How Pigs Make Politics in Serbia

An essay by André Thiemann

“I take her for a walk to her boyfriend”

How do pigs make politics? In George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” they lead the revolution of the animals against their human master. But instead of freedom and equality for all, the pigs become more equal than others.

As in Orwell’s parable, real-life pigs are wayward, powerful political actors. This essay explores how pigs shaped politics in Serbia: since the nation state emerged in the 19th century, they were a major commodity and provided considerable tax revenue. First extensively reared for export, they were later held ever more intensively in more-confined spaces and their chances to live their full porcine potential were restricted. Throughout, pigs had a decisive impact on the Serbian state.

Since I have started fieldwork in central Serbia, villagers repeatedly told me how “in the olden days” (under the Ottoman empire), their ancestors raised pigs because the Muslim tax collectors did not like to tax them. Although impossible to verify, this story shows three things. First, Serbian nationalism has defined itself as in resistance to the imagined “Muslim, Ottoman Other”. Second, villagers are so ambivalent about the state that they may have even colluded with their pigs in tax evasion. And third, the villagers liked to live – and to think about the world – with pigs.

And yet, today’s pigs and villagers are radically different from the “olden days”. The pigs of yesteryear looked more like wild boar than today’s barn pigs. A long-extinct heritage breed called Šiška, they had thick bristles, dirty-yellow hair and long-legs, and fended for themselves in the forest.

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The extinct heritage breed Šiška (https://mojafarma.ba/bosanska-primitivna-svinja-siska/)

The direct ancestors of my interlocutors in the village probably never kept Šiška pigs. Central Serbian villagers typically traced their roots to mountainous regions Montenegro or Eastern Hercegovina – suited for cattle, sheep and goat rearing – from where their ancestors had immigrated in the second half of the 19th century. ¹

But what had in fact brought Šiška pigs and humans together in the 17th and 18th centuries? It was political strife that laid once prosperous “European Turkey” to waste – protracted wars between Hapsburg (Austria-Hungary) and the Ottomans that created waves of outmigration.

It was the time of the famed “Exodus of the Serbs” (seoba Srba) – two distinct events in ca. 1690 and 1737–1739 – when Orthodox-Christian, Slavic-speaking peasants fled north across the Danube River to settle in faraway Budapest or Szentendre. Later, in the 1780s, when Constantinople’s central authority declined, war lords (agas) vied for regional predominance. In the Belgrade pashaluk this triggered peasant resistance and led to the first and second Serbian uprisings (1805 and 1815, respectively).

As a result, by ca. 1800 the rolling hill-landscape south of Belgrade had become a dense forest zone of beech and oak stands known as Šumadija (literally “woodlands”). This forest expanse was not only congenial for guerilla warfare, but also for an ancient form of breeding pigs on the “mast” of acorns and beech fruits.

Villagers then were few and tilled little land, which they fenced in – to keep the pigs out. The pigs, being far more valuable than the crops, were shipped, via the Danube, to the vast Hapsburg market. This “pig-pannaging-economy” would shape the emerging nation state. Many of the leaders of the Serbian uprisings were themselves livestock traders, and chief among them was Miloš Obrenović, who lead the second uprising.

As the newly minted Prince of Serbia (1815–39; again 1858–60), Miloš Obrenović monopolized the export taxes on pigs. His tax officers were the first who did not need to dirty their hands in the forests, as they could count the heads of pigs at the Danube ports. It was probably the resistance against Obrenović’s Christian tax collectors that my interlocutors remembered.

To advance his tax revenues, in 1833 Prince Miloš donated from his “personal” (state) farm Topčider a dozen so-called Šumadinka pigs (Šiška unsystematically cross-bred with others pigs) to Archduke Joseph, the Palatine of Hungary. On the latter’s Kis Jenö manor (in present-day Romania) the Archduke had the Serbian pigs systematically crossed with (now extinct) Romanian Szalonta and Hungarian Bakonyi pigs. This created the curly-haired Mangalitsa – a lard-pig bred for its marbled meat and thick bacon rinds of mostly unsaturated fats, highly acclaimed by modern-day foodies.

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Swallow-bellied Mangalitsa (© Drezgic farm, https://mangulica.com)

This “improved” breed was swiftly re-introduced in Serbia, where it continued to rootle through the forests and mingle with its cousins, the wild boar. Even though it had smaller litters than the meaty Šiška (on average five Mangalitsa piglets were raised to slaughter weight, compared to seven Šiška piglets), it was far more “productive.” Thus, the Mangalitsa grew in only 14 months (rather than 30 months) to a slaughter weight of 180–200kg (rather than 80 kg).

And Prince Obrenović did more to support “his” main sources of income – the free roaming pigs and their independent smallholders. To protect them from the scylla of feudalism (suzerainty by regional lords) and the charybdis capitalism, the Prince exempted peasant homesteads from confiscation (as a side effect, peasants had no collateral to obtain credit, stymying their investment in “modern” farm methods). Furthermore, Obrenović curtailed the villagers’ access to education; and he also minimised their consumption of industrial commodities by levying high tariffs on them.

