Spencer Burke

Hidden away from view behind unassuming doors, under humming fluorescent lights and encased in corrugated steel, rest most of the six million objects in the collection of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The place is deliberately hard to find. If you’re lucky enough to be taken inside, it’s hard not to be reminded of the last scene in *Raiders of the Lost Ark*. After two hours of fisticuffs and truck chases, Indy rescues the Ark of the Covenant from nefarious Nazis and hands it over to the government. The relic is crated and wheeled through a vast storage facility, eventually disappearing into anonymity among thousands of identical boxes containing who-knows-what other priceless treasures.



The Peabody Museum was founded in 1866,  the first anthropology museum in the Americas. This was just as archaeology was beginning its transformation, from what had been a hobby for gentleman antiquarians into a regimented systematic science, and the Peabody helped pioneer excavation techniques and methodology. The museum dispatched expeditions around the globe to collect archaeological and ethnographic artifacts. 



At this time museums served two essential functions: to save things and show them. In its first half century, the Peabody focused on exhibiting. As the collection grew, new wings were added to the stately red-brick museum on Divinity Avenue, north of Harvard Yard. Eventually the rate of acquisition outpaced the availability of space and funds for new construction, and the museum’s focus shifted, from display to study and interpretation. Objects were gradually put away. Today, less than half of one percent of the museum’s collection is on public display. The most valuable objects are never exhibited. The museum’s security isn’t good enough. So they stay in the vault, protected from curious eyes as much as loose fingers.



Among the objects in the Peabody’s storerooms are approximately thirty thousand artifacts from the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá, collected by the American archaeologist Edward Herbert Thompson at the turn of the 20th century. These objects are among the most storied—famous and infamous—in the Peabody’s collections. Mexico alleges they were removed from the country illegally, and the artifacts have since been the subject of a lengthy legal battle and long-standing antipathy.



I entered this story in the spring of 2008 when William L. Fash, the Peabody Museum’s current Director, hired me to investigate the questions at the heart of the dispute over the ownership of the artifacts from the Sacred Cenote. I searched the archives to determine the legal status of the artifacts at the time, the conditions under which they were removed from Mexico, and the basis and extent of the Peabody’s proprietary claims on the collection.



***



Edward Thompson’s zeal for archaeology was born from his childhood rambles hunting arrowheads around Lake Quinsigamond, near his home in Worcester, Massachusetts. Thompson eagerly devoured accounts of adventures in distant lands and took a particular interest in investigating historical riddles. While studying engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Thompson published an essay in *Popular Science Magazine *titled “Atlantis Not a Myth,” in which he suggested that refugees from the lost island had come to the New World and constructed the pyramids of Mesoamerica. It caught the eye of several prominent archaeologists, and six years later, in 1885, Thompson received an invitation to a dinner party with members of the Peabody Museum and the American Antiquarian Society. They confronted Thompson with a proposal: travel to Mexico, investigate Maya ruins there, and send specimens back to the United States for study. Massachusetts Senator George Hoar arranged to have Thompson appointed US Consul to Yucatán, a post that provided some financial stability, as well as cover for his real objective.



With his wife and infant daughter in tow, Thompson arrived in Mexico in the spring of 1885. He set up shop in Mérida, the drowsy capital of Yucatán Province. The place was sticky-hot, thick with dust in the dry season, bogged with mud in the wet. He took his time before setting out to the ruins in the interior: learned to speak Spanish and Mayan, attended to his consular duties, and studied the customs of the local Maya, the descendants of the people who built the ruined cities he was meant to explore. 



Thompson completed several surveys for the Peabody and made plaster casts of Maya architecture to be reproduced for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. That same year, he stumbled on the chance to purchase a moribund old *hacienda *estate east of Mérida, one hundred acres that happened to contain the ruins of Chichén Itzá. It was a unique opportunity—to actually own the remains of one of the most important Classic Maya cities—and Thompson pounced on it. Chichén Itzá would be Thompson’s home for the next three decades, and the site of his most momentous work. The old plantation house, the *casa grande*, was itself several centuries old, built of stone taken from the ruins, its walls encrusted with statues and carvings. “Can you imagine a more ideal habitation for me while engaging in my work?” Thompson enthused in one letter home.



Chichén Itzá stands amid the flat plain of subtropical scrubland in the north of the Yucatán Peninsula, about one hundred miles southwest of the modern resort city of Cancún. The city flourished as one of the centers of the Maya world, reaching its height around 800 CE. When Thompson arrived, the city sat crumbling, slowly dissolving back into jungle. Trees sprouted from buildings. The iconic Pyramid of Kukulkan could easily have been mistaken for a wooded hill, and not something made by the hands of men. From the city’s nexus at the Pyramid, a stone-paved causeway strays a quarter mile south into the forest. At the end of this path is the Sacred Cenote, an immense hole in the earth, 180 feet around, with sheer chalky cliffs and a perpendicular eighty-foot drop to the turbid green waters below. A collapsed stone shrine stands sentinel on the rim. More than one early visitor remarked on the mysterious influence that seems to pervade the place.



*Cenote* is a Spanish corruption of the Mayan word *tzonot*, “fresh water well.” They are sinkholes, created when rainwater erodes the topsoil and limestone bedrock until they collapse to form a natural well. As the only permanent source of surface water in the region, *cenotes *were critical resources to the Maya, and took on enormous spiritual resonance. *Cenotes* were regarded as portals between the earth and the underworld, Xibalba. These openings in the earth served as prime points of contact with the gods, and were important pilgrimage sites. There are several thousand *cenotes *in Yucatán, but this one is the largest and most sacred. From the ruined shrine at its edge, sacrificial offerings were thrown into the Cenote in hopes of appeasing the rain god Chaac. Over a period of about eight hundred years, the Maya cast precious objects and human sacrifices alike into the waters below.



