Grave life in the Balkans Posted: 21.

June 2011

"I'm sure that his retirement insurance is just as great as his health insurance. Oh what we southerners would give to be Slovenian mummies!"

Let's make two things clear right away: the dreams of a grave life are not one of my favorites. I find stuffed animals horrible, let alone stuffed human beings. A while ago, I needed a mummy, for reasons known only to my editor. What was I supposed to do? I prayed to the Google-god, pressed the search button and immediately found six to nine mummies in several parts of former Yugoslavia. Which of the mummies should I chose for my novel? I was left with nothing else but to examine the problem. Bosnia was the first to go. There are no mummies there. Thei aim high so they have a pyramid in Visoko.Why would they lose precious time with small inventory from graveyards? Let's look at Slovenia. IsaHta, a Theban priest from the eight or seventh century B.C. came to Ljubljana as a gift from the Austrian consul in Egypt, Anton Lavrin, way back in 1846. There's no messing around with Slovenes, the venerable IsaHta still earns back every Euro spent for his conservation and restoration in work place in the National Museum of Slovenia. At least he has health insurance. Even as early as 1953, he was driven to get an X-ray in a military hospital. Granted, he was driven there on a tricyle.

In January 2001, he was driven with a museum truck for a tomography to the University Medical Center in Ljubljana.

His health records are available to everyone computer literate at http://www.nms.si/mumija/debata/index.html . Democratic, of course. I'm sure that his retirement insurance is just as great as his health insurance. Oh what we southerners would give to be Slovenian mummies!" Spaking of the south, Macedonians had as many as three mummies. It's not entirely clear whether they're actual Egyptian mummies, from the Nile River Valley, or Egyptian mummies from Kosovo or Macedonia, as they have lost all three of them. They were excavated around 1970 near Kriva Palanka, can you imagine? Two were taken by the night in Skopje and the third one was sent for an examination to Belgrade where the night is also responsible for kidnapping mummies. The story of Macedonian mummies is, let's be honest, a myth and legend created by Internet forums. It does sound nice though. But what do the three supposed-to-be Macedonian mummies have on five mummies from Croatia? It's all women, second class mummies. The most famous one is some mummy called Ruica, with a flattering name meaning a rose. Her real name, however, is Nesi-hensu. She was bought in Egypt by the Vienna based collector Mihael Bari in 1848, and twenty years later she was given by his ancestors to the Yugoslav Academy in Zagreb. Despite her outstanding pedigree from an ownership and legal point of view, Ruica is still more or less your average mummy, a housewife, the wife of a Theban tailor. Well, she would be, if she weren't wrapped in the longest preserved Etruscan manuscript consisting of about 1130 words. Not even Google Translate can tell what is written there, but the artifact's name makes sense: The linen book of Zagreb. She's slightly younger than the Ljubljana priest IsaHta, as she dates back to 390 B.C. which makes her prettier and she loves to be seen naked as well.

Ruica's three female friends Kaipamau, Shepenun and Kaseret can bee seen in their own sarcophaguses, and the fifth one, a gift from the Zagreb bishop Juraj Haulik

(what the hell does a bishop need a mummy for?), was almost proclaimed counterfiet, as she was stuffed into a nineteenth century sarcophagus. Tomography results show she had died of cancer and Croatian forum members can tell you it's only natural that she had to wait to get diagnozed in Zagreb. Anyway, the only controversial mummy is Kaipamau. She was Amon's singer born in Luxor and given to Yugoslavia by the United Arab Republic in 1967, as a thank you gift for the cooperation of Yugoslav companies and experts in trying to solve Egyptian culture heritage in Nubia while an accumulation lake was being built. The lake was created by the Aswan Dam. It was a rather unusual gift given the circumstances. A payment in kind perhaps?

But Kaipamanu isn't controversial because of Egyptian culture and politics matters, she's controversial because of Nesmin. The male Belgrade mummy (what else could he be, when he's a Serb). He's single and that's the problem, as his natural bride Kaipamau went to Zagreb because of the unfair separation of Egyptian cultural heritage amongst former Yugoslav countries, instead of marrying him and happily spending her grave life in Belgrade museum storage (Serbian forum members claim it's clear whose experts saved Abu Simbel. As far as I know it was the French, but I'm not a member of these forums so that doesn't count). Nesmin was brought to Belgrade in 1880, as a souvenir from a trip to Egypt by some Pavle Riiki from Mokrin, and he soon gave it to the Belgrade national museum. It could be seen then and never again. It spent more than one hundred years rotting away in the museum's warehouses and was only exhibited in a sarcophagus for a short period of time and only once, in the Knez Pavle museum before the World War. II Since 1993, it's been part of the archaeology collection of the Belgrade Faculty of arts where it is being examined. He hasn't said a word so far. And the few thousand Euro needed for the glass case where he could be exhibited without being in danger of further damage has also not been provided. There's lots of them now: Nesmin is a three part mummy with a separate head, separate body and separate legs. Looks like someone forgot to write Fragile! on the sarcophagus. The sarcophagus is pretty worn out, a part of the lid is missing and you can see his black fingers through a crack (God, how I screamed when I saw them!). And the roll under his left arm, which scientist say is the entire Egyptian Book of the Dead makes him one of the twenty most treasured mummies in the world.

Let's not forget Montenegro. They only had a mummy for a few years: the before mentioned Nesmin spent the time from 1986 to 1991 as a small token of Yugoslav unity and brotherhood in the Josip Broz Tito non-aligned countries art museum in Titograd and he was just as well off as he had been in Belgrade. He rotted away in the museum's storage area. Or was he worse off? When he came back to Serbia as a demand from the Faculty of arts, the sarcophagus contained not only his three parts, but mud, change, old museum tickets and cigarette fags as well. That's grave life for you. Look forward to it and get to experience it. In the Balkans? Cheers!