will read anything about it, but I don't think at this point it has a definite answer.
• 27:42
  How come Slavs before the advent of Christianity have no written records about themselves?
• 27:52
  They didn't seem to write.
• 27:55
  We didn't write.
• 27:56
  And then the shame of it is that no one, when they became Christian, that we didn't have
• 28:07
  someone writing down the old stories, writing down some of the old chronicles.
• 28:11
  Because that's what happened in Scandinavia, in Iceland.
• 28:15
  They became Christian, they had Latin writing, but they still cared about those pre-Christian
• 28:22
  stories, those Norse stories.
• 28:24
  And that same thing happened in Ireland and Wales where the Celts became Christian, but
• 28:27
  they were still valuable to write down some of the old stories.
• 28:32
  And we have almost none of that in the Slavic world.
• 28:36
  You have to rely on archaeology, you have to rely on people who saw the Slavs and they
• 28:41
  were still pagan, Christians usually, but a few Muslims and Jews, but mostly Christians,
• 28:48
  who saw Slavic religion being practiced, who saw Slavs in the pre-Christian state.
• 28:56
  But we don't have any real native testimony.
• 29:01
  Even the Svanians who aren't Slavic, but they seem to have believed similar things.
• 29:06
  They did not write them down, even though they stayed pagan until the 1370s.
• 29:12
  So you're talking really, you know, the Renaissance has already started.
• 29:16
  It's the War of the Roses in England.
• 29:19
  And in Lithuania you've got pagan dukes, pagan rulers, a whole pagan organization, probably
• 29:29
  similar to what the pagan Slavs were like.
• 29:32
  It's hard to tell exactly how different.
• 29:34
  And they didn't write to have written down at least a myth or a song clearly.
• 29:39
  But we have to rely on everything post-conversion.
• 29:44
  Usually we do get these proto-states or kingdoms in Eastern Europe.
• 29:49
  In the book you talk about the fact that unlike in other kingdoms at the time, whose royal
• 29:54
  dynasties usually had some sort of a fantastical grand story of how they ascended the throne,
• 30:00
  in the Slavic kingdoms, these narratives were much more modest, sometimes almost cute.
• 30:07
  Usually they talked about a lucky peasant or a farmer who happens to become a king.
• 30:13
  In reality though, a lot of these dynasties established themselves with the help of a
• 30:19
  little industry called slavery.
• 30:22
  Could you talk about that a little bit?
• 30:24
  Yeah, I think this is the dirty, dirty secret of medieval Slavdom.
• 30:31
  It's really not something I grew up on though.
• 30:34
  I never heard about that before.
• 30:37
  Yeah.
• 30:38
  And growing up when I went to like Polish school, this is not the story you get told.
• 30:42
  You get told the traditional story and the story that's passed down in the Middle Ages
• 30:46
  is even as pagans, these peasants, different hardworking peasants or wheelwrights or craftsmen
• 30:57
  in Poland or Czechoslovakia.
• 30:59
  And actually in, I think Slovenia has kind of a similar story, the Dukes of Corinthia
• 31:03
  and what they were supposed to...
• 31:04
  Yeah, Carinthania.
• 31:05
  Yeah.
• 31:06
  And I think that was all covered because the archeology and the outside chronicles make
• 31:14
  it pretty clear what was happening on the edge of the Christian space.
• 31:20
  This is the 900s.
• 31:24
  There was a gold rush in kind of that Slavic barbarian non-Christian world and the gold
• 31:30
  rush was the slave trade.
• 31:33
  You could not enslave Christians.
• 31:36
  You could enslave pagans.
• 31:39
  And you could sell...
• 31:40
  There was an enormous appetite for slaves, especially for Slavic slaves in the Middle
• 31:47
  East, in Iran, Iraq.
• 31:50
  And they had an enormous amount of silver.
• 31:51
  They had big silver mines.
• 31:53
  There was a big appetite for this.
• 31:54
  There was also an appetite for it in Venice and Spain.
• 31:59
  So the kingdoms that started, it looks like they got their start by hiring lots of mercenaries,
• 32:07
  hiring their own soldiers, protecting an area and then raiding outside of it, grabbing people
• 32:13
  and then sending them by caravan to other places.
• 32:16
  And that seems that in Slovenia too, Samo's kingdom, that kind of not clear...
• 32:22
  I mean, that seems to have been a Frankish slave trader who started on the edge of that
• 32:28
  Carolingian world.
• 32:29
  You could go past...
• 32:30
  It's kind of like the Wild West in reverse, the Wild East.
• 32:33
  That you get beyond the Christian frontier and out in these tribes, you could start...
• 32:39
  If you could have enough armed followers, you could start raiding and you could start
• 32:42
  selling.
• 32:43
  And those captives were the biggest industry in Europe because each slave was worth an
• 32:51
  amount of silver.
• 32:52
  There was a little bit of other trading for beeswax, forestings, but it was slavery.
• 32:59
  That was the economic driver.
• 33:00
  And ultimately with an economic push like that and a lot of silver flowing in, you could
• 33:06
  start building a state.
• 33:08
  You go from being a tribe to having fortifications, roads, an army, a duke, a king.
• 33:15
  But that's not a story people want to tell later because it's not an attractive reality.
• 33:21
  So usually you had a warlord who had some warriors and like you said, they had a little
• 33:26
  fort and then they were expanding all with the help of raids and acquiring slaves that
• 33:33
  then they were selling all throughout Europe.
• 33:36
  Wow, that's really fascinating.
• 33:39
  Especially because a lot of right-wing narrative, at least in Slovenia, probably it's similar
• 33:46
  in other Eastern European countries revolves around the fact that these were some sort
• 33:50
  of proto-democratic kingdoms where milk and honey was flowing and equality reign supreme.
• 34:01
  So it's really amusing that the truth, at least based on archaeological evidence, is
• 34:08
  quite the opposite.
• 34:11
  It's a little jarring.
• 34:14
  They were a hundred years into having these kingdoms and they became Christian and they
• 34:19
  kind of gave up the slave trade.
• 34:21
  The chronicles tell these stories that are very convincing.
• 34:25
  You're like, oh, they chose someone from the people and they ruled with consent and they
• 34:30
  listened to each other.
• 34:31
  Then it's like, well, where did the...