An old Spanish account from shortly after the Conquest told of how, “if this country possessed gold, it would be this well that would have the greater part of it, so great was the devotion which the Indians showed for it.” Thompson set out to test this story, and chose the Sacred Cenote as the subject of his most ambitious archaeological project. In 1904, Thompson and his team of Maya workers constructed a derrick on the Cenote’s south shore, lowered a steel clam-shell dredge more than one hundred feet down, and hauled up pail-fulls of the creamy yellow silt that lined the Cenote floor.



Eventually artifacts began to show up in the muck—exquisitely carved jades, embossed gold discs, clumps of copal incense, wooden weapons, and human remains (including an incense burner made from a child’s skull). The thick muck at the bottom of the Cenote* *helped to preserve artifacts from decomposing, providing some of the only surviving wood and cloth objects from the pre-Hispanic Maya world. The high quality and craftsmanship of many of the recovered sacrificial objects, and the discovery of materials from as far away as Panama and central Mexico are a testament to the importance of Chichén Itzá’s Sacred Cenote as a center of pilgrimage. Together they represent one of the finest collections of Maya artifacts in the world. 



Over the next five years, the team continued the tedious work of dredging the Cenote floor and sifting carefully through the sediment for artifacts. When returns from the dredge slowed, Thompson returned to the United States and learned how to deep-sea dive in Boston harbor. He came back to Mexico with a Greek sponge diver and two primitive globular cast-iron diving suits, and descended into the Cenote’s murky waters to search by hand for objects the dredge missed. A diving accident left his hearing permanently damaged. Two years later, Thompson declared his work at the Cenote done. 



The Peabody Museum sponsored Thompson’s work, indirectly, through remittances from Frederic Ward Putnam, the museum’s director, and Charles Pickering Bowditch, a businessman and patron of the museum. The exportation of artifacts was patently illegal under an 1897 Mexican law, which decreed that all “archaeological monuments existing in the National Territory are the property of the Nation,” and outlawed the removal of antiquities from Mexico. In order to ship his finds back to his benefactors in Cambridge, Thompson presented “quite a sum of money” to Santiago Bolio, the Inspector of Ruins responsible for enforcement. “To obtain this money cost me many sleepless nights and unhappy days,” wrote Thompson, “but I knew that it was the chance of my life to put him under such obligation that he would hold fast to my interests.” The artifacts recovered from the Cenote were smuggled out of Mexico in the luggage of friends and colleagues. Thompson even employed his wife as a courier. 



This amenable political status quo was upended by the overthrow of President Porfirio Diáz’s regime and the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. Thompson scaled back his archaeological work and focused on managing the plantation. Maya peasants, angered by the slow pace of land reform promised by the Revolution, torched the *hacienda *house in 1921. Thompson’s records went up in flame. This was only the beginning of Thompson’s troubles. The post-revolutionary government did not look kindly on foreigners digging out Mexico’s past, and initiated an investigation into his activities at Chichén Itzá. In 1926, the Mexican government seized the *hacienda* and charged Thompson with the theft and illegal exportation of archaeological patrimony. Thompson fled via sailboat to Havana and returned to the United States. Mexico sued Thompson *in absentia *for more than a million pesos in damages. The Peabody Museum and Harvard University were named accomplices in the suit.



The case of the purloined Cenote treasure ignited the press in both nations. Thompson was vilified in Mexico and defended in America. The Mérida weekly *Revista de Yucatán *denounced “the diving ducks [who] took out innumerable ancient objects, among them many of gold ... the treasures, stolen from Tlaloc [a name for the rain god] … were sold to the millionaires of New York *… *which constitutes a great shame.” Back in Massachusetts, Thompson justified himself in *The Boston Globe*. “I should have been false to my duty as an archaeologist,“ he maintains, “had I, believing that the scientific treasures were at the bottom of the sacred well, failed to improve the opportunity and attempt to bring them to light and thus make them available for scientific study instead of lying imbedded in the mud and useless to the world.”



***



Thompson spent his last years in relative poverty, living with his son in New Jersey, delivering occasional lectures, and drafting a memoir titled *People of the Serpent*, in which he wrote, “I have squandered my substance in riotous explorations and I am altogether satisfied.” He died in 1935, at the age of seventy-seven. Thompson was audacious, even to the point of recklessness, and was prone to being swept away by romanticized notions of adventure.  He seemed to take a certain pleasure in risking bodily harm in the name of archaeological inquiry, such as when he insisted on diving the Sacred Cenote himself. Though his methods were unorthodox, sometimes brazen, the depiction of him as a grave robber is not quite fair. Looters do not bother to take such copious field notes. He was driven by an expansive thirst to uncover the mysteries of an ancient people then unknown to history.



The criminal case against Thompson was dismissed when he died, but the civil suit dragged on for nine more years until the Mexican Supreme Court declared Thompson not guilty, on a technicality. But the affair left the Peabody’s reputation bruised. An internal Peabody memorandum from the late 1940s acknowledged that the court’s decision still “leaves [the Peabody] as the ultimate recipient of objects exported illegally.” The continued possession of the Cenote artifacts left many at the museum discomfited. One director remarked that the museum now had a “considerable black eye in Mexico.” No Peabody excavations had been allowed in the country since. 



Over the next few decades, the Peabody hosted an exhibition and published several studies and catalogues of the artifacts. In the 1960s and 70s the museum returned several sets of jade and gold artifacts in exchanges with Mexico. Several Cenote jades can be seen at the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, and a few more in the Peabody’s third-floor Mesoamerica gallery. But the bulk of the thirty thousand objects Thompson sent back to Cambridge remain in the dark of the Peabody Museum’s storerooms. 



