Mimoza Paçuku: Can you tell us something about your childhood, what do you remember about it?
Safete Rogova: We, who are of a certain age, remember with joy the beautiful time of our childhood. I was born in Gjakova, a beautiful town in Kosovo, to a large family with many kids. My father and mother made crafts, so we did not struggle to make ends meet, although we were many children who needed to be dressed, fed, educated…, and fortunately our neighborhood too was filled with kids, so I have many memories of a very pleasant childhood.
In my neighborhood there was a school, a mosque, and there was also a teqe.[1] As you know, in Gjakova there are many teqe, and since my school was nearby, in the afternoon if a ceremony was taking place, we children in the community would go together, and since there wasn’t enough income in Gjakova, we witnessed a sort of performance, the singers wore those very interesting long vests, and performed the ceremony in the teqe. This was very appealing to us children and even though we did not know what the theatre was, we thought that was theatre, that a performance was going on. So later, I often remember, in my youth and also through my first stepsin the theatre is that the initial attraction I felt for it, came from the teqe in my neighborhood, which we would often visit and we were happy with all the ceremonies performed there.
However, it was the post-World War II period, and Gjakova had experienced large destruction. Families had just enough to eat, and we didn’t have any particularly nice clothes, there were no nice clothes, no ready-made clothes. My mother, since we were many daughters, often had to take apart her own dimia,[2] because that is what she wore then, and she created dresses for us girls.
We helped her cut them with scissors, to look as pretty as we could. Our house had one floor, with a large garden that had a big apple tree. Sometimes, when we were naughty, because as a child one gets into trouble, we would hide under that leafy apple tree {shows how they hid}, and our mother would never find us, for a long time she never knew where we hid, you know, we have many, many, beautiful memories of that time.
We had two one-story houses under one roof, and we shared the attic with a neighbor {makes a roof top with her hands}. The girls’ meetings, although we were young then, around eight or nine years old, always took place there, in the attic. I recall it was a tough time then. Children didn’t have toys, so we made them ourselves. We got sticks, drew faces on them, and dressed them up. From those sticks we made a sort of doll game. Now that I am a grandmother and have many grandchildren, who have lots of toys, and who often throw them away – they don’t want to play with them, because they have ready-made toys – I wonder, sometimes should we let children create their own toys, and have the fun which is found in making a toy themselves, rather than have a beautiful doll, an expensive one, with which to play and play and ultimately throw it away.
The beauty of that time, of my childhood, is that I created everything myself. We had a cow in the garden, and as we had no footballs then, we cut the hairs of the cow and with a bit of water we created a type of ball (laughs). That was our ball because we didn’t have plastic ones then, or other ones, we created every type of game ourselves, and there was a beauty in it, that it created a fantasy, it stimulated the imagination, because we did what we liked with those toys, and now unfortunately, but also fortunately, children have many ready-made toys. I think that we should let children free to create, to imagine their own lives.
Then school started, it was a beautiful school nearby. I stood out next to my sisters, who each had their particular talent, it looked like mine was acting. In the first and second year of school I had immediately begun to recite well, and they had noticed I had some talent and I would become an actor. We didn’t have costumes for school’s performances, so our teacher made them from paper. We helped, we also wove paper into tiaras. I have many photographs from the time we created our own tiaras from paper {creates tiaras with her hands}, our dresses from paper. We had school performances of either singing, or plays, and in this way the school developed children’s imagination.
Up until fourth grade, there were many students in the school and I had lots of friends in my class who are all the same age and when I visit Gjakova, I still seek out the company of my friends of 60 years ago. I finished fourth grade. Because we were many children, we had to move to Pristina. My dad wished for his children to be educated in Pristina, because Pristina was a big center with asecondary school, a Gymnasium[3] and a Shkolla Normale,[4] because at the time there was no university in Pristina. When I got to Pristina, I felt upset for leaving my beloved neighborhood, my friends, my teachers, whom I always remember with longing even though they are no longer living. However, we adapted quickly. The area where we lived was near the Gymnasium Sami Frashëri. As I said, my family adapted quickly, we children fortunately lived near the school, my mother and father continued their work. They made quilts, and worked very hard so that we would be educated and stay on the right path.
