Balagan: The Disorganized Balcony
A word that is beloved and ubiquitous in Israel is Balagan (בָּלָגָן); it colloquially means “mess” or “disaster”. It’s easy to see why it is so frequently used in a country where disaster is prophesied weakly (weekly, too) and everything seems on the verge of chaos.
It’s origin is somewhat shrouded in mystery as are most slang words. Referring to the root doesn’t really help; according to Amos Oz’s father in A Tale of Love and Darkness, it is derived from the Persian word for balcony (
) – in Persian (or Farsi if you prefer) balakana – because balconies in those days were where laundry and cleaning supplies were kept.
As one might imagine, the balcony was disorganized, filthy and generally a mess. Since the Jews were exiled in Persia centuries ago and continue to live in present-day Iran, it makes perfect sense that a foreign word would be adopted into Hebrew and used in this way.
What’s intriguing about the world balagan is not just its origin but its parallel use in Polish. Many modern words that were Hebraicized seem to have come from Polish. Words such as telewizja (television) and kommunikowac (communications) have come into Hebrew transliterated exactly. This is also not surprising; many of the founders of the state of Israel were from Eastern Europe and Russia. Eliezer Ben Yehuda, credited for the revival of spoken Hebrew, is from Belarus.
The word balagan seems to have become rooted as a Polish colloquialism, though. In Polish, the word for mess is bałagan (pronounced roughly bawagon).
Additionally, the word balagan appears in other Slavic languages like Russian (балаган) and means essentially the same thing.
In the Slavic vein, balagan apparently means an upper room in disrepair or shed. It essentially conveys the same meaning as “disorderly” or “a mess” but has come to localize in the Russian or Polish countryside. And it was first brought into the Slavic languages through Yiddish; it brings out a sense of desperation and even frustration.
It’s fascinating how a word can originate in a conquerer’s language (Persian) and can be carried by a wandering people (the Jews) throughout the centuries and become enlodged in the various languages of the various countries and territories that the Jews have inhabited in these two thousand years of exile only to finally become ubiquitous in the modern incarnation of Hebrew and in the homeland of the people who have wandered for so long.
As an aside, according to Shad Khel:
“Just thought you might be interested to add another meaning of the word balagan from my language. In Pushtu [a language from Afghanistan] bala means monster and balagan is plural so it means monsters.”