The Picture Was Warm. The Bathroom Was Not.
Behind every poor Balkan table
I have realised that I find the most peace for writing when I am completely alone, but somehow I find the most material for writing when I am surrounded by people. Isolation gives me the silence to put thoughts together. People usually give me the thoughts I need to put together in the first place. Recently, I found myself in another one of those situations that I like to call a small shock of modern life. What made it particularly interesting was that it did not come from people who knew nothing about the Balkans. Quite the opposite. It came from people who grew up in more or less the same world I did. For almost half an hour, we were remembering childhood. Grandmothers, food, cousins, summers, streets full of children, family gatherings, old houses, the usual collection of things that become increasingly beautiful the further away we move from them. Everyone was happily contributing another memory to this lost Balkan paradise until, apparently incapable of allowing a beautiful moment to remain beautiful, I asked, “Sorry, but… weren’t we extremly poor back then?” There was a short pause, followed by the inevitable answer. “Well, yeah, but…” But what?
That “but” stayed with me because I have started noticing it everywhere. Somewhere between filtered family photographs, old Yugoslav songs and videos of grandmothers making food, the Balkans seem to have acquired a new past. It is softer than the one many of us remember, warmer than the houses we grew up in and strangely free of all the things that once made people desperate to leave. Social media has created a version of Balkan childhood in which poverty became simplicity, lack of choice became tradition and exhaustion became family values. We now look at photographs of overcrowded rooms, old furniture, children wearing clothes passed down through several cousins and tables covered with whatever could be made from whatever happened to be in the kitchen, and we call it authenticity. Apparently all poverty ever needed was enough time to pass and a decent filter.
Perhaps memory naturally does this. It takes the sharpest edges of childhood and slowly rounds them until even things that were difficult begin to feel warm. I understand that. I do it too. There are things I remember with enormous affection that I would probably complain about after forty eight hours if somebody actually sent me back to live inside them. But nostalgia becomes something else when we stop using it simply to miss our childhood and begin using it to make claims about the society in which that childhood happened. There is a difference between missing a person and glorifying the conditions in which that person lived. There is a difference between loving our grandmother’s kitchen and pretending that the life available to our grandmothers was somehow superior to the lives available to women today. There is a difference between remembering a house with affection and forgetting why only one room in that house was heated. Social media, however, seems particularly talented at removing those differences. The cold bathroom becomes rustic. Second hand clothes become vintage. Food made from whatever was left in the fridge becomes traditional cuisine. A childhood shaped by financial limits becomes proof that we once understood the meaning of life better. Very convenient.
Many of us grew up in societies where economic differences obviously existed, but for a large part of the population the scale often seemed to move from poor to slightly less poor rather than from poor to rich. We knew it even when nobody spoke about it. Children understand money much earlier than adults like to imagine. We knew which classmate could afford every school trip and which one mysteriously became sick whenever payment was due. We knew who bought snacks every day and who carried sandwiches from home. We knew why winter jackets were expected to survive several years and why shoes were sometimes bought slightly too big. “You will grow into them” was less a parenting philosophy and more a small economic strategy. And yes, we grew into them. Eventually. After spending a year looking down as if our feet had arrived before the rest of our bodies. Years later, those same sandwiches become proof that our mothers cared more, oversized clothes become evidence that children were less spoiled and the absence of choice becomes a moral virtue. It is remarkable how easily necessity becomes philosophy once we no longer depend on it.
The grandmother has perhaps suffered the most from this historical editing. She has become almost mythical. In our collective memory she permanently stands over a stove, making food for fifteen people and somehow delighted that another cousin has appeared without warning. Her kitchen smells wonderful, the table is always full and nobody ever leaves hungry. All of that may be true. The food really was better. I am not even interested in pretending otherwise. But what disappears from the picture is that many of our grandmothers had extraordinarily limited lives outside that kitchen. Some had only a few years of elementary education. Not distant ancestors whose names survive only in church records, but our grandmothers. Women we knew. Women who watched television with us, complained about our clothes and lived long enough to watch their grandchildren graduate from universities they themselves never had the possibility to enter. Somehow we now celebrate their ability to cook as if they had all independently chosen a lifelong culinary career rather than spending decades becoming excellent at one of the few forms of work society consistently expected from them.
And perhaps the most uncomfortable part is how easily we glorify not only what they did, but what they endured. We speak with admiration about women who “kept the family together,” without always asking what keeping it together required from them. We remember women who stayed for decades beside men who had a “difficult character,” men who sometimes came home angry, men everyone knew not to provoke at the wrong moment. We remember mothers lowering their voices, children learning when to disappear into another room and neighbours understanding perfectly well when it is none of their business. We later rename all of this into strength, patience, sacrifice, commitment to a family. Sometimes it really was all those things. And sometimes it was also simply having nowhere else to go.
There is nothing wrong with admiring their strength. What feels strange is building a romantic ideal around the circumstances that required so much of it. Somehow we now celebrate our grandmothers’ ability to cook, serve, forgive, stay quiet, continue and make sure everyone else was fed as if they had all independently chosen a lifelong exercise in self sacrifice. A woman could wake up the next morning after the worst night of her life, put coffee on the stove, make lunch and make sure the children looked presentable, and decades later that same ability to continue would be offered as evidence that women used to be stronger. Perhaps they were. I just wonder why we are nostalgic for a world that demanded so much strength from them in the first place.