I have fond memories of Gjakova. In the winter it gets very cold and a lot of snow falls, and during those great snowfalls the roads would sometimes close, because there was no way of clearing them. When we wished to visit our paternal aunties, my father, bless him, would have one child on here, another on there, and me too {puts palms on her shoulders}. I don’t know how he held us because there was a lot of snow, so much that you couldn’t see people. To keep us happy he would walk through all that snow, but here in Pristina the climate was different, it was more gentle and I did not experience the harsh weather of Gjakova, the snow of my childhood.
We settled into a big house that luckily also had a big garden. The children had now grown up and were ten, twelve and fourteen years old and the time had come to start helping my mother sew the quilts. As a child and even now I can sew lovely quilts, but now there is no need for that because they are done with machines. As a family, we were professional quilt makers. We sisters, six of us, and three brothers, have always made beautiful quilts, so in addition to our academic schooling, we learned a craft, a skill, and that helped us materially very much. We worked and we sold what we made so that we could go to school, dress ourselves.
Luckily, I had a very good group of friends. However, we were only the children of a craftsman, and in my class there were the daughters of public officials, whose names I won’t mention now. When I went there, those girls were dressed so nicely, in their petticoats, and I went home nearly crying.
And my mother sees me sad and says “Huh?” I tell her, “I have the daughter of so and so and the daughter of this and that [in my class], and they are dressed beautifully, they go to different cities in the former Yugoslavia to find clothes,” and my mother says, “Don’t you worry, I am going to sew you dresses,” and my poor mother ruins another pair of dimia, makes another dress, makes another headband. She tried to fulfill all our wishes and to not make us feel like we had nothing to wear, but I could never be equal to the children of the wealthy, who had plenty. Even so, we didn’t feel out of place, even when our finances were tight, our parents tried very hard for us children.
It is then that I also found my passion to sing and play. I sang beautifully, and I danced ballet, although then there was no ballet school. We created parts, made up songs that we knew by heart, and we girls did ballet since primary school. It was indeed a beautiful and pleasant time. For example, we had school competitions in ballet, or singing, or playing. Fortunately, at that time there was a school called Vuk Karadžic, later named Elena Gjika, which won every competition. We noticed that from that school many actors, singers, and famous doctors emerged – even now there are two or three doctors living in America – and well-known engineers, I mean, it was as though that school produced talents, it produced children who later achieved very much.
The neighborhood girls gathered in our garden along with us children and girls and there we created scenes and sets. As my father was a quilt maker, his material came from around former Yugoslavia in big crates where my father put the cotton and materials he worked with. When they were empty – and it is at this point I realized that I would one day become an actor – I would create a set in the garden using two or three crates {shows the size of the crates with her hands}. In the garden we had plants and wood and with some bed linens we created curtains, and we played a game of “theatre,” aware that I was creating something, also that I had talent for the theatre, and that one day I would become an actress. These are the first steps that relate to my fate as an actor.
My mother gave birth to another two children. There were six of us in Gjakova, and with these two, nine. My mother was pregnant, but we didn’t know because she wore dimia. We didn’t understand that she was pregnant until later on, until she was due. We treated her normally, in her dimia, freely, until the moment she said, “Mom is almost due,” “What birth, where is the belly!?” We could not see it. Then my little sister Igballe – Igo -, was born. “Igball” means good luck and my mother brought us “good luck.”
It’s interesting, usually in Albanian families they always shoot a gun when a boy is born, but in our family no gun was used, although for us all it was still a day filled with joy when my sister was born, and later we sisters fought for the rights of women, precisely because our family educated us in such a way, because my father did not distinguish between girls or boys, and when my little sister was born, the fact they named her “Good luck” (smiles) expressed their happiness, and we also were happy. We had many sisters so we didn’t need many girl friends, we had as many sisters as we wanted, and we could help each other in doing school work or housework. In those days we did not have the same means as now, our living room was very big, very clean, but it had no sofa, we would sit, ordered like this, in fact I think, just like these {points to the interviewers} girls sit here now (smiles).
