The first thing I ever excavated was destroyed by my own mother.
I was eight or nine. My best friend Edin and I had just watched Indiana Jones, and I did what I always did when something impressed me that much: I tried to become it. Behind our house in Gunja, in Croatia near the border with Bosnia, we were building an extension onto the old house my grandfather had brought over from Bosnia in pieces, on a wooden wagon. There was a big garden that fed us through the year, and a freshly dug well. That is where we started digging, with the maša, the small iron tool you use to turn bread in a village oven. The real digging tools were too big for us, so we got the one sized for children’s hands.
We found a fork. It had four tines, rusted through, and a grip that seemed formed in wax and covered with a dark tin metal, almost black. It looked baroque to me. I had found bits of pottery before, but pottery is mute when you’re a child: it could be from last generation or from any time at all. The fork was different, though; it belonged neither to my time nor to my status. Nobody was supposed to have ever lived on that land; as far as anyone knew it had always been fields. I stood there holding a rusted fork and feeling, for the first time, that the ground under our everyday life had other lives in it.
My mother put it in acid. She wanted to help us clean the dirt off, and she is an intelligent woman, but this was a village in the eighties and acid was how you cleaned metal. Almost nothing of the fork survived. So inside a single week my first excavation taught me the shock of finding and how easily a found thing is lost again.
Years later, when the first satellite images became available on Google Earth, I searched the fields around that house. A few hundred meters away I found the traces of an old Franciscan monastery, so someone had lived on that land after all.
The stories
I grew up among cultures and religions without thinking of it as anything special. Home was the Serbian household of my mother’s parents. My best friend Edin was a Muslim from Bosnia; my other best friend, Damir, a Croat from Zagreb who came to Gunja every year to visit his grandparents. In 1992 we fled twice, first from Gunja across the river to Brčko, to escape the war in Croatia, and then on from Bosnia to Germany, because the war had come there too. Those cultures went to war with each other, and I still cannot hold that against any of them. Every one of them enriched my life and made it more valuable, and that feeling is underneath everything on this site.
In that household, my grandparents told vampire stories as things that happened to people they could name, in places I knew, along with the utvara and other creatures whose names don’t translate. As a child those stories terrified me.
Then, over the years, I stopped being afraid of the stories and became afraid of not knowing them. They had turned into my connection to people I can no longer ask anything, and it reaches past my own dead: when I read about a creature that lived in the beliefs of people in Greenland, I feel something very close to what I feel toward my grandfather and grandmother. Most of us will never learn the name of our great-great-grandfather. What survives are the stories a whole people told, and through them something of the tellers. That is what culture is to me: the channel through which the dead still speak, and the one we will speak through, later.
Sicily
In 2005 I spent two weeks as a volunteer on an archaeological excavation at Campobello di Licata, in Sicily. The first week was field survey. They taught us to read pottery, the thick coarse medieval ware against the thin fine antique ware, and sent us walking across the fields to collect everything that didn’t look like a stone. I have never been so focused in my life. I filled my bag before the field was half done and the archaeologists handed me two more. The second week we dug a necropolis, and I was able to excavate three graves and locate two others. The group started calling me Indy. It was terribly unhealthy for my ego.
The moment I still tell people about came with a geoarchaeologist named Gabriele Lena. He had a field he couldn’t get anyone to dig: he believed a Roman villa lay under it, others thought it was only a pottery workshop, and nobody funds one. We surveyed it. I came back with the smallest bag of anyone, because I had decided to collect only sigillata, the fine Roman gloss tableware, and to leave everything else in the field. Gabriele went through my finds, then started shouting and hugging me. One sherd was so thin that ware like it was produced, as far as he knew, in only a couple of places in the whole Roman world, and none of them was Sicily. Nobody hauls luxury tableware to a workshop in the fields, so that one thin piece of clay tilted the whole question toward the villa. Finding it there, he said, was like digging up the keys of a Ferrari where you were asking whether rich people ever lived. Crazy Alchemist is the same detective work, done in libraries instead of dirt.
What Crazy Alchemist is
Crazy Alchemist officially started on 22 February 2022, in St. Gallen, Switzerland. It is my exploration of the past, shared as I go, not an attempt to copy Wikipedia: the saints and the demons, deviant burials, folk cures and calendar feasts, the creatures my grandparents believed in and the ones other people’s grandparents believed in, from the Balkans to Greenland.
I care about the bright side of belief and the dark side, and I refuse to pick one. Even in old Bibles you will find a drawing of the devil. A culture’s fears are as much a part of it as its prayers, and I love these subjects far too much to disrespect any of them. So the saints have their room here and the demons have theirs, the way a museum has rooms, and nothing is mixed to shock anyone.
And I hold one conviction under all of it: whether or not any of these beliefs point at something beyond us, belief itself does something to the people who hold it, and medicine measures that every time a placebo works. People who believed in something built and endured; a society that believes in nothing has no reason to care for anything, and creation starts with caring. That alone makes the beliefs of humanity worth a platform where you can explore them properly. I present what I find, with sources, and where the evidence ends I say so.
The practical part
I was born and raised in Gunja, Croatia, near the point where Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia meet. My mother’s side is Serbian, my father’s side is Ruthenian. From 1992 on I grew up in Germany, where German became my second mother tongue. After a long career in IT as a product manager, I turned in 2022 to what you see here: this site, and the translation and publishing of books, mostly folk tales and historical works from Serbian into German and English, with footnotes that give you the cultural context the original readers carried in their heads.
Today I live in St. Gallen. If you want to reach me, write to rade@crazyalchemist.com.