• 34:33
  And then you dig in and you find these big jars of silver from the Middle East and you
• 34:37
  find massacres and chains and you're like, this doesn't quite line up.
• 34:42
  So that's a story that does not get told in schools.
• 34:44
  But I think it's increasingly clear that that seems to be the truth behind what was happening.
• 34:52
  By the way, why were Slavic slaves so popular in the Middle East and other places?
• 34:58
  That's interesting.
• 34:59
  A little bit of...
• 35:03
  This is a millennia ago, but the idea, at least in the Middle East where we have surviving,
• 35:10
  is that there were two, they needed a lot of slaves because they were actually a very
• 35:17
  different world back then where Iraq was very irrigated, very cultivated, kind of the economic
• 35:21
  center of the world, huge need for manpower, both kind of labor and soldiers.
• 35:28
  And they use slaves for a lot of that.
• 35:30
  And the soldiers, they like to have people from Central Asia.
• 35:33
  They like to have Turks.
• 35:35
  Turks made really good soldiers.
• 35:37
  They were good at writing, they were good at archery.
• 35:42
  And Slavs were seen as very good for domestic work, for working in the palace, for working
• 35:50
  with women, for being refined.
• 35:53
  And the idea was that...
• 35:54
  And also a lot of eunuchs on both sides, eunuchs being made.
• 35:59
  And it became a trend.
• 36:00
  And I think those are the two big sources of slaves.
• 36:05
  That Viking or Russia, Rus, comes out of this too, is that they were raiding in Northern
• 36:11
  Russia, sending people down river, down the Dniep, sending them to Baghdad, sending them
• 36:18
  to Baku, places like that.
• 36:22
  And in Sakhalinba, we don't have any voice.
• 36:24
  We have people writing from the other side, describing slaves.
• 36:29
  We don't have any slaves writing about themselves or writing about their own experiences.
• 36:32
  And you know actually, there was a Slavic slave revolt in Morocco at one point.
• 36:36
  Really?
• 36:37
  Yeah.
• 36:38
  And I didn't have this...
• 36:39
  Let's face it, Slavic slaves who worked in the Muslim part of Spain, in Morocco, they
• 36:47
  were actually one country, revolted.
• 36:50
  And for a while, they had their own little rebel kingdom somewhere in Northern Morocco.
• 36:56
  And they left no records.
• 36:57
  It's against this problem of really Slavic history, very little writing.
• 37:01
  But there was also...
• 37:03
  There was Slavic slavery, there's also Slavic slave revolt.
• 37:07
  But all of that is so shadow and so hard to pin down.
• 37:13
  But that Abbasid world, that world of 10th century Baghdad also had lots of East African
• 37:18
  slaves.
• 37:19
  They also had their own revolt in Bahrain.
• 37:20
  So they're a really, really different world of multiple kinds of slavery, in which Slavs
• 37:28
  featured as one of those.
• 37:30
  I think as I had a historian of the Ottoman Empire on the podcast, and he was also talking
• 37:36
  about the Devshirme system and about slaves coming from the Balkans into the Ottoman Empire
• 37:42
  later.
• 37:43
  And they were reputed for being good soldiers, the Janissaries and administrators.
• 37:49
  So it changes, I see, from period to period.
• 37:52
  It swings because yeah, the Serbs were...
• 37:57
  The Turks looked at the Serbs as great soldiers, and the Greeks as great sailors and kind of
• 38:02
  had a different way of evaluating.
• 38:06
  Anyway, one of the main threads of the book that I found fascinating is the fact that
• 38:12
  historically Eastern Europe was always a place of great diversity, where people of different
• 38:18
  religions speaking different languages, doing different things, lived side by side, and
• 38:23
  they did so for centuries.
• 38:25
  Much more so than Western Europe, at least at the time.
• 38:29
  And that's another blind spot we usually have about Eastern Europe, especially since, well,
• 38:33
  except maybe Russia, most Eastern European countries today are pretty homogeneous places
• 38:40
  when we compare them to the West.
• 38:42
  Anyway, how come medieval European rulers kind of welcomed immigration with such open
• 38:50
  arms at the time?
• 38:52
  Yeah, it's a great question because the pattern, kind of big picture wise, is that Western
• 38:58
  Europe used to be diverse in similar ways.
• 39:01
  It's like we were talking about Muslim Spain.
• 39:04
  Spain had that, or Iberia had that combination of Jews and Muslims and Christians and Al-Andalus
• 39:12
  and the kind of melting pot of different cultures.
• 39:17
  France had that, Southern France had that too.
• 39:19
  Italy, Sicily used to be a Muslim area.
• 39:21
  They used to be a lot more Jews in France and England and Germany.
• 39:25
  But as those countries kind of became more established, rigid kingdoms, like it's more
• 39:33
  stately, going from kind of mixtures of different distributed power of Dukes and local rulers
• 39:42
  to full established states, they became more and more homogeneous.
• 39:46
  So the end of that process is that moment in 1492 in Spain, when Spain pushes, conquers
• 39:53
  the last Muslim kingdom and simultaneously expels its Jews.
• 39:57
  And that last trace of that kind of diverse Western European world gets kicked out.
• 40:02
  Where did the Jews go?
• 40:03
  Mostly go to Morocco and the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans.
• 40:10
  And the Muslims also go to North Africa and sometimes the Ottoman Empire.
• 40:16
  And meanwhile, the Eastern European powers have a great need for manpower, have a great
• 40:21
  need for development, have need for people who can connect them to a wider world commercially
• 40:29
  and a wider world religiously and have some fighting skills.
• 40:33
  So they are inviting foreigners in a big way, in a consistent way, making room for them.
• 40:40
  So Poland, Lithuania, a vast kingdom at some point, becomes a real homeland of Europe's
• 40:46
  Jews.
• 40:47
  And Eastern Europe becomes this cradle, really, of world or Ashkenazi Jewry.
• 40:52
  You have Muslim tribes coming in or nomads and being also recruited by Hungary and by
• 40:58
  Lithuania to be mercenaries.
• 41:00
  And then you have that Ottoman push that brings the actual Ottoman Muslim rulers.
• 41:06
  And you also have other nomads coming in from Anatolia and from the steppes.