We did not have a sofa [laughs], so we sisters sat like this, or when we ate we had a big sofra,[5] we always sat like this. Although it may have been a bit primitive – thank God the day has come that we all have furniture in our houses – however, sometimes that primitiveness can be very beautiful, can bring you closer. You know, when we were together, when we ate together, we actually saw each others faces – we were happy. Sometimes I compare that time to this one. My daughters have both succeeded and have made names for themselves as artists (sighs), yet I see them stressed, tired. In my time we were not so stressed, I don’t know, maybe because we were less informed, with no television, newspapers or politics. We didn’t know who the President was, who were the members of Parliament, who was involved in corruption [giggles], you know, the entire beauty of life, of family, was around that sofra, and we enjoyed one another, each other’s achievements if we did well in school, and when we saw that our father had a lot of work, we helped him, and we earned more for our living. In a way, we didn’t tire our heads with other things, we preoccupied ourselves with growing up, getting educated, learning, and so I think, our food rituals, our way of eating on a sofra, had its own beauty, so often we told stories there, shared events, laughed with one another, this has its own beauty.
In secondary school, we had the same luck in Pristina as in Gjakova, in that the school was very close. We had our primary school, and behind that, the Gymnasium. I went there with my sister, and my brothers went to different schools. I remember, now, we were very interested in the achievements of the children in different lessons or subjects, and how they went!? I remember that when the school year ended my mother would ask “Did you pass, or didn’t you?” she didn’t know much else about what we were learning, if we had coursework, or other obligations, no, no, just “Did you pass?” and I would tell her “Yes, I passed at the top of my class”, and she would say “Well done, good for you.”
Nowadays, there is a lot of stress, then, we were not so burdened. I think that this specifically helped us live healthier lives, being less bothered by politics. I, for example – maybe it is not customary to mention it – had many friends, some Catholic, some Muslim, because for us it did not matter what religion one had, like now for instance, this religion or that religion, it is a problem. I don’t know, then we were not concerned with religion, nationalities, we played as children as that is what we were, not burdened with these problems that they have now. I empathise with today’s youth and children who are concerned with problems of religion, nationality, and it bothers me. They need to have some independence, a freedom of their own.
Maybe when in those early years I began to mature, to grow, and I began to be a bit more self- aware, I adjusted to the Gymnasium, and we were luckily a great generation of girls and also boys in the context of an excellent school. But always, when I talk about this, I relate it slightly to my profession, because there were many subjects that I loved, math, art, physics, philosophy, yet, even in the Gymnasium…. my wish was to recite and dance. At the time we began to perform small plays.
So the years are 1960-1961-1962, a new theatre for children had opened, and even though there was the National Theatre, we didn’t follow it. We did go later on, but it was not until I had graduated from high school that I saw my first show there (sighs) because at the time we had begun to put on shows at school, and it was there that I began to find myself, because truthfully, I saw my wishes, my dreams and my future there. Often girls dream. We have beautiful dreams, maybe more so than boys, when we are teenagers we dream of maybe becoming ballerinas, singers, actresses, you know, we like to swim in our dreams a little.
Mimoza Paçuku: Can you tell us of a specific event which defines your childhood?
Safete Rogova: As I said, I have many fond memories, there are many instances, many nice reminiscences, and I remember this one as well. We didn’t have a washing machine, but there was a river close to where we lived, the river Erenik.[6] My mother would collect a large basket of clothes and us behind her, just like in the movies, went to wash the clothes on a big washboard in the river Erenik. We, the sisters, were young, and my mother did the washing, she scrubbed them with soap, and we didn’t know at the time that the river had lots of water. Interestingly, the rivers have dried up because of global warming, but at the time that river was very deep. There was an instance, when we sisters were washing together with our mother, that our three year old little brother, in a split second, fell and the water took him, we were terrified, none of us knew how to swim, not my mother, nor we sisters who were just a bit older, and I remember a village-boy jumped into the water from a hill {moves her hands}, he jumped from a great height, and luckily saved my little brother from death. That day, there was a great celebration in my family, a huge joy, the boy was reborn. Now he is in America with his family, and other times when my mother wanted to go and wash clothes we said “No, we won’t go to that place, we will move our washing spot,” (giggles) because we were terrified by what had happened to us.
