Dealer's Diary» Fresh Finds and the Last Peasant Market
Travelling over the bad lands, the flat-lands where the exhaust on the main route and the smoke belching from industrial facilities by mid afternoon forms a choking smog, on the one side the old Soviet heavy industry and aged apartment blocks for workers, on the other side new build installations and warehouses mostly high tech industry, electrical import and Chinese. You are travelling through a place not far from the border that seems to be called Orriyidea (or "Orrid 'ere") but heading on a Tolkein map, to the far and distant hills, a faery land between the woods and the water, to find Europe's last great peasant market, a chance to see it before it too becomes a vestige of itself and a mere tourist facsimile.
Don't get me wrong we are not on a buying trip, to buy more Folk Art from Europe, my buying is all but done, bought piecemeal over the last few weeks and months and sourced from 5 different countries, we start to load tomorrow, with one free day it's decided to have a rare day out, to find the annual market, the one in the meadow by the river, where the gypsies come down from the hills and mountains with their wares to barter and feast. I borrow Lajos and a van for the day (just in case) and start out in the early hours.
After fighting through the rush hour traffic in the big town, it's 7am, the bus stops are full of high schoolers and workers, grandparents tending neatly muffled infants to nursery then finally the buildings thin out and you are charging along a highway with cargo trucks through desolate countryside passing through one street villages. This is gyspy country, they say gypsy not Roma, and it is a poor place. Even at this time the village idiot is out slugging from the first bottle of the day (or was it the last one of the night), to the more empathetically inclined these figures regularly encountered offer Wordsworthian epiphanies, they are superannuated agricultural workers whose identity and purpose is becoming so feint, that, dream like in the gloom their frozen gestures merge into a backcloth of mute objects and broken down rusticity.
There are different kinds of markets of course. Antique markets are mostly a Western European phenomenon, and if they are found elsewhere it stands to reason they should be found in the towns and cities where the middle class clients for antiques and old things resides. The sort of market you find in the middle of nowhere, in a field, or village, is the older kind of country market or fair, they are seasonal, periodic, and villagers and peasants come from miles to a traditional meeting point to exchange trades and socialise - the wooden spoon makers come, the tin tub ladies, the sellers of old leather boots and second hand furs...and the fat man with the cauldron of yellow gruel is there stirring it up, also the grilled meat vendors offering bottled ale and cherry brandy attended by flute players, or a fiddler and a group of men in woven straw hats forming a loose circle and singing songs.
One time hunting carpets and pottery in Morocco, we had given the pushy tourist guide the slip, found some Berber children who took us to the locals' "taxi" rank by the town gate, we exchanged some notes and the car was pushed to the fuel pump to fill up. For around £5 we booked our drivers for the day for a trip to the bi-monthly "souk" in the Atlas Mountains. My companion at the time, being white blonde (pure Dane with a bit of maintenance from Vidal Sasoon in Knightsbridge) was advised to wear a head scarf to create less of a stir and as we were going to a market where westerners were uncommon. This was a proper locals' market, the car park was one car (ours) and a lot of donkeys and hidden behind a mound was a medieval looking communal cess-pit, there were new tagines for sale, tea pots, tight woolly caps for the cold mornings in the mountains - along one flank was a row of barbers stalls where the children queued for their bi-monthly zero cut. Often one to grasp at a novel experience for the purposes of future story telling I decided to sit down myself in one of the barber's creaky wooden chairs and soon a wide-eyed crowd gathered around to watch this rare phenomenon. As I recall the man had a small round and cracked mirror tied to a stick, an oily black plastic comb and the most rusty dented and decorative pair of scissors, clearly dating to the colonial period and the only antique we saw that day. It was definitively the worst hair cut I ever had which we enjoyed trying to rectify later in the hotel with a pair of nail scissors.