• 41:11
  So it becomes a melting pot, partly from conquest, partly through deliberate strategy of needing,
• 41:17
  and also needing Western Europeans, asking Germans to come to be miners, to work in and
• 41:23
  develop towns.
• 41:26
  Economic development in Eastern Europe happened by inviting people from outside, from East
• 41:31
  and West, by having traders come in, Armenians, Greeks, or Germans, or Scots from all over.
• 41:41
  There was a big Scottish immigration at one point, and there were a lot of Polish Scots.
• 41:45
  So different groups get established.
• 41:47
  And it became very diverse that way.
• 41:48
  So to the point that in the Eastern European pattern was that countryside wouldn't have
• 41:54
  one language, the peasantry would have one language, and cities or any towns would be
• 42:00
  completely different from the surrounding countryside, and usually with different groups
• 42:04
  in that.
• 42:05
  And the landlords would be something else.
• 42:06
  So you have this very segmented, very kind of layer cake of a society in which each layer
• 42:13
  has a different language and religion and ethnicity, but they're all living very close
• 42:19
  to each other.
• 42:20
  They're all related kind of by occupation.
• 42:22
  Could you talk about this dynamic of day-to-day life at that time, of all these like very
• 42:29
  different communities at the time?
• 42:32
  Like you said, I think in the book you say they're like layers of cake, right?
• 42:36
  How did these people manage to coexist and what did that look like?
• 42:40
  Well people lived very close together.
• 42:41
  And this pattern really lasted up to deep into the 19th century, some places in the
• 42:47
  20th century.
• 42:48
  And the specifics of it were different based on place to place.
• 42:52
  But the broad pattern, and I think this is true from Slovenia to Estonia down to Romania
• 42:59
  in most places, and very different from Western Europe, very different from like central Russia
• 43:04
  too in which in Russia you have different tasks.
• 43:09
  Essentially you have serfs and you have merchants and you have nobles, but they're all Russian.
• 43:13
  They're all Russian Orthodox, they're all Russian speaking.
• 43:15
  In a place like what's now Ukraine or it's Poland, say Eastern Poland, Western Ukraine,
• 43:23
  the peasants would be Ukrainian, their landowner would be Polish.
• 43:26
  So the peasants would be Ukrainian, Eastern Orthodox, the landowner is Polish Catholic,
• 43:31
  and all the merchants in town are going to be Jewish and Yiddish speaking, so three languages.
• 43:36
  And in the town, in a village of like 200 people, you'll have all three of those.
• 43:40
  You'll have a little Catholic church for the landowner, you'll have a bigger Orthodox
• 43:44
  church for the peasants, you'll have the Jewish enclave buying and selling things.
• 43:48
  And each kept separate by law and by custom.
• 43:52
  You can't really cross between those because you're not really allowed to.
• 43:58
  Intermarriage is difficult, switching professions is, or switching kind of caste level is prohibited.
• 44:08
  So people are kept very narrowly in their stratum of society.
• 44:16
  And they interact and they're interdependent, but they also don't know that much about each
• 44:19
  other.
• 44:22
  Slovenia might be simpler, but it had that Czechia, Croatia, Slovenia of often German
• 44:31
  speaking landowners, Slavic speaking peasants, and then towns, there's something in between.
• 44:38
  And often German predominates.
• 44:43
  In Romania, you have German speaking towns, Hungarian, in Transylvania, Hungarian landowners
• 44:48
  and Romanian peasants.
• 44:49
  And so that pattern, each part of that three or four layer cake, the flavors change, but
• 44:55
  that structure is the same.
• 44:56
  And it's very different than Germany.
• 44:58
  You never find that in like, you know, was a German town in like Neckar or Frankfurt.
• 45:05
  You have different professions, but everyone's German.
• 45:08
  Everyone's usually by law, one kind of Protestant, one kind of Catholic, and everyone has to
• 45:13
  be that same thing.
• 45:14
  And you see if it's never the case, you almost always have at least two, three or four of
• 45:18
  these different linguistic social layers.
• 45:22
  All right, so like you said, these communities did live side by side, but it wasn't some
• 45:29
  sort of utopia.
• 45:30
  It wasn't exactly Disneyland, though, despite living side by side, religious and ethnic
• 45:35
  borders weren't easy to cross, especially between landlords and serfs or peasants, right?
• 45:40
  That's also why, yeah, in Slovenia, for example, where the landlords, like you said, were always
• 45:45
  German or Italian, we have this proud history of unsuccessful peasant rebellions that were
• 45:51
  always brutally repressed.
• 45:54
  Yeah.
• 45:55
  Yeah.
• 45:56
  And you know, it is easy to idealize.
• 46:00
  It is a pre, it's a world that is genuinely pre-modern and it lasts for a long time and
• 46:07
  has this ability.
• 46:08
  You have like incredible social diversity in very tight spaces.
• 46:11
  You know, in a town of 1500 people could have four religions.
• 46:18
  And I can think, like I can point to, like you look at the maps, I got a little town,
• 46:23
  but four different neighborhoods, each speaks a different language, each goes to a different
• 46:28
  church and they coexist.
• 46:29
  But it doesn't mean people like each other and they don't exactly, you know, and they're
• 46:35
  kept separate.
• 46:36
  And it's a world that runs on inequality, where inequality is woven into everything.
• 46:41
  An empire, because it's a world of empires, these empires run on inequality.
• 46:45
  Having these groups at odds with each other actually strengthens the empire because you
• 46:51
  play different groups against each other.
• 46:52
  You have landowners who are dependent on the center because they can't depend.
• 46:56
  They have nothing in common with the people who are their tenants, who are their serfs.
• 47:03
  You have merchants who owe everything to the lord of the area because they are separate
• 47:09
  religiously from all the people around them.
• 47:11
  So there's all this suspicion and hostility, and yet you also have a kind of real diversity
• 47:19
  that really vanishes with this.
• 47:22
  Real diversity may be wrong, but the modern state that is predicated on equality, you
• 47:28
  have to start getting rid of that.
• 47:30
  When France becomes a modern country, gets rid of its king, gets rid of the French Revolution,
• 47:35
  has this model of a new nation state, you try and teach everyone one language, try and
• 47:40
  have everyone serve some time in the army, everyone go to the same kind of elementary
• 47:44
  school and turn people into little clones of each other.
• 47:51
  You try and get rid of that diversity and have a homogeneous country.