I remember another time, we used to bake bread at home, but in a wood oven because we didn’t have electric ones then, and if we wanted to make other meals my mother would have to put them in clay pots to cook in the wood-oven. Once, when I had gone to retrieve the clay pot from the oven, it fell on me and I was burnt badly. You know, all of us children had some tough experiences (giggles) which we all survived thank God, because even I could have burnt myself and be left scarred but I survived as well. Every child had a similar memory when we were younger in Gjakova.
In the years 1955 and 1956, my maternal uncle and his family relocated to Pristina. We only had one uncle, one grandpa and one grandma, because my paternal grandparents had died very early on and my father never met them, and we never met our grandfather and grandmother either, so the single joy we had was visiting our uncle in Gjakova, to see my grandma, my grandpa, and we suffered from their absence, so we begged my father to go to Pristina, because we couldn’t live without our grandma and grandpa. Maybe that too influenced my father’s decision to move to Pristina. Maybe it was our luck, to be educated, although the journey to Pristina was also very interesting, because in those days there was no bus, nor car, and one would have to go to Peja in the morning, wait for the train for three or four hours at the station, get on the train, and be on it all day “rranga, rranga”/”Choo choo”/ {imitates train} until we arrived in Pristina. So, we left Gjakova in the morning and arrived in Pristina by dinner time. That journey was a very special one, later I travelled to Germany, France, Turkey, America, and no trip was as interesting as that journey on the train (giggles). It stopped in villages, picked up passengers, continued, stopped, let them out. A person could easily walk as fast as the train it was that slow, I don’t know why. Maybe because the engine was not powerful enough, I don’t know why. But, it went very slowly. Our biggest delight was that our uncle had come to wait for us at the train station in Pristina with a horse and carriage. We had no taxi then, and that carriage took us from here – the train station, home {shows distance with her hands} in about two hours. You know, transport was very slow then, but it developed quickly, roads were built, and they paved the road from Gjakova-Peja, Gjakova-Pristina. All things considered, the beauty of that journey stayed in my youth (smiles).
I said that moving to Pristina was a huge joy for us, not just because we were close to our grandparents and uncle, but also because fortunately we were accepted into good school, us sisters, and brothers, and we graduated from these schools. All nine of us finished school, and then we dispersed everywhere, the girls married in different cities, and the family began to shrink, there were only a few of us left….I always like to remember those moments in my career, and why I stood out among the others? Why the others, if they studied literature, or philosophy, my older brother who became a craftsman, each with their different profiles, but why me? My talent and desire were to pursue acting, sometimes I ask myself “Why acting? What made me love it so much?”
As I mentioned, even in school I was praised in every subject for the way I recited, I would prepare a good monologue, even at home I would always make theatrical plays, I created them when we ate, when we laughed, and when we hung out. Luckily all us sisters knew how to sing well, and my older brother played the violin. My house had its own little orchestra, two of my sisters did not play the guitar, but the tambourine, and our tambourine could be heard throughout the whole neighborhood (smiles).
I guess perhaps I am a kind of initiator, an organizer, because I created something, I made up small plays at home, in school. Time after time I think why did I go to school? And time after time I think, why did I pick acting, why didn’t I study medicine, for example? I liked medicine and the other subjects in the Gymnasium, they were the good days, the days of youth. In these days there were no cafes or bars in Pristina, the only recreational activity was found in the Korzo, a long and wide road that still exists today, where we strolled. We, young women in the Gymnasium, dressed up to go to the Korzo and look at a boy, someone we liked, we had sympathy for. However, we were under strict discipline in the family, my friends and I, and my dad would say go out until 18:30, or 19:00, or 20:00, and then we had to return, because the door would be locked. Sometimes it happened that we would stay out until 5 minutes to 20:00, so we would take our shoes off and run to get home as quickly as we could, because at 8pm, the door would close. The rules were very strict, and I sometimes asked, why…? Maybe it shouldn’t have been that way, maybe it was because there were such large families with many children, that sort of discipline was needed. In a family with seven, eight, nine children, each of them free to go out, you know, if you were to go out late at night, your parents could not keep track of you, control their own children. The discipline was necessary to keep the order and to keep children under the control of their parents.