***



Neither the battle lines nor arguments have shifted much in the intervening eighty years. Edward Thompson is not well liked in Mexico. He is considered a grave robber, a common thief who stole a significant piece of Mexican history. The clamshell dredge Thompson used to plumb the depths of the Sacred Cenote is now displayed in the expansive commercial complex that welcomes busloads of tourists to Chichén Itzá. The dredge sits across from the restrooms, next to a bilingual sign explaining its significance. The Spanish text is longer and more scathing than the English. Thompson, it reads, “purchased the Hacienda Chichén and made unscientific excavations throughout the site, beginning with the exploration of the Cenote ... the majority of these he removed illegally from the country and donated to the Peabody Museum of Harvard. It’s a disgrace that many materials were damaged at the time of extraction and there are almost no records of what was obtained.”



***



While many countries enacted laws protecting archaeological remains, starting with Greece in 1827, no international law governed the trade, export, or import of antiquities until the UNESCO Convention of 1970. The laws that now regulate archaeology in this country are among the strictest in the world. In 1990, the US Congress passed the North American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which legally mandated repatriation of archaeological and human remains belonging to existing Native American tribes. The Peabody Museum is considered a star of honoring repatriation requests. But NAGPRA applies only within the US, and so Harvard’s legal obligation for repatriation ends at America’s borders.  



But as Rubie Watson, a former director of the Peabody, writes, “NAGPRA is not a temporary, passing affair. It has ushered in dramatic and, many would argue, long-overdue changes in museums, establishing an atmosphere of openness that one trusts will be a lasting NAGPRA legacy.” A growing conviction, slowly spreading among archaeologists and museum administrators in the West, holds that sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony should not be hoarded away in storage, where they cannot be accessed by the public (let alone by the descendants of those who created them). 



Though Harvard is under no obligation to repatriate the Peabody’s Sacred Cenote collection, there is a strong ethical case for repatriation. The records are clear: by removing the artifacts from Mexico, Thompson violated Mexican law, and did so knowingly. The Peabody’s reputation continues to be stained by its possession of these artifacts. And for what? What purpose do they serve hidden away in the Peabody’s vaults? They were brought to the Peabody to be studied, and studied they have been. Volumes have been published on the jades, metals, and lithic tools from the Sacred Cenote, but now they are accessed only by the occasional grad student. They are simply preserved, and this is no longer a persuasive justification for their extended stay in America. 



In the end, the decision to repatriate rests with the Harvard Corporation: the President and Fellows of Harvard University. The Corporation, however, is in the business of growing Harvard’s assets, not reducing them. In 2002, Dumbarton Oaks—Harvard’s research library in Washington, D.C.—came to suspect that two Byzantine silver pieces in their collection were forgeries. They sent the pieces to the Oxford Archaeological Laboratory for testing. The lab confirmed that the objects were indeed fakes, and asked if they might be allowed to exhibit them in their museum of forged antiquities. Ned Keenan, Dumbarton Oaks’ Director at the time, recognized that the fakes had no real value to the museum and determined that they might as well be given to an institution that could use them. The Corporation refused. Generally speaking, the Corporation doesn’t want to enable any precedents for the repatriation of university property. If the Corporation were to approve the de-acquisition of even a single object (even a fake!) in a Harvard collection, they would risk a deluge of similar requests that could empty the university’s museums, and coffers. Requests from Native American tribes are fulfilled to the extent the law demands, but other appeals are usually rejected categorically. Two recent case studies of successful repatriation could be helpful in laying such a groundwork: Harvard’s return of the Lowell bells to Russia and Yale’s repatriation agreement with Peru.



***



Stalin shuttered Russia’s churches and monasteries in 1929 and outlawed the ringing of bells. Many thousands were melted down. The American philanthropist Charles Crane rescued eighteen brass bells from Danilov Monastery, on the right bank of the Moskva in Moscow. The largest, called the Mother Earth Bell, weighed thirteen tons with a 700-pound clapper. Crane gave them to Harvard, and seventeen were installed in the just-completed tower of Lowell House (the last went to the Business School’s Baker Library). Here they remained, rung at 1pm each Sunday and after every Harvard-Yale football game (Harvard’s score was announced on the Mother Earth Bell; Yale’s on the Bell of Famine, Pestilence and Despair). With the loosening of religious restrictions under *perestroika*, the Russian Orthodox Church began to press for their return. Eventually, a Russian oil magnate named Viktor Vekselberg agreed to foot the ten million dollar bill necessary to commission replacements and transport the bells back to Russia. In September 2008 Harvard’s replacement replicas were blessed by the Patriarch Alexei II in a ceremony attended by President Medvedev, and on March 17 of the following year the bells tolled in their old belfry for the first time in nearly eight decades.



In the fall of 2010, Yale University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History (endowed by the same Peabody) concluded a model agreement in a similar dispute. In 1911, the American explorer Hiram Bingham arrived in Peru and re-discovered Machu Pichu, the misty redoubt of the terminal Inka. Bingham secured permission to conduct excavations at the site and remove objects for study. The objects remained in New Haven for a century, despite public pressure from Peruvian intellectuals and officials. 



The two disputes bear a striking resemblance to each other: both involve collections of pre-Hispanic artifacts removed from Latin American countries at the beginning of the 20th century and retained by Ivy League universities in their respective Peabody Museums. 



After Peru brought a case against Yale in Connecticut court, the two sides began negotiations, mediated by outgoing Senator Chris Dodd. The result was “a very civilized agreement,” that Dodd says he hopes will serve as a model in resolving similar disputes. Yale agreed to return the objects to a university in Cuzco, the ancient Inka capital, which in turn committed to make the collection freely accessible to all scholars. In Dodd’s words, “Going back to the university in Cuzco, establishing a joint relationship, acknowledging Yale’s treatment of these artifacts over the last hundred years: I think sets a precedent that will allow for other such collections to be able to be moved and to be preserved and to be celebrated in ways that people haven’t thought of in the past.”



Perhaps such precedents will spur administrative headway on other deadlocked repatriation cases. Perhaps Harvard will hurry to avoid the Ivy League indignity of being one-upped by Yale. Or perhaps Indiana had it right with the Ark, “Fools, bureaucratic fools. They don’t know what they’re dealing with.”