• 47:54
  In Eastern Europe, that mostly happens through violence, through genocide, ethnic cleansing,
• 48:06
  and also movement of borders, movement of popular flight, movement of... and some assimilation.
• 48:13
  And all those together, very violently, very late for the European story, starting late
• 48:19
  19th century, but really accelerating the 20th century and really happening the biggest
• 48:22
  way in World War II and after, that really kind of destroys this world.
• 48:29
  So although it was kind of hard and undesirable, interactions between communities do happen.
• 48:36
  You describe this wonderfully in the book, how I'm probably not going to get it right,
• 48:41
  but how sometimes Catholics would go to a Muslim healer or a rabbi or borrow each other's
• 48:50
  saints, stuff like this that's really kind of endearing.
• 48:54
  Could you talk a little bit more about these inter-community interactions?
• 49:01
  How did they play out and how come this was sometimes tolerated?
• 49:06
  How come this was sometimes fine?
• 49:07
  So at the official level, religions were kept and usually all these separations are all
• 49:14
  overlapping religious, linguistic, ethnic.
• 49:18
  All those things are different at once.
• 49:19
  And at the official level, there's not supposed to be much mixing.
• 49:22
  At the official level, definitely Catholics and Jews aren't allowed to, on both sides,
• 49:27
  you cannot transgress that boundary at all.
• 49:31
  Orthodox Muslim and Muslim and Orthodox Christian also officially, according to the church elders,
• 49:38
  according to the Muslim elders, no mix.
• 49:40
  At the folk level, where people are living next to each other, living literally side
• 49:45
  by side, door to door, village to village, tremendous amount of contact, especially the
• 49:51
  level of kind of folk healing, folk remedy, folk magic, in a world without medicine, with
• 49:58
  very little, very low literacy and very low university training.
• 50:05
  This is a world where folklore is the everyday currency of life.
• 50:09
  You have all this living context.
• 50:11
  And if you get down to that level and read about what people were doing, and historically
• 50:17
  it's often hard, you know, history's usually written at this high level of the officials.
• 50:22
  But you can't, not the low level of regular village life, but there is stuff from that.
• 50:28
  And you discover Christians would go to major rabbis to get blessings, and different things
• 50:39
  would be valuable.
• 50:40
  People really believe that rabbis can turn fertility regardless of religion.
• 50:44
  So Catholic women would go to Jewish rabbis for that.
• 50:49
  Jews believe that Muslims, at least in Lithuania, were really good at treating madness, treating
• 50:55
  mental disorders.
• 50:56
  So they would go and send, if they had a relative with a mental disability, they would send
• 51:01
  them to live with tartars, to live with Muslims.
• 51:03
  Because that was thought, somehow that change would help.
• 51:07
  In Albania, in the Balkans, you have shared Christmases.
• 51:12
  Christians coming over to their Christian neighbors for Christmas.
• 51:19
  Christians going to their Muslim neighbors for Bairam.
• 51:24
  Clans that would split and maintain Albania would have clans that would have a Christian
• 51:28
  branch and a Muslim branch, but all related.
• 51:30
  And they would exchange ceremonies, exchange saints.
• 51:35
  And the Holiness would kind of circulate that way.
• 51:38
  And so there wasn't, at the official level, even at the legal level, big hard walls.
• 51:46
  At the local level, lots of bartering and exchanging and circulating and seeing pragmatic
• 51:57
  value in each other's essentially magic.
• 52:00
  Jews could be lucky, they could be unlucky.
• 52:03
  Muslims could regard Christian ceremonies as part of their own and actually part of their.
• 52:09
  So this very fluid world that you have to kind of get back to.
• 52:15
  That made me think of the last chapters of the book when you described some huge, I don't
• 52:20
  know if it's annual or if it's always open Polish market in Warsaw, where you could get
• 52:26
  anything.
• 52:27
  And people would a lot of the times have a picture of a Jew in their home that they would
• 52:34
  get from there.
• 52:35
  And that the reasoning was that he would invite money into your house.
• 52:41
  But then for the Sabbath, you have to put the picture down because he needs his day
• 52:45
  of rest.
• 52:46
  And that's right.
• 52:47
  You have to turn him away from the door, right?
• 52:49
  So the money doesn't leave your domicile.
• 52:53
  And I'm a Polish Jew, I'm from a mixed Polish Jewish family.
• 52:58
  So this is kind of really strange to be exoticized in a way.
• 53:01
  This is not the 19th century.
• 53:03
  This is the bizarre.
• 53:04
  This is after the World War, right?
• 53:06
  Well, no, this is after the 1993.
• 53:09
  So this is bizarre.
• 53:10
  I would go to.
• 53:11
  Right, right.
• 53:12
  It got bold.
• 53:13
  So it doesn't exist anymore.
• 53:14
  It got bulldozed because of the euros.
• 53:18
  When the soccer tournament was in Poland, they leveled this incredible gigantic bizarre,
• 53:24
  maybe the biggest in Eastern Europe, and put a giant soccer stadium on it.
• 53:28
  So it's the, if anyone knows Warsaw, it's in Prague, it's on the other side of the river.
• 53:33
  So before 2010, it was this enormous bizarre that in the night, especially in the early
• 53:41
  90s, was the clearinghouse of all of Eastern Europe for a kind of cheetah.
• 53:46
  In Polish we say tandeta, there's a Slovenian version of that, but kind of cheap socks,
• 53:56
  crappy lingerie, anything cheap and affordable and mass produced and brought in by truck
• 54:03
  or by train from China or Korea or Russia or wherever.
• 54:07
  No, we had those in the Balkans, only not on that scale.
• 54:10
  So this was kind of the bizarre of bazaars where all their bazaars would get their stuff.
• 54:13
  So the scale was enormous.
• 54:17
  I talked to anthropologists who worked there because you could find people from all over
• 54:21
  Eastern Europe, but also thousands of Poles.
• 54:24
  And there was this belief, this folk belief, isn't just surviving, of the lucky Jew, the
• 54:28
  Jew with the coin.
• 54:31
  And for people outside it was just like, oh, this is just a stereotype.
• 54:33
  And it's like, yes, but it's also a kind of magical presence.
