Lost traditions - By Rudin Dakli
- Published in English/French
As age start to settle, I find memories more and more intrusive especially during traditional celebrations, which maybe has to do with the repetitive nature of rituals and the effect of repetitions on enhancing those memories.
New Year’s Eve was by far the most important celebration in communist Albania, which was not related to, or heavily used for propaganda.
I remember as a kid, seeing my parents and family members starting preparations one, and sometimes two weeks in advance. Frenetic cleaning, sometimes refreshing the paint, scrubbing the wooden floors with soap (which were anyway clean and covered with carpets and rugs!). The house had to look spotless. We were told all of this was done so the New Year can find us clean and bring good luck. It was in fact a preparation for what was to come in the first few days of the New Year. Did not care much about all of this ritual until we grew old enough to become part of the cleaning crew. One can imagine how dedicated could be a teenager.
Every family had bought a turkey few weeks in advance of the New Years Eve, and part of the preparation looked like a passage from Hansel and Gretel. As they were suffering from malnutrition. I find this part of the ritual now bizarre. Feeding was some sort of art. We had to prepare this sausage like mix of bread, corn, and other food a turkey would like, roll it in olive oil and shove it down the turkey's throat, sometimes helping it to go down by gently sliding it down with the palm of our hand. must admit though, it did make the turkey taste delicious in several dishes.
As for the desert, it had to be baklava, prepared from scratch. It started with preparing the dough to later roll into filo pastry sheets. Most of the time rolling the sheet turned into a fun competition among women in the family, on which one of them would make the thinness of the sheets without breaking them. For as I remember the thinnest the sheets the better the baklava would be. Breaking the nuts that was sometimes assigned to kids, and we loved it. Once all was prepared, we had to send the large baking pans to the closest bakery. Not sure what term to use but these were in fact stores with big wooden ovens that usually served a neighborhood. We used to have small wooden stoves at home and the large pans used to bake baklava or the turkey did not fit in them.
So, everyone had to send their dishes to bake in a neighborhood bakery. This was great because there was one outside person that could be blamed if the dishes did not turn as delicious as expected. The bakers however were very skilled and experienced and most of the time the results were optimal. The last part was preparing the “sherbet” and pouring it over the baklava. As easy as it seems this bit was as important as the other steps because if not done right it would make an otherwise perfectly prepared baklava taste not that great. There were certain people who were gifted in sugar matters.
I am not going to write about the evening of 31st as this was the party night.
Coming January, the 1st, a marathon of visits from family and relatives would start, to last for a few days. In my hometown in the morning the first day of the New Year the first people to visit were the ones who lost a loved one during the preceding year. Not sure how that tradition started but I suspect it was an opportunity to make up for missing ceremonies.
Then a parade of relatives coming to visit would be a chance to find out missing puzzles on genetic make up expressions. You could see cousins up third times removed or even more. People I did not even know were relatives. It was a way to keep up the knowledge of family pedigree one would assume.
Usually raki (traditional strong alcoholic Albanian drink) and baklava would be served. One of the baklava pans was in fact made for the guests.
Being a large family, there were six households on my courtyard, and it was a tough little area for the guests to visit, as even though the size off the drinks were shots, maybe one ounce, they had to drink six of them one after the other at every one of the houses.
As for the baklava we fared well with sugar as a society at that time, as there was no cars and people had to walk or bike to go places. It was a today's liberal heaven so to speak. No need to spend for bike lanes as the government did not allow to spend on private cars, so the roads looked somewhat like the images of North Korea today. Have to say though that we were one the greenest countries in the world.
In all this ordeal the ones that were exhausted after the first week of January were women. They had to prepare everything, clean and serve the drinks and desert to guests. And remember, they also had to work full time Monday to Saturday.
© Rudin Dakli