***



Thompson’s self-defense in *The Boston* *Globe *echoes the existential mission statement employed by museums today. By what authority do museums possess the past? While the first museums grew out of the collecting tradition of curiosity cabinets and were conceived as instruments of experiential diversion, their focus shifted in the 20th century to embrace the project of research and education. Museums emphasize their responsibility as custodians of the past, stewards of the sacred debris from the shipwreck of time. Thompson conveys this vision of archaeology as a duty and a burden. In order to reconstruct the puzzle of the past, to unravel the mysteries of our ancestors and confront history head-on, it was first necessary to retrieve all of the pieces. 



Thompson articulates an archaeologist’s imperative, a responsibility to make these remnants of the past “available for scientific study instead of lying imbedded in the mud and useless to the world.” It is a sad irony of history that Thompson recovered these objects from the darkness of the Cenote’s deep, only to have them returned back to the bowels of the earth, beneath the green pastures of Harvard University.

The call to prayer sounds more mournful in Sarajevo than in Istanbul or Beirut. Walking through the old city—a disorder of cobbled lanes, Moorish architecture, and bazaars spilling over with hammered copper pots, communist kitsch, and bright wool Bosnian kilims—the call of the muezzin comes softly at first. A single cry drifts in from the distance, then is joined by another, and another, lapping over each other, building to an eerie harmony, a song sung in round. 



Minarets scatter the skyline, rising above the corrugated tile roofs like ancient gnarled pines in a forest. The mosques in the old city date back three, four, five hundred years. The muezzins’ calls began at the oldest of these, a short walk away, across the turbid shallow waters of the River Miljacka. The Tsar’s Mosque, as it is called, is squat and unremarkable. Built in 1457, the building is as old as the city itself. It is named for Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror: the man who turned Constantinople into Istanbul and brought much of the Balkans into the expansive fold of the Ottoman Empire. Sarajevo was founded at Mehmet’s orders, to serve as the capital of his new province. This mosque was duly erected.



It was a fitting beginning for a city that overbrims with houses of worship. Long before Ellis Island and the multicultural metropolises of the 21st century, Sarajevo was among the most diverse places on the planet. For hundreds of years it was one of the few cities where one could find a Catholic cathedral, a mosque, a synagogue, and an onion-domed Orthodox church together on a single street. Inside the tchotchke stands and hostel rooms you can still find the old tourism posters from the 60s and 70s that proudly proclaim Sarajevo “The Jerusalem of Europe.” 



The diversity of this place is, perhaps, the inevitable consequence of history. The Balkans have always existed on the fringe of empires, as a much-fought-over domain at the center of their territorial ambitions. Through the centuries, Romans, Byzantines, Slavs, Venetians, Turks, and Austro-Hungarians came, saw, conquered, and in time retreated back from whence they came. Each left echoes of their presence: some words from their language, some converts to their religion, some favorite food or drink or art form. The language—called Bosnian, Serbian, or Croatian, depending on whom you ask—reflects this tradition of borrowing and lack of cultural consistency. “Tea” (*?aj*) comes from Turkish, “water” (*voda*) from Slavic, pronouns from Latin. The Balkans are the great palimpsest of history.



***



It’s hard to believe, after years of war and ethnic strife, that the name *Balkan* once evoked this kind of diversity. The name—derived from the range of mountains that run up the peninsula’s spine—has taken on an altogether different meaning in the Western lexicon, *balkanization* now signifying an injurious breakup of a whole into small, hostile parts.  All complex entities, from corporations to African states, risk the fate of balkanization: *out of one, many*. A sense of spoiled potential hangs in the air here. The diversity of this place was once its selling point, a source of pride. But it also proved to be its downfall. When else has a city gone in ten years from Olympic host to war-zone? The wooded, rolling hills that cradle the city were transformed from ski runs for the world’s finest athletes into a shooting gallery for heavy artillery and Serbian snipers.



The siege of Sarajevo lasted for nearly four years, longer than any other siege in modern history, three times longer than Stalingrad.  When it was all over, ten thousand people were dead and fifty thousand wounded. One in two citizens reported seeing a family member shot and one-third of the population had fled for their lives. The renowned national library was burnt to nothing but ash.



There is a famous photograph taken by Annie Leibovitz during the war. It shows a bicycle collapsed on pavement, a crescent of blood smeared against the pale ground like a stroke in Chinese calligraphy. Leibovitz flew into Sarajevo in 1993, a year into the siege.  On the drive back from her meeting with the newly crowned Miss Besieged Sarajevo, a mortar crashed to earth ahead of her car. “It hit a teenage boy on a bike,” she wrote, “and ripped a big hole in his back. We put him in the car and rushed him to the hospital, but he died on the way.”



***



I didn’t see the photo until after my own visit to Sarajevo. It captured something distinct and plaintive about the place that reflected my own experience. By the time I started poking around the Balkans—fourteen years after the conflict’s end—the stains of war remained everywhere: the spray-painted warnings of mines; the disabled ordnance sold as souvenirs; the colorless blotches left by exploded shells on building fronts, like pox scars on a face.



On our last afternoon in Sarajevo, my friend Chelsea and I wandered away from the center of town. We posed for pictures on the Latin Bridge, the spot where Franz Ferdinand met his fateful end in 1914. We clambered around the old Olympic stadium, and rested with a couple of cans of beer in a strikingly green park. We later discovered that the park was a memorial and graveyard to some of the fifteen hundred children who died in the siege. Here again was this incongruity, this friction between the visible and exterior and an unnerving evil that always seemed to be lurking beneath them. The hills surrounding Sarajevo shelter the city in a cozy embrace, but during the war they made escape impossible, as their vantage enabled Serbian militia to rain death down on the city. The diversity of the Balkans is both its distinction and the root of the war that ripped Yugoslavia apart. This is what I think so many outsiders have found troubling and beguiling, fascinating and repelling about this place. This was the carrion-smell that attracted the vultures of death here in the 90s, and this is what first drew me to the Balkans. 