• 54:38
  It's almost like a fossil of another era of you actually, people believed in it and used
• 54:45
  it just the way you describe of like you position it and sometimes you would have an actual
• 54:49
  statue, sometimes you have a photocopy of a thing and to try and keep people's luck
• 54:53
  going.
• 54:54
  Because this is a hard, scrabble place.
• 54:55
  This is people sometimes selling two rusty nails, mismatched socks in a pot and hoping
• 55:03
  to make money.
• 55:05
  But you know, that is a little bit of that pre-modern magical worlds.
• 55:10
  Although now it's a soccer stadium.
• 55:14
  It's harder.
• 55:15
  All right.
• 55:16
  If we go back a little bit, for a time, I believe, especially during the Enlightenment,
• 55:19
  the biggest capitals of Eastern Europe, such as Prague, became kind of delicious, almost
• 55:25
  rogues galleries, safe havens for some of the most memorable characters that existed
• 55:30
  at the time, obscure prophets, scammy alchemists, practitioners of the occult, also lots of
• 55:37
  legitimately smart people.
• 55:40
  How did this sassy world in Eastern Europe come about?
• 55:44
  You know, it's one of the many benefits of being weakly, politically weak, political
• 55:54
  weakness of having, when you don't have the strength to impose unity, you get a lot of
• 56:01
  diversity growing in the cracks.
• 56:06
  That pattern, both in Western Europe and in Russia, of having a strong state, you know,
• 56:11
  a Kremlin or a Rome or a, you know, that France of Louis XIV that can have bureaucrats go
• 56:19
  everywhere and turn them into making things very uniform, drives out diversity.
• 56:25
  You know, literally like Louis XIV, or some Protestants left in France, drives them out.
• 56:31
  The Russians are, as they're organizing, they recruit Muslims for a while, and then they
• 56:36
  try and convert them, they try and push them out.
• 56:38
  There's a drive to impose homogeneity.
• 56:43
  Eastern Europe, much more politically confused, even when there are empires, actually a pretty,
• 56:52
  we say empire, empire is in the sense of yes, there was a lot of different pieces and they
• 56:58
  were big.
• 56:59
  But empire in terms of having a single kind of uniform power structure and everything
• 57:04
  depending on the center, usually not.
• 57:06
  Usually it's like pieces, you know, in Slovenia, it's that Dukedom of Corinthian, the dukes
• 57:11
  had their own agenda and Bohemia had its own electoral king and its own laws and the, you
• 57:16
  know, everything is Habsburg.
• 57:18
  But for a long time, the Habsburgs had limited ways of imposing themselves.
• 57:23
  You have all this stuff growing.
• 57:24
  And Poland, Lithuania was a mess.
• 57:26
  There was very little central authority.
• 57:30
  Romania was a mess.
• 57:31
  A lot of these countries were assembled out of pieces and that central power was very
• 57:36
  weak.
• 57:37
  And in that, that allowed for all this growth and actually some people recruited diversity
• 57:42
  and some people just couldn't do anything about it.
• 57:45
  So there was no inquisition in Poland.
• 57:47
  There was none of that drive to like impose Catholic unity.
• 57:50
  There was just a lot of space.
• 57:53
  The Ottomans didn't have great control over the Balkans for a lot of it.
• 57:55
  So you could have sects running away from Anatolia and people finding places like Bulgaria
• 58:02
  or Bosnia to do their own things that were different.
• 58:06
  And there wasn't a lot anyone could do about it.
• 58:10
  The benign neglect in a way.
• 58:12
  Right.
• 58:13
  Writing and researching this book, who became your favorite out of these, what we call it
• 58:19
  outlaw characters or maybe not outlaw characters, but you know, these sassy, you know, there's
• 58:28
  a lot of like Roma kings and sort of like prophets that are just crossing one religion
• 58:35
  to another, alchemists, scammers.
• 58:39
  There's a lot of absolutely colorful, fantastic stories in the book.
• 58:44
  But you must have one that's also a lot of the time is very amusing, but you must have
• 58:48
  some that's that really blew your way.
• 58:51
  I have a lot.
• 58:53
  I'll tell you one.
• 58:54
  As you mentioned, the Roma, there's one I never heard of.
• 58:56
  I think very people have heard of it.
• 58:58
  So Roma woman named Gina Renjecic.
• 59:03
  The poetess.
• 59:07
  You could say Croat, although it's hard to pin down, but her name, she ends up living
• 59:11
  and dying in Croatia, that part of Croatia that's inland, it's next to Serbia.
• 59:18
  But she had this incredibly adventurous life.
• 59:20
  She belonged to a Roma band, a migrant, a roaming nomadic band that moved around.
• 59:31
  It's now Croatia, Serbia, probably Austria in the early 19th century.
• 59:37
  Probably she was born around 1830.
• 59:39
  And she has this incredibly adventurous life of living in Constantinople and Adrianople
• 59:44
  and having husbands who are bandits, who are traitors, who are Ottoman dignitaries.
• 59:53
  And then she's abandoned by them.
• 59:55
  I can only even, her story is so kind of wild and operatic.
• 59:58
  I can only tell a little bit of it.
• 1:00:00
  And then at the end of her life, she's an old woman, very poor, very abandoned.
• 1:00:11
  And she meets an ethnographer, someone who's gathering Roma stories, gathering Roma folk
• 1:00:18
  poetry, Roma folk traditions.
• 1:00:20
  And he hears that there's this poet somewhere out in this little camp, a tabor, which is
• 1:00:24
  a migrant camp, and starts talking to her.
• 1:00:27
  Around the 1890s, and she's a very old woman.
• 1:00:30
  And she just unspools this incredibly complicated story that has these just husbands who try
• 1:00:37
  to murder her, husbands she tries to murder.
• 1:00:41
  She vanishes, she has to run away, love affairs, crazy movements through every European country.
• 1:00:50
  And she's also a really good poet, probably the first recorded Roma poet.
• 1:00:55
  She tells this man, this German Romanian Polish man, her songs.
• 1:01:01
  And I found her in a book full of stories like that.
• 1:01:07
  She stood out, and I could, because that's a novel waiting to be written, someone to
• 1:01:12
  tap into that.
• 1:01:13
  And I could only kind of tell her story till like age 23, and it keeps going.
• 1:01:17
  It's just being wilder and crazier and shipwrecks.