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Some of the strongest memories of Balkan childhood are built around a table, and perhaps they deserve to be. Food was affection, apology, celebration, mourning and, in many families, the closest thing anyone regularly came to saying “I love you.” But romanticising the table without remembering who was standing beside it is convenient. The grandmother cooked. The mother served. The children ate. The men were very often already sitting. Decades later, someone uploads a photograph and writes that women used to know how to take care of a family. It is difficult not to admire the efficiency with which an entire history of unpaid female labour and silent endurance can be reduced to a heart emoji. Maybe women today really have lost something. Between education, employment, financial independence, divorce and the revolutionary discovery that their lives may contain interests beyond feeding and forgiving other people, they somehow failed to preserve the sacred tradition of spending half of Sunday in the kitchen. Civilisation has apparently been collapsing ever since.
The same selective memory appears whenever we romanticise the famous Balkan family trip to the sea. Those photographs are perfect material for nostalgia. A car packed as if the family is permanently relocating, plastic containers of food, towels hanging from every possible surface, children running barefoot and at least three relatives nobody remembers officially inviting. We remember eating on the beach, watermelon cut with a knife someone brought from home and the feeling that summer existed only for us. What we remember less often is the machinery required to create that memory. Someone worked extra hours to afford the petrol. Someone woke up early to prepare the food. Someone packed the clothes, towels, sunscreen and water. Someone remembered which child needed what, who would get hungry first and which one had a tendency to disappear the second nobody was looking. Very often that someone was the mother, who could spend the entire day at the coast without experiencing anything that could reasonably be described as a holiday. Then she went home and unpacked everything. But twenty years later we look at the photograph, see everyone smiling and conclude that people simply knew how to enjoy life back then. Perhaps the children did. The adults were working.
And maybe that is the central illusion behind the romanticisation of Balkan childhood. We remember a world we were never responsible for keeping together. Naturally it felt simpler. We were children. Someone else knew how much electricity cost, whether there was enough money until the end of the month, why the father was working late and why the mother looked tired. We remember ten cousins sleeping in one room as closeness without asking whether there simply was no other room. We remember clothes passed down through the family as tradition without thinking about the parents relieved not to buy another winter coat. We remember streets full of children and decide that life before smartphones was purer, as if we had consciously rejected modern technology in favour of a spiritually meaningful relationship with concrete. And perhaps most conveniently, we remember the traditional family through photographs in which everyone is still standing together. We rarely remember what sometimes kept them there. Economic dependence, shame, fear, neighbours who heard but did not interfere, women who could not leave because leaving meant shame and children who learned very early which sounds from the next room were better ignored. Decades later, everyone is smiling in the picture, so the family must have been strong. Technically, perhaps it was. A locked door is also very difficult to open.
None of this means that the old Balkan family was without beauty. I would not believe that argument either. There was a community. There was a kind of closeness many people genuinely miss. Cousins grew up almost as siblings. Neighbours entered houses without appointments and relatives could be irritatingly involved in every decision while also being the first people to arrive when something went wrong. Food appeared when somebody visited, whether anyone was hungry or not. One person’s problem could become the concern of an entire street before that person had even fully understood the problem themselves. There were crowded tables, loud conversations, summers that seemed endless and a form of solidarity modern life has weakened in many places. Those things were real. I miss some of them too. The problem begins when appreciation becomes glorification, when we decide that because something beautiful existed inside that world, the entire world must therefore have been beautiful. Apparently history allows only one mood.
What makes this even stranger is who often performs this glorification now. We can be living abroad, working online, earning salaries our parents could not have imagined, travelling with partners our families know about, visiting country number forty something and then posting a video of an old Balkan house with “take me back” written over it. Take you back where? Permanently? Because that part somehow never makes it into the caption. We spend summers on the Montenegrin coast talking about how the Balkans have something the West will never understand and then return to countries where institutions work better, salaries are higher and personal choices require less explanation. There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, the possibility of building that life is part of the progress previous generations worked for. What is strange is using the freedoms created by social and economic change to explain that everything was better before those changes happened.
We want our grandmother’s kitchen, but not her lack of education. We want the traditional family, but not the restrictions that sometimes held it together. We want the village community, but not the village knowing who came to our apartment last night. We want the cousins sleeping in one room, but preferably while visiting for the weekend. We want simplicity, but with WiFi. We want tradition, but with the right to ignore it whenever it becomes inconvenient. We want a Balkan childhood with a Western salary, a return ticket and, ideally, air conditioning. This is not a return to the past. It is a very selective holiday package.
That, perhaps, is why this glorification feels so artificial. It does not really want the past. It wants the atmosphere of the past without the conditions that created it. Poverty becomes minimalism. Restriction becomes discipline. Lack of options becomes gratitude. If the right old song plays quietly enough in the background, almost anything can start looking like paradise.
So when I hear half an hour of romanticising Balkan childhood followed by “well, yeah, but…” after somebody mentions that we were, in fact, not living inside of a folk music video, I keep coming back to that unfinished sentence. But what? We were poorer, but happier? Sometimes. We were closer, but less free? Also sometimes. Families stayed together, but should all of them have? Grandmothers made incredible food, but what might they have done if their lives had offered them twenty other possibilities? Children spent entire days outside, but did that make the economic situation around them somehow beautiful? None of these questions destroy the good memories. They simply allow the memories to remain honest.
Perhaps the problem is not that we romanticise the Balkans. The Balkans have always been romanticised by someone, usually from a safe enough distance. The difference now is that we have started doing it to ourselves. We take the difficult parts of our own recent history and place a warm filter over them until deprivation looks like simplicity, inequality looks like tradition and survival begins to resemble a lifestyle choice. We have become tourists in our own memories.
And like all tourists, we photograph only what looks beautiful.