Meanwhile refugees from the wars between the Ottomans and Hapsburg outside Serbia began to flock into Šumadija. Unlike in neighbouring Bulgaria, their labour could neither be absorbed by a proto-industry nor by an educational sector. How did Serbian villagers and pigs react? They loved their early years of independence! The villagers, who swiftly accumulated “capital on the hoofs” loved to indulge in frequent, exuberant feasts. The pigs participated in them on both ends. Some were boiled in stews and roasted on the spit, others cleared up the leftovers.

By mid-century this mode of production became unsustainable. The rising human population needed housing and income and cleared the forests. Combined with the lack of economic alternatives, a pattern of rural underdevelopment emerged. ² Following Clifford Geertz, I characterise it as a Serbian “agricultural involution” – the increased extension of effort leading to stagnant output. ³ Namely, the former forests were sowed with maize, a novel crop from the “New World” – but less in the fertile plains and hill lands near the Danube, than in the infertile mountainous interior. This corn was then not even fed to the villagers – but to their pigs. In 1882, an insolent Friedrich Engels saw the Balkan struggles for independence as fights over the “right to rustle cattle”. ⁴

From pannaging to tilling and feeding

The party ended with a bang. In the “Pig Wars” of 1905, Hungary closed the borders to protect its pork production from its southern competition. Serbia’s agriculture took a U-turn. No longer were the pigs fenced out; instead, they were fenced-in, typically on the plum orchards around the house. The (unsystematic) cross-breeding of Mangalitsa with British Berkshire pigs, resulting in the new black Moravka breed, brought a further intensification.

With the pigs no longer aloof, their relations with their human allies became more intimate. The villagers welcomed the swinish efficiency in turning food waste (pigswill) into proteins and calories. At least one of my interlocutors in 2023 still fondly remembered how in the 1960s a sounder of Moravka had rootled through his grandmother’s orchard. ⁵

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Moravke, who recently returned to the grandson’s orchard, 2023

The sociable pigs now cared besides for their sounder also for their impoverished humans. Their meat, no longer a staple food, became a luxury for festive occasions. ⁶ The pigs now served as a “piggie-bank,” to be touched only when it could be profitably cashed in by selling it to affluent customers. Living pigs became the visible sign of modest prosperity.

By the second half of the twentieth century, the pigs moved from the orchards in front of the houses to the stables behind it. They were no longer allowed to display their full range of socio-etiological behaviour – and they were made less visible. During my initial fieldwork in 2009–10, even proud farmers seemed ashamed to allow guests into the stable (the mistrust of intrusive tax-collector types probably also played a role). At the same time the dependency of the pigs on their individual human carers grew.

Pork products also took new shapes. Baked pork was less consumed full on the spit, but more cut into chunky bites; smoked pork bacon (prosciutto) was sliced thin. Smaller meat pieces ended up in sausages, fat rinds were deep fried into čvarci (pork cracklings). The shift was linked to a global politics of changing tastes. From mid-century, the main importers (Austria and Germany) demanded lean, meat-optimised “capitalist pigs” instead of small-holders’ fat-optimised ones. ⁷

This is mirrored in the 1961 book on “Contemporary pig breeding” in the Socialist Yugoslav Republic of Serbia. While it portrayed historical breeds such as Šiška, Mangalitsa and Moravka, it compared them unfavourably to the new “white” (or rather pink) breeds, whose swift introduction it saw as beneficial for self-sufficient producers and factory-style farmers alike. ⁸

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Sow with piglets in the stable, 2009

By the end of Yugoslavia the white pig breeds had become the new “conventional”, and only a few farmers clung to older Serbian “heritage breeds”. Surprisingly, some herdsmen even continued pannaging (white) pigs in a protected forested marshland on the Save River border area with Bosnia-Hercegovina and Croatia. Latest with the advent of African swine fever (ASF) in Serbia in 2020, these pannaging practices became outlawed by state-backed veterinarians who tried to protect factory farms from a supposed biosecurity hazard. ⁹

Since the 2000s Serbia’s time-tested alliance between pigs and villagers has come under increasing international pressure by an industrial-scale competition that has further optimised its pig “disassembly lines”. As profits for Serbia’s small pig farms plummeted (in 2022 there were roughly 3 Mio. pigs, in comparison to 7 Mio. humans), tight consumer budgets meant that also the the expensive “quality meat” of heritage breeds could bring no stable solution to farmers.

To conclude: In this essay I have argued that in the last ca. 250 years pigs and humans in what is today Serbia have formed strong, enduring alliances. First this was characterized by extensive pannaging for external markets, later by an ever more intensive form of husbandry. In the 21st century, pig rearing then became a rare and fragmented field. What the future will bring is open by definition. And yet, it is likely that pigs will continue to shape the politics of Serbia.