• 1:01:22
  And actually, she's a good poet, and she's just forgotten by history.
• 1:01:24
  And it's one of these stories, because who does she belong to?
• 1:01:28
  The Eastern Europe story of like, is she Croatian?
• 1:01:32
  Maybe, but Croats don't claim her.
• 1:01:35
  Is she Ottoman, because she lived in Constantinople for a long time?
• 1:01:39
  Maybe, but they don't claim her.
• 1:01:40
  And Roma, there's no Roma state, there's no Roma archive, there's no Roma studies.
• 1:01:46
  So that doesn't have that slot for her.
• 1:01:51
  She just belongs to the whole region as a whole, I think.
• 1:01:54
  So she's an example of one of the people I really like.
• 1:01:56
  It was a real discovery, someone I'd never heard of.
• 1:01:59
  And I think it's still barely known.
• 1:02:02
  Well, I've never heard of Jakub Frank before.
• 1:02:06
  He was probably my favorite story in the book.
• 1:02:09
  Could you tell us a little bit about him?
• 1:02:12
  I grew up hearing about Jakub Frank, because he's not well known globally, but he's kind
• 1:02:17
  of well known in Poland.
• 1:02:18
  What a character.
• 1:02:19
  And Olga Takarczuk, who won the Nobel Prize a few years ago, the Polish novelist, she
• 1:02:25
  wrote this giant book, hard to get through, but called The Book of Jakub.
• 1:02:30
  Great title, according to me.
• 1:02:32
  I love it.
• 1:02:33
  But it's a novel about his life, very close to his story.
• 1:02:36
  And he was a Polish Jew, a little bit of asterisk there, because you could also say he's a Bosnian
• 1:02:44
  Jew.
• 1:02:45
  But he was a Jew in the 18th century who traveled a lot to the Balkans, traveled a lot towards
• 1:02:50
  Constantinople, and became fascinated by this messianic Jewish messiah who declared himself
• 1:02:58
  the messiah in the 17th century, aroused enormous excitement, enormous interest across the Jewish
• 1:03:05
  world.
• 1:03:06
  People were like, oh, it's finally happened.
• 1:03:09
  We have the messiah.
• 1:03:10
  We've been waiting 1500, however, almost 2000 years.
• 1:03:14
  It's happened.
• 1:03:15
  It's the messiah.
• 1:03:16
  It happened.
• 1:03:17
  And then the Ottoman authorities are like, well, here's a choice.
• 1:03:23
  You can continue being the messiah, the Jewish messiah, and we'll fire, we'll shoot arrows
• 1:03:29
  at you until you're dead.
• 1:03:30
  We'll execute you by arrow.
• 1:03:31
  Or you can convert to Islam and save your life.
• 1:03:35
  He's like, I'll take Islam.
• 1:03:37
  I'm Muslim now.
• 1:03:38
  Smart man.
• 1:03:39
  Yeah.
• 1:03:40
  And then his followers are like, well, this is troubling because our messiah is now Muslim.
• 1:03:45
  And so they find an explanation.
• 1:03:47
  They're like, well, this must be part of the plan.
• 1:03:51
  And so a part of them keep following him, keep following his descendants, and they kind
• 1:03:55
  of become Muslim Jews or crypto Jews and other Jews reject them.
• 1:04:00
  And they become this thing in between.
• 1:04:02
  And this Polish Jew discovers this is like, this is amazing.
• 1:04:06
  Maybe I could become a person like this.
• 1:04:08
  And he gets in with these Messianic crypto Jews and brings that idea back to Poland and
• 1:04:17
  finds and creates like a clue around himself.
• 1:04:19
  And part of what the appeal of this belief system is that if you have a messiah on your
• 1:04:23
  side, everything is allowed.
• 1:04:26
  All those complicated Jewish laws, all that Talmud, all that Torah, if you have the messiah
• 1:04:31
  telling you what you can do, he can tell you sin.
• 1:04:36
  Because the more you sin, the more you can find redemption.
• 1:04:39
  So everything-
• 1:04:40
  Makes sense to me.
• 1:04:41
  I don't know.
• 1:04:42
  So like sin more, then you get more redemption.
• 1:04:45
  So all the sexual laws, all the dietary laws, all that baggage of Judaism gets lifted.
• 1:04:52
  And so they're able to kind of party and have orgies and do whatever they want.
• 1:04:56
  And then he has a whole story.
• 1:04:57
  I won't bore your listeners with the complicated story of how he becomes Catholic and then
• 1:05:02
  stops being Catholic and bounces between empires, but a wonderful story too.
• 1:05:10
  So that story, at least though, I actually knew about for a long time, unlike the other
• 1:05:14
  one, which is totally obscene.
• 1:05:15
  But also there's a great, there's nearly a thousand pages about that.
• 1:05:19
  That novel will take you through his life page by page.
• 1:05:23
  It's pretty thrilling.
• 1:05:24
  I mean, say what you will about his religion, but I see a lot of sense of it.
• 1:05:30
  You have to sin in order to find grace.
• 1:05:32
  I mean, what's not logical about that?
• 1:05:34
  And if you get forgiven for sinning, the more you sin, the more you can be forgiven.
• 1:05:39
  There is a logic.
• 1:05:40
  Didn't Rasputin later on practice something similar in Russia?
• 1:05:43
  Some of that same kind of idea.
• 1:05:46
  Yeah.
• 1:05:47
  That you lower yourself to be brought up high.
• 1:05:50
  And if you want to be religious, but you also want to party a little bit, explore something.
• 1:05:57
  It's an attractive way.
• 1:06:00
  You'll find some sense in this logic across the centuries and across religion.
• 1:06:03
  So there must be something to it.
• 1:06:06
  All right.
• 1:06:07
  Unfortunately, we don't have the luxury of time to cover the decidedly tragic 20th century
• 1:06:13
  Eastern Europe.
• 1:06:14
  However, I do want us to talk about something important that is often overlooked in the
• 1:06:19
  story of Eastern Europe, but which you do mention in the book.
• 1:06:24
  And that is our black sense of humor.
• 1:06:28
  You write the following, but amidst all our differences, Eastern Europeans share one legacy
• 1:06:34
  in common, and that is a gift for seeing comedy amidst tragedy.
• 1:06:39
  Is that simply a coping mechanism?
