When the American bombardment of Belgrade in 1944 drove me to take refuge in Rušanj, a village only twelve miles to the south but so inaccessible that the Germans had never occupied it, I noticed that my hostess, Savka Nikolitch, used to clean her mud floor by sprinkling it with water and sweeping it every day, though any exceptional mess had to be scraped off with a mattock (cf. Odyssey xx. 149: αἱ μ༐νμα koρήσατε πoıπνσασαı ῤὰσσατέ τ and xxii. 455 f.: Λíστρoıσıνὰπεὰoν… ξoν). In the course of conversation she told me that her father-in-law had paid her father a deposit for her (cf. Od. i. 277, ii. 196 ενα). This had been spent on her trousseau. She had brought it to her father-in-law's home in a chest which still contained precisely ‘ʒσατρά τε kαí πέπΛovς kαí ῥήγεα σıγαλóεντα’ (Od. vi. 38). Both her husband and father-in-law had failed to return from the war in 1918. ‘This house lost two oxen’, she said, ‘in the last war—and two men too.’ This was all so Homeric that I looked round to see whether there was anything else about the house which might illustrate the Odyssey. I offer the following observations in all humility to the scholars from whose ranks circumstances have excluded me.

Savka's house is the oldest in the village and reckoned by an expert from Belgrade to be at least two hundred years old. The population of those parts is believed to have migrated from Macedonia during the Turkish rule.