COQUETTE WINDOW

I used to visit the former Yugoslavia frequently before the country was plunged into a series of civil wars in about 1991. The purposes of my visits was to visit my Yugoslav friends as well as to explore their beautiful country.

In October 1989, I stayed in Belgrade where most of my friends lived. As was often the case, I made an excursion from the city with my good friend, the late Rasa Raicevic. One of the places that we explored was the town of Sremski Karlovci, which is not far from the city of Novi Sad. Both places are in the region of Serbia known as the Vojvodina. This region had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before its demise at the end of the First World War.

While we were walking through the attractive streets of Sremski Karlovci, Rasa pointed out some special ground-floor windows. They differed from the majority of the windows in the buildings that lined the streets in that instead of being flush with the walls in which they were embedded, they projected over the pavement.

My friend told me that these windows were known as coquette Fenster. Their purpose was to allow the young ladies of the house to survey the street without having to open the window and lean out. No doubt, they also allowed young men in the street to view the young ladies positioned in the coquette Fenster.

Currently, I am writing a book about my experiences in Yugoslavia, while it still existed. I wanted to check whether I had remembered the naming of these windows correctly. I looked up 'coquette Fenster' on the Internet. However, despite using a number of variants on the spelling of 'coquette', I found nothing relevant to my quest.

Originally, I believed that I had seen these windows in Varazdin (Croatia), but then recently I discovered my photographs of these windows. They were labelled 'Sremski Karlovci' rather than 'Varazdin'. Having discovered this, I resumed my research, but looked-up information about windows in Sremski Karlovci, and discovered that people had posted information about these special windows, but had described them as 'Kibitz' windows.

Leo Rosten in his invaluable encyclopaedia, The Joys of Yiddish, explains that the word kibitzer, that is someone who kibitzes, is derived from Kiebitz the German word for the lapwing or peewit, an especially noisy and inquisitive bird. Further, he defines a kibitzer as someone who gives unasked for advice, and also someone who flatters. Additionally, he writes that a kibitzer can be used to describe someone who 'joshes or teases'. So, I wonder which of these definitions is particularly pertinent to the naming of these windows.

A coquette Fenster on the left with its 'normal' neighbour

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Once upon a Time in Yugoslavia"

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TUBES

 

Gjirokastër,  Albania in May 1984

"That evening after dinner, a number of us sat with Aferdita and Eduart in the hotel’s night club. Each of the hotels in which we stayed had one of these. With the exception of our two guides and the musicians who performed in them, these clubs were out-of-bounds for Albanians. This evening we were entertained by a small band that played western pop music, mainly tunes originally performed by the Beatles. The noisy background of these clubs provided our two young guides with opportunities to ask us about life beyond their country’s tightly sealed borders. However, it was clear that Aferdita was trying to eavesdrop on Eduart and vice-versa. As the musicians strummed away in the semi-gloom of the club in Gjirokastër, Aferdita turned to me, rolled her lower lip away from her teeth, and asked my opinion of her gums. She wanted to know if they had been treated properly. I told her that I was unable to give her an opinion in such poor light.

The following morning, I spotted some tubes of Albanian toothpaste on display in a locked glass display case near the hotel’s main entrance. I tried to communicate to the receptionist (who did not understand English) that I wished to purchase a tube. I used to collect toothpastes from wherever I travelled, and was curious to taste its contents. Whilst I was doing this, Aferdita appeared, and asked me what I wanted. I told her. She explained my desire to the receptionist, and moments later I had become the proud owner of a tube of Albanian dentifrice."

This is a brief excerpt from my book "ALBANIA ON MY MIND" (Click HERE for more detail), published in 2012. Until two days ago, I had believed that I had lost or thrown away the Albanian toothpaste  bought in Gjirokastër,to which I referred in the excerpt.  Well, I found it amongst some goods that we had kept in storage for almost 20 years. The illustration below shows 2 of the tubes in greater detail:

These were not the only dental souvenirs that I discovered in our family storage locker. Here is an extract from the draft of my forthcoming book "SRABBLE WITH SLIVOVITZ - Once Upon a Time in Yugoslavia" about Yugoslavia before 1991:

"Between Niš and the dull, nearby Niška Banja, we encountered a large number of Russian and Bulgarian cars parked by the side of the main road. Each car had a stall - usually a folding table - set up beside it. Their owners were selling a wide variety of odds and ends. I bought tubes of toothpaste manufactured in the USSR and the People’s Republic of China. For a long time these, and the dentifrice that I had bought in the Albanian town of Gjirokastër a few years earlier, shared pride of place in my large collection of toothpastes from all around the world. Sadly, this collection no longer exists, and I have also lost the Russian toothbrush, which I bought there."

This section is now going to need re-writing, as I have found the missing toothpastes...

Sadly, the Russian  toothbrush remains missing!

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