• 1:06:41
  I would say I would just say a coping mechanism, not simply.
• 1:06:47
  I think it's actually hard to cope with things that are truly difficult.
• 1:06:53
  And there is more violent history, like more resistance to Eastern Europe.
• 1:07:00
  There are bad things that happen everywhere.
• 1:07:02
  But Eastern Europe, I think, is specific in having a lot of its history, no sense of stability
• 1:07:10
  or security.
• 1:07:11
  None of that kind of hard ground that you're like, you know France isn't going to disappear.
• 1:07:16
  You know Russia is not going to disappear.
• 1:07:18
  But a lot of these, you know, Poland disappeared.
• 1:07:21
  Hungary disappeared.
• 1:07:24
  Slovenia took a very hard way of being born.
• 1:07:26
  You know, things, Yugoslavia disappeared.
• 1:07:29
  That the whole foundation of life, and before that, Austro-Hungary disappeared.
• 1:07:33
  That your whole world can vanish within your lifetime, multiple times.
• 1:07:39
  That you have to find yourself on this kind of sweeping sea and find a place in it.
• 1:07:43
  And humor is a way of reestablishing this coordinates.
• 1:07:46
  And I think it, you know, so I would say a coping mechanism, but not just a coping mechanism.
• 1:07:54
  It's hard to cope with things that are this hard.
• 1:07:57
  Well, the internet is making sure that this kind of unique brand of humor isn't going
• 1:08:02
  anywhere because Slavic memes are experiencing an absolute renaissance online.
• 1:08:08
  And they're a big hit there.
• 1:08:11
  And an ironic twist of fate, I feel like some form of some digital form of kind of almost
• 1:08:17
  pan-Slavism or of brotherhood over similar destinies is emerging because of the memes
• 1:08:22
  now.
• 1:08:25
  The gopnik and the yeah, there's a little bit of yeah.
• 1:08:28
  The Slavic squat and all of this stuff.
• 1:08:30
  Yeah.
• 1:08:31
  Yeah.
• 1:08:32
  The crack suit.
• 1:08:33
  Yeah.
• 1:08:34
  The unify us.
• 1:08:35
  You know, a jar of cookies that looks very nice from the outside, but inside there's
• 1:08:42
  always just like needles and stuff for sewing.
• 1:08:46
  Yeah.
• 1:08:47
  Yeah.
• 1:08:48
  Bottles of water that are actually bottles of vodka.
• 1:08:50
  And you find that out the hard way and stuff like this.
• 1:08:53
  Absolutely.
• 1:08:54
  Anyway, let's talk about the many predicaments of Eastern European countries today.
• 1:09:01
  Obviously, we have the senseless war in Ukraine, but even without it, you believe Eastern Europe
• 1:09:06
  is in a bit of a pickle.
• 1:09:09
  I think you write the following in the book.
• 1:09:15
  Here we go.
• 1:09:17
  I think this is the last chapter.
• 1:09:19
  Many Eastern European nations face an odd predicament.
• 1:09:23
  They possess a surplus of history, but a deficit of useful narrative.
• 1:09:28
  That is, plenty of things have happened to them, but not enough has been done by them
• 1:09:34
  to establish a deeply rooted sense of shared destiny.
• 1:09:39
  Could you elaborate on that a little bit?
• 1:09:42
  Yeah, I think when we started the podcast about history and politics and finding and
• 1:09:53
  having almost often invent a usable past, that's a process every country goes through
• 1:10:02
  and a process that many countries have to revise.
• 1:10:05
  In America, we keep relitigating the civil war, relitigating traumas of the past.
• 1:10:11
  But in Eastern Europe, a lot of countries have to, almost the whole block really, since
• 1:10:17
  in our lifetimes, has had to find new coordinates of what it means to be Latvian, Lithuanian,
• 1:10:27
  Polish, Slovenian, Ukrainian, etc.
• 1:10:32
  What's the kind of essential, important ethos of that country?
• 1:10:38
  Because politically, you have to either stand up for it or contest it.
• 1:10:43
  You have this very difficult birthing process of figuring out what each of these countries,
• 1:10:50
  not just what it is, but what it means.
• 1:10:52
  You have things going in very different directions.
• 1:10:54
  Hungary has had a very strange kind of evolution of that, where they've gone back to their
• 1:11:00
  nomadic past, or their imagined nomadic past.
• 1:11:02
  The Mongolian kind of setting.
• 1:11:04
  The Mongolian myth.
• 1:11:05
  And yet, if you go, Budapest does not feel like a Mongolian city.
• 1:11:09
  It feels like a city of shmoz.
• 1:11:10
  Not at all.
• 1:11:11
  But then you'll go to a mall and there'll be huge boulders with runes, or with step
• 1:11:20
  designs.
• 1:11:21
  The government has really poured money into the celebration of a step background.
• 1:11:26
  Poland is looking for its colonel.
• 1:11:30
  And the previous government, the previous government, it was all about World War II,
• 1:11:33
  and a very specific vision of World War II.
• 1:11:35
  A very anti-communist specific group of people that they were celebrating and honoring and
• 1:11:42
  elevating above.
• 1:11:44
  And in North Macedonia, it's just a bit...
• 1:11:46
  Alexander the Great.
• 1:11:47
  Yeah, Alexander the Great.
• 1:11:48
  And then they had to walk it back.
• 1:11:51
  So he's still there, but he's kind of not Macedonian.
• 1:11:55
  But it's a wildest thing.
• 1:11:57
  And so you have, in some ways, the more politics becomes, the more politics achieves in some
• 1:12:06
  places, the more you kind of take care of some of the basics of life, of new membership.
• 1:12:13
  Or this is kind of pre-2020, pre-Ukraine.
• 1:12:17
  But the more of that kind of bread and potatoes, meat and potatoes stuff gets done, the more
• 1:12:23
  politics you get into wrangling over what's the proper historical destiny, what's the
• 1:12:27
  proper image of the past that you should put forward, and contesting that and trying to
• 1:12:34
  use that as a wedge to mobilize voters on one side or the other.
• 1:12:39
  So you have a lot of right-left discourse around that.
• 1:12:42
  And you're still...
• 1:12:45
  I mean, nation building is very, very new.
• 1:12:50
  You have countries that are...Slovakia is historically brand new, Slovenia is brand new.