***



I spent six weeks in the Balkans. I went to class, traveled on the weekends, became a connoisseur of Croatian brandies, and tried to fathom the place. The Balkans are the Gordian knot of geopolitics, full of divisions so subtle as to seem wholly imperceptible to the outsider. It was not until around week four that I began to get a handle on the ones between Croats and Slovenes, Macedonians and Kosovars, Stokavian and ?akavian dialects, and so on. But just at the point when I hoped coherence would set in, I only grew more confused. 



As our lectures recounted the breakup of Yugoslavia and the wars that followed—the ethnic cleansing, the churches filled with people and set burning—it gradually felt less foreign and perverted. Had I assimilated the Balkan mentality? Was this normal, inevitable, unavoidable? Was it simply the sanitizing gap between experiencing atrocities and learning about them in a classroom? It wasn’t that the war existed in some distant past. My classmates from Serbia and Croatia had all been touched by it. We talked about it a bit: a father gone fighting for years, a brother wounded by snipers, sleepless nights spent huddled in bomb shelters. They seemed to accept it all so matter-of-factly. I suppose these things are different when you grow up with them.



One Monday I received a call from Matija, a friend of a friend who had offered to show me around. Matija was a man on a mission. “Plan for Thuseday,” he declared. “Take a train to Sisak. We’ll look around. It was important city. Then will drive to Petrinja. That is a city that was devastated during war. After that I’m going to Zagreb, so you’ll be co-driver. OK?” I must have dithered for a moment too long, because before I could answer he was demanding, “When can you take train?”  



“Hold on, was that Tuesday or Thursday?” 



“Thuseday.”



“Thuseday?”



“Yes, day after today.” He was getting impatient.



“Oh, yes, of course. I’m free at four.”



“Mm. Arrival should be in one hour. It is small station, however, it is the only station that looks like one. More or less. Until Thuseday,” he said and hung up. Nothing quite like Slavic hospitality.



The day was broiling and the train airless. When I arrived in Sisak, my clothes were soaked and plastered to my body. Matija gave me a quick tight hug and started walking. Sisak is an ugly but tidy industrial city. Smokestacks fill one end of the sky. The streets were empty, and it was silent save for the murmur of cicadas. We walked along the river. A few Roman columns stood uncomfortably between communist-era tenements. We crossed the river and walked up a hill into a neighborhood of small neat suburban houses. He gestured ahead to a house on the right, where his grandparents live. He told me that in 1995, when he was ten, fighting broke out again between Croatia and the breakaway republic of Serbian Krajina, in what now lies within the southern and eastern borders of Croatia. His mother worried that the Serbs would bomb Zagreb, so she drove them out into the country to stay with her parents until things cooled down. Gesturing to an overgrown vacant lot on the left, Matija said that during that night back in Sisak a deafening noise woke everyone up. A bomb meant for the nearby power plants had flattened the house across the street.



We went into his grandparents’ house to wait for his friend Helena. His grandmother cooed over me as she force-fed us from a seemingly limitless supply of plum dumplings. His grandfather meanwhile held forth, enumerating Croatia’s contributions to the world: the necktie, the fountain pen, the torpedo. The list went on. Helena arrived an hour later. We drove off to her hometown, Petrinja, which had seen some of the heaviest fighting in the ’95 campaign. We got out to walk around in a few places, stopping to look at an old stone fort and a 16th century battlefield, then drove up out of the city, pulled off onto a gravel road, and stopped. We were surrounded by trees. Below was an idyllic meadow, tall with grass swaying in the breeze. It all looked like something out of a Grimm fairytale. Helena told us, as Matija translated, that Serb paramilitaries marched twenty-two Croats from the town into these woods. They shot them, then buried them in a mass grave near this spot.



We drove on, stopping again by the side of the road as we neared the outskirts of town. Here there was a simple wooden crucifix in the middle of a field. Helena said that this had once been a church that had been bombed during a service. This was the exact day it had happened, nineteen years ago. She added, almost as an afterthought, that her parents had been killed inside. It was all so sober and unsentimental. She didn’t even change the tone of her voice or run her hand along the cross.



Matija and I drove back to Zagreb. He asked me to explain something that he’d been wondering about for years. Of course, I said. “I have tried and I don’t know .... Baseball,” he blurted out, “how does it work?”  



Matija dropped me off at my hostel and said goodbye. I went up to my room, exhausted from the long day, and got ready for bed. I couldn’t fall asleep, and so finally I went out for a walk, bought some ice cream and brought a tall beer back to the room. Suddenly I was overwhelmed. I started to cry. It was over as soon as it started. But in a way I felt relieved. I don’t know anything about war or hardship or loss or post-traumatic stress, and I still didn’t understand the stoicism of the day, the *unfeelingness* of the entire place. This was, after all, a people which stereotype faults for volatility. I didn’t know what I had just felt. But in my confusion, tears were confirmation that feeling did still exist. The gesture reassured me, and I was thankful for it.



***



Every Yugoslav remembers May 4, 1980: the day Tito died. Though twelve years would pass before the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia collapsed under myriad internal pressures, the nation’s decline became inevitable on this day. Yugoslavia was more of an idea than a country anyway. Tito was the prime salesman of this idea. The force of Tito’s personality literally held the nation together. People recognized that he was a dictator, but he gave them a nation based upon grand ideals, a nation that was a player on the world stage, a nation that they could believe in and be proud of. Who cared if your ruler was an autocrat if you had all that? After Tito, the idea of Yugoslavia slowly lost its cachet. As people stopped believing in the idea of the nation, politicians stopped talking about the good of Yugoslavia, and started addressing their local constituencies, Serbs and Croats and Slovenes. 