" Sausages..."......Lajos wakes me from my semi-slumbers to tell me we are nearly there and as a one time resident and after a fair drive he is looking forward to introducing me to his favourite local delicacy. Where the real world meets the imaginary land of Monrovia the transition is quite sudden, geologically that is, but even it seems metaphorically, the bare plain of iron hard fact meeting the high forested hills and mountain meadows where gypsies in coloured head scarfs and aprons stand in doorways with baskets of bread and flowers, well, almost. As the road suddenly abuts the mountain it starts to corkscrew, you climb slowly in near vertical ascent in tandem with slow moving trucks, you can almost hear the rachets of a chain winding up as if you are mounting the slope of a fairground ride.
On the road to the far eastern reaches of the old European empires I have taken this route several times, the first time I went I was taken, I was being introduced, it was a privilege and an initiation, where are we now I kept asking? "Budapest" came the answer, everytime "Budapest", but we would stop soon and eat something I was told, when we got to the beginning of the mountains, which we did, and yes, it was sausages served up at nighttime from a roadside barbeque and they looked ok to me until i started eating - it was like some form of grisly porridge in a barely penetrable rubber sheath. My good friend and persecutor could not stop laughing as I chewed and chewed and eventually gave up, "Lofas...Lofas.." he kept saying and laughing and he soon told me ( I never quite established how accurate this was) "Horses' balls"!
So on this occasion I was poised to decline Lajos's offer of sausages for breakfast in case it was the same variety but we nevertheless made the customary stop at the gateway to savour the transition from reality to fantasy and take in the view, hill after hill receding into the distance, unadulterated nature or so it seemed, a Lake District from the age of De Quincey but amplified, a mini Tyrol and here were the ever present Monrovian semi-stray hounds to welcome us. Perhaps they recognised me from my first time and hoped to finish off my left-overs.
In this work we can see as no doubt presently a cross section of the country society, the landowners, the brothers, stand by a cart, tall with droopy moustaches and proprietorial gaze, rough and ready peasant women in headscarves shout for custom, there are the horse traders, the wise woman with a goose and a stork's nest on the cottage, all the fresh fare set out on huge long trestle tables, in the corner is the tavern, the dancers, the singers, the drunks. Fact and fiction intermingle.
In the corner of the canvas appears the artist himself loafing modestly by the tavern Sinatra style in a white trilby and summery shirt. The girl with the plaited hair on the cart maybe for sale or at least offered as a bride to suitors and until recent times in parts of Eastern Europe there were bridal fairs.
For our present times the Great Peasant Market may capture a cross section of local society indeed,- the various gypsy tribes, few any longer makers of things but mostly vendors of mass produced articles. Things are much changed and it's all not so unlike any vast market anywhere, in Milton Keynes or Warwickshire. Above all one finds an endless offering of second clothing and footwear, all lovingly polished and presented in row after row and on the same long trestle tables or on the grass. It's poignant and not exactly magical but strikes a thoughtful tone, with social and economic insights, and connotations for the imaginative into Europe's present plights and past murders, like an installation of conceptual art by a student of Wei Wei or Warhol.
At what point does an object acquire significance, aesthetic appeal, a mystery such that it becomes a desirable object, a work of art? The grand market it seems is the stage set for the melancholy performance of old clothes, or if not this then it is a pageant of the multiple, the anonymous and repeated item, whose utilitarean existence and blank message is the antithesis of the special antique, decorative object or art work.
But as we do know with time, utilitarean objects separate themselves from their use context, their look goes awry but deepens in character, the form becomes a thing in itself, non-use based, rich in association of the past or perhaps newly anonymous, something abstract and purposeless like a sculpture not a tool for use, like Duchamp's urinal...
With these holiday thoughts and philosophical speculations we jump back in the van and leave the grandchildren of the tin-smiths, the cauldron makers, the "lautari", to their haggling and brandy as thoughts turn to new finds gathered at the depot, reflections that the magic of the past is a capsule of energies dormant in the resonant object awaiting ignition through acts of contemplation and imagination.
A single old hand made pair of shoes, oft repaired and neatly placed nightly by a simple bed, a dug out bread bowl or creamer, once sold at a giant country fair then lovingly used, wiped dry and hung in a barn, never left in the sun or frost to crack.