• 1:12:57
  The Baltics have had that very short period of existence between the two world wars, and
• 1:13:03
  now they're starting anew.
• 1:13:04
  And people are...in some ways, they can be positive.
• 1:13:08
  Like I think there are new forms of government.
• 1:13:12
  You can see all kinds of innovation in Estonia around government and how government can be
• 1:13:17
  run.
• 1:13:18
  But it can also be really negative.
• 1:13:19
  You have this constant re-litigation of the past to inflame people and to drive wedges
• 1:13:26
  and to mobilize voting blocs.
• 1:13:28
  But then in Ukraine, you look at that, it is such a divided memory in that country, and
• 1:13:34
  such a divided past, divided geographically.
• 1:13:39
  And if the book had come out, and the book was gonna come out a year earlier, the story
• 1:13:43
  of Ukraine would have been of another one of these two different histories, or two or
• 1:13:49
  more histories and presence in contestation.
• 1:13:54
  And now I think it's an incredibly unified country fighting an external enemy.
• 1:13:58
  So when there's a bigger problem, these smaller problems, these less existential problems
• 1:14:05
  of identity and history can vanish very quickly.
• 1:14:09
  And it's also interesting how personally your identity can switch or is prone to adapt.
• 1:14:18
  I was always Slovenian when I was in Slovenia, but then when I moved to Germany, nobody knew
• 1:14:24
  where or what Slovenia is.
• 1:14:26
  So I started embracing a more of Eastern European kind of identity, hanging out with other folks
• 1:14:34
  from Eastern Europe or the Balkans and understanding the appeal in it, which I wouldn't have if
• 1:14:41
  I stayed in Slovenia, for example.
• 1:14:43
  I don't know.
• 1:14:45
  I think that's right.
• 1:14:46
  And I think that idea of Eastern Europe in a way, I grew up a little bit in Poland and
• 1:14:51
  a lot more outside of Poland.
• 1:14:53
  And Eastern Europe is more of a thing that exists when you're outside of it, that you
• 1:14:57
  get grouped with other people.
• 1:14:58
  And then people group you with this bloc.
• 1:15:03
  And when you're grouped with them, you actually do discover there are things in common.
• 1:15:06
  There is things you don't perceive within Poland.
• 1:15:10
  It's such a poll and a slow knock is so different.
• 1:15:14
  And it's a totally different kind of polls and checks, almost think of themselves as
• 1:15:18
  opposites in the reviews on everything, especially religion and sex and just the two different
• 1:15:25
  societies.
• 1:15:26
  But you take polls and checks and put them in England, it's kind of the same thing.
• 1:15:30
  And you discover, well, in a lot of ways, we have these tunnel vision in country.
• 1:15:36
  But there's also a bigger commonality.
• 1:15:39
  Because a lot of the history in outline, in types of experience is shared.
• 1:15:47
  Those same beats in families, you get the same big pivotal years, the big pivotal events,
• 1:15:53
  slightly different shading on each of them.
• 1:15:57
  But the history, and I was surprised even going to places that seem very remote from
• 1:16:02
  Poland, like Albania, Bulgaria, actually some real similarities, just even at the level
• 1:16:06
  of architecture and people's attitude towards things from the West and attitude towards
• 1:16:14
  family and travel, very, very domestic things, very similar and quite different from something
• 1:16:20
  you'd find in Germany.
• 1:16:22
  Maybe we should institute a mandated temporary exile for all Eastern Europeans for a little
• 1:16:29
  bit.
• 1:16:30
  And then when they come back, they're like, hey, we can get along.
• 1:16:31
  It'd be good to rotate a little bit.
• 1:16:35
  Yeah, kind of discover.
• 1:16:38
  Because I do think you discover those commonalities once you're outside of your home country.
• 1:16:45
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:16:46
  That makes a lot of sense.
• 1:16:47
  I haven't thought about it before, but it makes perfect sense.
• 1:16:50
  Jakub, thank you so much.
• 1:16:51
  Your book is so good.
• 1:16:53
  I really recommend it to everybody.
• 1:16:56
  Probably available everywhere, right?
• 1:16:58
  Pretty.
• 1:16:59
  There's a UK version, there's an American version, there's a German language version,
• 1:17:05
  and there's some more on the way.
• 1:17:06
  But anywhere English language books are sold.
• 1:17:08
  Okay.
• 1:17:09
  Any Eastern European translations coming up?
• 1:17:12
  There's some coming.
• 1:17:13
  There's some coming.
• 1:17:14
  We're going to have Hungarian, Czech, and some more on the way.
• 1:17:21
  Awesome.
• 1:17:22
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:17:23
  Yeah, absolutely fantastic.
• 1:17:25
  I enjoyed every second of it.
• 1:17:29
  Do you have any social media?
• 1:17:31
  Where can people follow your work?
• 1:17:34
  They're not that active, but it's jmikanowski or jacobmikanowski on Instagram.
• 1:17:42
  jmikanowski on Twitter is easiest.
• 1:17:44
  And then I have a website, jmikanowski, which has the Instagram link, Twitter link, those
• 1:17:50
  are the main ones.
• 1:17:52
  What are you working on right now?
• 1:17:54
  Do you have any other book coming, any other books coming up?
• 1:17:57
  I do, but it's a little bit, it's in the early stages and I have to keep it kind of, yeah,
• 1:18:01
  I don't, not yet.
• 1:18:02
  Okay.
• 1:18:03
  Okay.
• 1:18:04
  Well, looking forward to it.
• 1:18:05
  And I hope we can do this again.
• 1:18:06
  Again, thank you so much.
• 1:18:07
  This is a thank you so much.
• 1:18:08
  It was a joy talking to you.
• 1:18:11
  Thank you for listening to the episode.
• 1:18:14
  If you've enjoyed it, please subscribe and follow on YouTube, Apple podcasts and Spotify.
• 1:18:20
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• 1:18:25
  on Patreon, the Kings and Queens, Gordon, Yurechuk, Lorenzo, Veronica, Mila, Carmen
• 1:18:32
  and Tai Chi.
• 1:18:33
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• 1:18:38
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• 1:18:43
  find Smart Cookies podcast on there and become one.
• 1:18:47
  It's as simple as that.
• 1:18:49
  Thank you.
• 1:18:50
  Bye.