I saw an old Slovenian propaganda poster once in a Ljubljana museum. It showed the growth of an apple from naked limb to fruit, in five panels. The apple represented Yugoslavia and the panels were each labeled with a decade. The 1940s are a bare branch. Over the next three panels, the apple develops into a large ripe fruit. In the last panel, the 1980s, only the core is left, dangling. Slovenia—the most developed, the most homogenous, and the most “Western” of the republics—was the first to withdraw from the federation. Slovenians no longer saw any value in propping up Kosovar villagers with the fruits of their industry, so they removed themselves from the social contract that was Yugoslavia. Now, Slovenia is the only ex-Yugoslav state to have been invited into the EU. 



To some extent, our sense of ourselves is always filtered through the eyes of others. Yugoslavs once took pride in their country’s complexity and untroubled diversity. But since the wars of the 90s, they have lost the self-assurance of a confident nation, of Americans, Frenchmen and Argentines. Since Yugoslavia splintered into a bloody mess, they have realized the connotation that the word *Balkan* now holds for Western ears. They are scared to death that they too will begin to think about themselves in this way. And so they tend to dismiss the war, disregard its causes. It is not consistent with their self-image, so they go to great lengths to try to disprove the negative stereotypes. They try to harbor no grudges, to remain unsentimental. 



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Before the breakup of Yugoslavia, before the strident nationalism and petty border wrangling, each republic in the federation could have been personified, with certain character traits. Imagine Yugoslavia as a family in a sitcom, with Tito as the lovable but hard-nosed father. Serbia would have been the stern athletic elder son, tough and devoted. Croatia: the elegant, pretty, popular one. Slovenia was smart, serious, maybe a little socially awkward. And Bosnia was the dysfunctional, jokey class-clown, always making ironic asides, making light of adversity in order to beat it. 



 The Bosnian comedy group Top Lista Nadrealista—“Surrealists’ Top Chart” in English—began producing a popular radio comedy show during the ’84 Sarajevo Olympics, consciously modeling themselves on Monty Python. As the country unraveled, they moved from radio to television, and their sketches shifted from silly fun to political burlesque. They kept on producing darkly absurdist humorous sketches through the long siege of Sarajevo. One skit constructs a farce out of the grim reality of life in a city surrounded by snipers.  The actors run a relay race that involves collecting buckets of water from a well while prancing back and forth to avoid the sniper shots that ricochet around them. The lunacy of this setup is only amplified by the fact that there are actual snipers firing on them. The bullets whipping past the players are real. But the misfortunes of the 90s eventually dampened this comedic spirit. Two of the original Nadrealistas tried to resurrect the group a few years back, but the new program failed to find an audience. Sarajevo now seems a deeply melancholy place, downcast in spirit and dour in mien. Even the call to prayer sounds more mournful in Sarajevo. 



Something of the old spirit still endures. If you direct your gaze downward while walking Sarajevo’s streets, you will sooner or later spot a bright red rupture blooming in the pavement. These are gashes caused by exploding shells during the siege. Rather than smooth them out and repair the damage of war, the city filled them with red resin. They are meant to commemorate the dead and transform the scars from the city’s darkest chapter into things of beauty. There are hundreds of these scattered around Sarajevo, and each is unique. Looked at with a sanguine eye, it resembles a flower. And so it is called a Sarajevo Rose.

Shiraz, 1971



Haile Selassie descends to the tarmac in a gabardine suit. The hot thin air of Shiraz greets the 79-year-old emperor before the line of salutes and the smiling Shah striding to meet him. The Shah of Iran and Emperor of Ethiopia embrace. The Shah thanks him, in English—such a pleasure to see you again, my friend. As the evening shadows sink over the Zagros Mountains beyond the runway, they set off down the fresh highway in a fleet of black Mercedes limousines. The 40 desert miles to Persepolis are richly lit, as if by magic, with long rows of hissing gas-lamps, a reminder of the liquid wealth underlying the affair. At Persepolis, ancient seat of the Achaemenids, they arrive at the glittering tent-city erected for the occasion. All is in place, lavishly conceived and immaculately achieved.



The Shah and his guests have assembled here amid the ruins of Persia’s ancient capital to celebrate two and a half millennia of Iranian civilization. They will feast for five hours on golden caviar and roast peacock flown in from Paris. Spiro Agnew will whisper to Prince Philip—did the old Shah really spend two hundred million on this whole shebang? The Greek president, glutted, will doze off during the sound-and-light show. Orson Welles will opine that this was no party of the year; it was the celebration of 25 centuries.



Haile Selassie—lone emperor in a crowd that includes eight kings, three ruling princes, twelve presidents, ten sheiks, three prime ministers, two sultans, two vice presidents, and a cardinal—will stick close to the Shah. As the night’s gala nears its end, the Emperor will move in close and tell the Shah, with a conspiratorial note, that he feels the sorcery of history in the air tonight. The Emperor reminds his host that they, as the divine heirs to the world’stwo oldest surviving kingdoms, have the full thrust and approbation of the past propelling them to greatness. At the moment, anything seems possible. The Shah, ebullient with success and fine wine, will smile and say—yes, and good thing, for there is so much still to achieve. The party will disband, and the Shah and the Emperor will return to the air-conditioned comfort of their tents. In just a few years both will be overthrown. By the end of the decade, they will both be dead.



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Back in April 1970, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi ordered his advisers to prepare an anniversary celebration to be held in eighteen months. His directive commanded that the pageant demonstrate how “Iran’s continued existence and its national sovereignty is possible through the continuation of the monarchy.” It was to be held in Persepolis, for no other site could better conjure the imperial grandeur of Iran’s past.



The problems soon became apparent. The nearest city, Shiraz, was ill-prepared to host such an event: the airport could only service small planes and the road to the ruins was dilapidated and unlit at night. The Shah told them money was no object. Fifteen million dollars were spent retrofitting the airport. Specialists from the state oil company were brought in to rig rows of temporary gas- lamps along the highway, and 250 bulletproof Mercedes-Benz limousines were ordered.



