Jajce // Svemirko and Nikola Šop
Nikola Šop on the 100km note // © Prachaya Roekdeethaweesab // Shutterstock
I steadied myself while peeing out of respect for the excellent people that run the place. Still, trips to the toilet had become increasingly common, and the beers didn’t seem to be lasting too long at all. Was I drunk? Oh no, I was drunk. There comes a time in every boozy evening where one is, for want of a better word, cooked. I was cooked. I glanced at my watch. The time was 7:17pm.
A couple of hours earlier, I had entered the doors of Svemirko Pub, a place recommended by the hotel receptionist, who promised good beer and a good atmosphere. Truth be told, I don’t need either of those, I just need somewhere to sit and read my book and drink a quiet beer. My traditional nightlife days are long gone (and good riddance to that), give me reading or quiet conversation or give me nothing. Still, this Svemirko place sounded okay, so I traipsed through the tunnel in its vague direction, keeping an eye out for the glowing neon of the UniCredit Bank. Once I found that, all I needed to do was look across the road and there it would be. Easy.
117 years, three months and 21 days before I stumbled out of Jajce’s Svemirko Pub, Nikola Šop came kicking and screaming into the world in that same building. Work had been done in the interim, of course, but don’t derail the story for specifics. Šop was a poet, a cut and dry description and one that is by no means uncommon in this part of the world. Poetry is fluid, after all, but what was it about Nikola Šop that carried him above those that came before him? What was it about Nikola Šop that made him a generational poet in this part of the world, a man beloved by Auden, a calming presence and the friendly face that stares back at me when I have the misfortune to come across a 100KM note?
“I remember watching that game. I saw the first half, figured everything was done, turned it off and did something else. An hour later, I returned to the living room to see what was happening, to be greeted by a penalty shootout and probably the greatest comeback in modern football. And yeah, names like Milan Baroš live on forever because of it.” You see, I don’t speak Bosnian, but I speak more than enough to understand when people are talking about Istanbul ’05. I’m not even a Liverpool fan. If you hear the words ‘Vladimir’ and ‘Šmicer’, there is a good chance that they are being used as part of a conversation about the most famous Champions League final in history. I was beckoned over to the table to join the three chaps, one of whom turned out to be the owner. Hey, Jimmy, how you doin’?
I was already two Gorštak Pale Ales deep at this point, one of which had been plonked on my table by the barman with those cheerful words, ‘on the house’. I moved across to my new social environment, and the conversations began. All three chaps said they were from Jajce, but an out of character confidence bubbled in me as I asked if they were actually from Jajce, born out of a vague recollection of someone telling me once that there isn't a maternity hospital in the town. Sure enough, alternative towns of birth were revealed. Split. Zenica. Bugojno.
Nikola Šop didn’t have the relative comforts of midwives and bright lights when he made his grand entrance into the world. He had the floor of a building on what is now Maršala Tita for comfort. Šop started writing poetry at a young age, publishing poems in the 1920s that focused on ordinary life and the religious world, although there was something different about him from the start. For one, his Jesus wasn’t a wizard descended from the heavens to point us in the right direction. Šop’s Jesus was an ordinary fella, an uncle who has stopped by for a coffee, a friend willing to chat, a bloke with whom one could ponder poverty and nature in equal measure. His Christianity was all humility over dogma.
Live music at Svemirko Pub, Jajce // © Svemirko // Facebook
This might not sound particularly shocking in the modern age, but 21st century Europe is not 1920s Bosnia, it isn’t 1920s anywhere. Jesus? An ordinary bloke? Madness! The divine is eternally divine, he isn’t going to hang out with you pondering the confidence of the rooster! For shame! Nikola Šop was different, heretical in his faith, not a million miles away from the Bogomils of centuries past. Šop’s faith was personal and social, it had roots in normality, as opposed to roots in the beyond. Nikola Šop’s faith was on the ground, not in the sky.
Gorštak Pale Ale, Gorštak Helles, Gorštak Brown Ale. Hey, have you tried the Gorštak Mint Ale? I hadn’t, although it didn’t take long for those circumstances to change. Conversation is an incredible thing, especially when enjoyed with link-minded people who will happily talk about jazz as the only truly punk genre of music, before reverting to jokes about Bugojno. No offence to you, Bugojno, but still. As conversation flows, so do drinks, and whether or not I enjoyed the mint ale was immaterial. I enjoyed it, although that enjoyment had nothing to do with the taste of it.
Šop’s early poetry was centred on the material world, but his work soon underwent a transformation that guaranteed his place in the history books and his face on the currency. The boy from Jajce went off to Belgrade to study comparative literature but was seriously wounded as the bombs fell in 1941, forcing a move to Zagreb where he found work translating Latin literature. The war ended, and he stayed, translating Renaissance poets into the local language for local enjoyment, but his own work had been transformed from looking inward to looking way, way out. The time had come for Nikola Šop’s faith to head to the skies.
My head was somewhere in the skies, a swirling mess of alcohol, nicotine, conversation and excitement. A joyful mess, sparkling with discussions about Jajce, about music, about sport, about villages called Prisoje. Jimmy had studied in Vienna and returned to Jajce in the middle of the pandemic to open this pub in the house that Nikola Šop was born in, a pub that paid homage to Šop’s magic and the universe that inspired him so brightly. ‘Svemir’ is the word for ‘universe’, by the way.
One of the best pubs in Bosnia and Herzegovina // © Svemirko // Facebook
In a gorgeously ironic turn of events, I kept forgetting the word for ‘brain’. That word is ‘mozak’.
In the second half of his life, Nikola Šop's unique brain allowed him to blossom as a poet. His work became focused on the cosmos, the ubiquity of space, the magical loneliness of eternity. It had nothing to do with the space race and everything to do with the most overlooked aspect of the impossibility of the universe, Ashley Morton’s ‘unlikeliest of events’. We are not important, but that in itself makes us very important indeed. We are a tiny speck of a speck of a speck, smaller than the grain of sand analogy that gets bandied about. To be blunt, we simply do not matter in the grand scheme of things, and there is no more liberating fact. There is no greater freedom than that afforded to us by infinity. There is no finish line. Stop running towards it.
I don’t know how many beers I had drunk with Jimmy and co, but I had reached the finish line. It was 7.17pm, after all. I thanked the hirsute man profusely for the evening and stumbled back out into the early evening, shuffling through the tunnel and making it back to the hotel without any drama.
Nikola Šop’s life came to an end in 1982, the injuries he suffered during World War II eventually catching up to him. He left behind a unique legacy of poetry that embraced infinity and the tangible in equal measure, a catalogue of words that humanised Jesus and the entire universe, reminding us of our humanity and the positive ways in which loneliness can be perceived. He also left us a fantastic pub in Jajce.
The bus to Banja Luka the next day was a struggle, but I’d do it all again for excitable conversation and the magical loneliness of the eternal.