In fourth grade, Kris Berisha, an actor and a director, came to the school and said “I need a girl to play the role of Nita,” and all eyes turned to me. They said, “This is Nita.” However, to tell the truth, my parents didn’t want me to act in a play, I was grown up, I was a young woman, but my parents always insisted “We need a doctor in the house, you are smart, you should study medicine so that we have a doctor in the house.” I promised that I would study medicine and that I would return as a doctor. When I graduated I played “Nita” and it was a fabulous play. I was scared to call my parents and tell them that I had acted in this play, I had promised I would study medicine.
And at that time there was no university in Pristina, we had to go to Belgrade to study medicine, and I went without fail to Belgrade with one of my friends to apply for medical school. On the way there, I said to my friend “I’m coming, but my mind isn’t with medicine, I’m going back, I’m only coming to make my parents happy.” In that same year, 1966-67, the first drama school opened in Pristina, it wasn’t an academy but an advanced school for acting, I prepared to go there, and returned to pass the admission exam. My girlfriend, who is now a successful doctor in America, Zana Dobroshi, said to me “I would love to be with you during our studies, but if you wish to go back, stay a night here and then return to Pristina.” We were tired. But still, we got to Belgrade by train, with my friend Zana, we both loved music. There was an opera house there and she had connections that could get us tickets. She said, “We can reserve our tickets and go,” I said “We’re not dressed to go,” and she replied, “Come on, we are going, we are about to start our studies so were going,” and the minute we sat down, we fell asleep (smiles) because we were tired from the journey. We had left our bags somewhere and it was only until the final big applause that we woke up, “What’s going on?” (laughs), I mean, it was one of those youthful adventures that one experience but that can also trick you.
I returned to Pristina and my parents asked me, “How did your admission exam go?,” I told them “it was very hard,” and in fact it was very hard, it was in the Serbo-Croat language that we had learnt in school, but further studying was required. I told them “I had not prepared enough,” they said,
“Well, what do you want to study?” And I couldn’t tell them in the beginning, I just couldn’t for a long time. I applied [to acting school], went to auditions, and I was accepted, the year was 1966 and only two or three girls applied for acting school. At that time girls were not allowed to go to the theatre, and I had been accepted but I was afraid to tell my parents that I neither wanted to study medicine nor biology, but that I wanted to be an actress.
After a while, I mean after I was accepted, and luckily they had secured scholarships for us because we were such few students, there were ten of us, and I took the forms to fill out, I carefully told my mother, I am going to acting school, and bless her, it’s not that she didn’t want me to go, but she was scared of my father. He made many of the decisions in my house, about our professions, our clothes, our education, our schooling, and it was hard for my mother to communicate with him that, “Our daughter,” I was the third, “Wants to be an actress.” Maybe it was hard because of the prejudices of the time, the years were 1966, 1967, and there were negative judgments about the theatre then, about actors, they were considered second hand, especially the women. So naturally they did not want me to have that experience but it was up to my mother’s skills in this case to persuade my father, “Because we can’t ignore her wishes to go to the theatre and become an actress.”
For a while, I felt perhaps a coldness in the relationship with my father, I didn’t know how to act, maybe I should have been closer to him, should have talked to him more, maybe because he was a craftsman and he didn’t know nor understand what this profession meant, that profession, and it created a distance for some months, you know, I finished the advanced school but in order to fulfill my parents wishes I attended and completed a degree in Philology, Language and Literature, to show that I could finish another university as well. Luckily I finished them both, and even though there were such few girls in the theatre, I was accepted straight away.
[1] Teqe in Albanian, tekke in Turkish, is a lodge of a Sufi order, in this case the Bektashi. It is inhabited by a Cheikh or Baba and by dervishes.
[2] Billowing white satin pantaloons that narrow at the ankles, Turkish style. They are made with about 12 meters of fabric.
[3]A European type of secondary school with emphasis on academic learning, different from vocational schools because it prepares students for university.
[4]The Shkolla Normale opened in Gjakova in 1948 to train the teachers needed for the newly opened
schools. With the exception of a brief interlude during the Italian Fascist occupation of Kosovo during WWII, these were the first schools in Albanian language that Kosovo ever had. In 1953, the Shkolla Normale moved to Pristina.
[5] Low round table for people to gather at communal dinners, sitting on the floor.
[6] A tributary of the White Drin, it runs by Gjakova.