Architects drew up plans for a new luxury hotel beside the ruins, but it was decided that eighteen months was not enough time. Someone had the idea to build a tent city instead. Empress Farah blanched at the suggestion, declaring that all her guests should feel that they were staying in a palace. And so the maker of the world’s most expensive tents, Jansen AG of Switzerland, was employed to design 54 royal blue, silk-lined tents for the guests. Each air-conditioned, fireproof tent could withstand hundred-kilometer winds, and came complete with wall-to-wall carpeting and his-and-her marble bathrooms.



When construction began they discovered that the desert around Persepolis was a notorious haven for poisonous snakes. The area was sprayed with poison. Loads of snake, lizard, and tarantula carcasses were gathered and trucked away to the local dump. Versailles’ horticulturalist was engaged to landscape the parched environs; 1500 cypress trees and 50,000 carnations were shuttled by Iranian Air Force jets to the new airport at Shiraz, then to the ruins by army truck.



Maxim’s of Paris—then the most famous restaurant in the world—closed down for two weeks and flew 159 of its chefs, bakers, and waiters to Iran to prepare the feast. Attendants and sommeliers were brought in from the Shah’s favorite hotel in St. Moritz. The foreign ministry, tasked with ensuring for- eign leaders’ attendance, played hardball, linking the attendance of British, French, and German rul- ers to drilling and mining contracts in Iran. The ministry of culture recruited Orson Welles to narrate a documentary movie, Flames of Persia, about the pageant. In exchange, the Shah’s brother-in-law put up the financing for Welles’ next movie.



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The festivities began with the feast. Six hundred guests stuffed themselves for five hours on the six- course meal, featuring quail’s eggs stuffed with golden caviar, saddles of lamb with truffles, crayfish mousse, and 92 imperial peacocks (with intact tail feathers) surrounded by a court of roast quail. They consumed 2,500 bottles of fine French wine and champagne: 1945 Chateau Lafite, 1911 Moët Chan- don, 1959 Dom Perignon Rosé.



It was said that the only thing Iranian about the night was the caviar. Those with an eye for irony noted that the Shah, who was allergic, had artichoke instead.



With heavy bellies and swaying gaits the guests made their way to a sound-and-light show over the ruins of Persepolis, complete with fireworks and a new electronic composition by the French avant- garde composer Iannis Xenakis. The next day, guests were treated to a cavalcade of soldiers outfitted in the full regalia of Persian armies through the ages, with garish costumes, false beards, and chariots. A parade of horses pulled a model castle and three reproduced ancient oared warships past the viewing stands. One news anchor remarked that the Shah had out-DeMilled Cecil B. DeMille.



No one was quite sure what to make of the whole affair. Pakistan’s president returned home to declare a national holiday in Iran’s honor. Many historians point to the pageant as the Shah’s crossing of the Rubicon, the moment when he proved just how staggeringly out of touch he was with his people. The ostentation of the pageant eclipsed the 2,500 schools, 2,500 clinics, and 2,500 books commissioned for the anniversary. From exile, Ayatollah Khomeini declared, “these festivities have nothing to do with the noble people of Iran.” The liberal press openly criticized the Shah, attacking the spending and the tastelessness. “Lavish at the Expense of Starving People,” “An Insult to our Culture to serve French food,” read the headlines. A now-declassified memo from the British embassy in Tehran described the event as a daring enterprise, but marred by the element of excess, overwhelmed by the Shah’s megalomania. Their analysis put the cost of the event at several hundred million dollars. In all the pageantry, it was easy to miss the small symbol at the center of it all.



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This is a story about the use and misuse of history.



Two thousand five hundred and ten years earlier, Cyrus the Great marched his victorious army through the gates of Babylon. Cyrus, a skilled politician as well as a consummate conqueror, immediately began the second front of his conquest. He issued an edict, announcing himself to his new subjects.



“I am Cyrus, king of the world, the great king, the powerful king, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters of the world ... The needs of Babylon and of all its cities I gladly attended to.” He portrayed himself as a liberator, who overthrew the unpopular king Nabonidus with the blessing of the Babylonian god Marduk. Then he made a bold and original declaration of tolerance, promising to promulgate religious freedom and equality in Babylon. He pledged to restore the shrines of gods that had been damaged under the old king, and to allow the Jews—kept as slaves in Babylon for generations—to return to their homeland.



These words have come down to us in a document known as the Cyrus Cylinder, a barrel-shaped clay seal, nine inches long, incised with lines of cuneiform text. It was discovered by British archaeologists amid the foundations of a wall in Babylon. Fragments of the same inscription have been found across the area.



The Shah chose Cyrus and the Cylinder to be the focal points for the anniversary celebrations. The Cylinder was represented as a symbol for all the achievements of Iranian civilization. Its image appeared at the center of the logo for the anniversary. Small copies were fashioned in clay and distributed to guests. The Shah convinced the British Museum to lend the original for the year of the anniversary.



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The tomb of Cyrus is a simple and elegant structure, a gabled chamber atop a six-stepped pedestal, with a small opening on its western side. Built from white limestone, it blends in with the camel- colored earth and hills that surround it. It sits at the heart of Cyrus’ capital, Pasargadae, “the camp of Persia.”



It was here that the celebration actually began, before the foreign guests arrived. Just before noon on October 12, 1971, the Shah, dressed in his full military regalia, walked a vivid aquamarine carpet to a low stage opposite the tomb. Taking to the lectern, he looked right past the sea of dignitaries and dark-clad soldiers assembled before him. Instead, he directly addressed the spirit of the long-dead king in his mausoleum, “O Cyrus, great King, King of Kings, Achaemenian King, King of the land of Iran. I, the Shahanshah of Iran, offer thee salutations from myself, and from my nation.” The Shah’s voice echoed across the plain. “Rest in peace,” he told Cyrus, “for we are awake, and we will always stay awake.” It was a stark and somber ceremony, especially in contrast with what was to come.



At the close of the pageant in Persepolis, after the banquet and light show and procession, after his guests had gone home, the Shah returned to Tehran for the final event of the anniversary celebrations: the ceremonial opening of the massive white-marble Shahyad (Kings’ Memorial) Tower built across the capital’s Eisenhower Avenue. Underneath the tower’s vault there is a small museum with several dozen objects selected to represent the arc of Iranian history. In its place of honor, at the museum’s center, was the Cyrus Cylinder itself.



The cracked clay artifact is perhaps a strange choice to represent 2,500 years of history. Compared to the objects surrounding it in the museum, it is not particularly beautiful or impressive. If not for its placement, most would walk right by it. Why, out of two and a half millennia of culture and artistic achievement, did he choose this?



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The Shah was not of royal blood. He was born to Reza Khan, a soldier who came from a small village northeast of the capital and rose to the command of an elite Cossack brigade. When he was two years old, his father led a British-sponsored coup against the foundering Qajar monarchy. Five years later, his father seized the Peacock Throne, declaring a new imperial dynasty with his son as heir. The new Shah initiated a broad program of institutional reform. He revered the secular vision of Kemal Atatürk, founding father of modern Turkey, emulating his project of modernization and uprooting Islam from the state. He chose the name Pahlavi for his new dynasty as a none-too-subtle reference to the name of the language spoken in Iran before the arrival of Islam.



Mohammad Reza Pahlavi carried on this enterprise when he succeeded his father in 1941. They both saw modernization as the best path toward restoring Persia’s former greatness. As they struggled against the religious establishment for influence, they found themselves pitted against the traditional purveyors of political legitimacy. So, from the beginning, the Pahlavis drew instead on Iran’s pre-Islamic past to vindicate their rule. When the son sought to aggrandize his rule in the eyes of his people and the world, he went all the way back to link himself with the great king Cyrus.



The anniversary celebrations would be a reflection of the Shah’s understanding and vision of Iranian history. He saw the soul of the nation divided between its Zoroastrian first millennium and its Islamic second millennium. The goal, according to one of the event’s main organizers, was to accentuate the imperial grandeur of this first era at the detriment of the Islamic second. This emphasis would, he hoped, strengthen his own hand against his most vociferous critics—the mullahs in the holy city of Qom, particularly the Ayatollah Khomeini, exiled after denouncing the Shah to his congregation as a tyrant and a “wretched, miserable man.” It would also present the Shah’s vision for a third millennium of Persian grandeur, a merging of Cyrus the Great’s imperial ambitions with modern economic development, supported by the nation’s newfound oil wealth. Iran, the Shah believed, would take its rightful place as a prosperous, industrialized welfare state at the top of an interconnected, secular world. He liked to call this Iran of his dreams, Tamaddon-e Bazorg—or, “The Great Civilization.”



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In the year leading up to the anniversary, the Shah led an international publicity campaign seeking to enhance Iran’s status to that of a world power. At the forefront of this campaign was the Cyrus Cylinder, which the Shah put forward as the world’s first declaration of human rights, proof that some of the grand tenets of Western civilization originated in ancient Persia. The campaign was successful. A reproduction of the cylinder is, to this day, displayed prominently beside the United Nations Security Council chamber in New York. The Cylinder represented a past Persia that was powerful, progressive, and magnanimous—synonymous with the Shah’s vision for the new Iran he hoped to build.



But the Shah’s vision of the Cylinder was flawed and specious, countered historians. The declarations of religious freedom in the Cyrus Cylinder were neither bold nor original, but rather consistent with comparable proclamations that had been made by Babylonian rulers assuming the throne going back two centuries before Cyrus. As for his promised manumission of the Jews, no such pledge is found on the Cylinder; the mention comes only from references to the Persian king in the Old Testament. The Cylinder is not even Iranian: it is a Babylonian document, written by a Babylonian scribe for a Babylonian audience, found in present-day Iraq, and now the property of a British museum. That this artifact was propagated as it was as an artifact and emblem of Persian civilization speaks to the Shah’s faith in the belief that he who controls the present, controls the past.



It is the same story with the staging of history in the pageant itself. The Shah transmuted two and a half millennia of dynamic, effervescent history into a static event, simplified into a series of visual cues, bent to his will. By skipping back to the nation’s inception he could present simple grandeur, a glorious pre-Islamic past, free from the power of the mullahs. Unencumbered by narrative, he could avoid acknowledging the presence of those narratives and people that did not agree with him.



A few years later he codified this narrative by shifting Iran’s calendar from the Islamic system to a new “imperial calendar,” beginning with the accession of Cyrus rather than the Prophet’s flight from Mecca. Overnight, the year changed from 1355 to 2535. It was another example of the hubris of a man who believed he had the power to rewrite history. And like the pageant at Persepolis, it united the Shah’s two blocks of opponents, on the left and in the mosques, against him.



After the Revolution swept away the Shah and his fantasies, the new regime sought to play the same game, and banished allusions to the country’s pre-Islamic past. Ayatollah Khalkhali, new Chief Justice of the Revolutionary Courts, published a book countering the Shah’s cult of Cyrus, depicting the king as “a tyrant, a liar, and a homosexual,” and calling for the immediate destruction of Cyrus’s tomb and Persepolis. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed.



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In the shadow of Kuh-i-Rahmat, the Mountain of Mercy, the ruins of Persepolis endure. They are largely empty of visitors now, with fewer and fewer tourists willing to brave the mercurial regime to behold the ancient capital.



Alongside the Palace of Darius and Gate of All Nations, the tent city built by the Shah endures. In front of the Shah’s grand tent are two signs, hand-painted in blue in elegant Persian cursive. On the left is a Qur’anic verse, a pointed warning, “Examine what your predecessors did and learn a lesson.” On the right, another warning—“Don’t throw garbage.”