Balkan Account

Trip to the Balkans, September 2017

Silke Hesse

I have found that my desire to travel to certain areas of the world at certain times of my life arises not so much because I want to view novel scenery or cultural artifacts but because of some conundrum of my own. And when I then return home I am irritated when all people ask is to see my photos and perhaps hear my comments on the suitability of the area for holidays.  I have no doubt that the Balkans are an excellent region for  holidays – for swimming, sunbaking and sailing on the Dalmatian coast, for hiking and adventure sports in the mountains of Montenegro or Macedonia, for reimagining ancient times with their fortresses and walled cities, impressive heroes or marching Roman legions, their amphitheaters, wild animals and Christian martyrs. The Balkan Peninsula also has mosques, bath-houses and caravanserais, as well as the Orthodox churches of the East. In other words, the region offers a handy potpourri of cultures that have usually originated and reached greater perfection in other places. And it now also has excellent modern hotels.

But those are not the things that drew me there. For the western Balkan Peninsula with its rugged rather than spectacular mountains, its often difficult weather patterns, its frequent massively destructive earthquakes, its history of impoverished peoples caught between self-interested conquerors and incompatible Eastern and Western values,  is not one of the primary and original cultural showpieces of Europe.  Throughout their history the Balkan countries have always been at the mercy of greater powers and their interests: Greece and Rome, Byzantium and Turkey, Venice, the Vatican, Hungary and Austria, Russia, Napoleon’s France, Mussolini’s Italy, or whatever other powers were attempting to expand their “spheres of influence”.  And in part due to such foreign interests, the Slavic peoples who settled on the peninsula from around the fifth or sixth century onward ended up being fractured into hostile mini-nations, often intent on emphasizing identifying differences between themselves rather than cooperating. 

The Balkans first became a personal conundrum for me during the wars of the nineties.  Between WWI and the collapse of the Communist governments of Eastern Europe after 1989, there had been two attempts to consolidate most of these small states into a single nation along the lines of what was successfully achieved in Italy and Germany in the second half of the 19^th century.  The first of these led to the kingdom of Yugoslavia which then collapsed during WWII; the second was a Communist Confederation under Marshal Tito. For quite a while Tito’s state was actually surprisingly successful not only in uniting the South Slav or Yugoslav peoples of the western and central peninsula as a federation of autonomous but fairly cooperative republics, but also in holding the middle ground between Eastern and Western, Communist and Democratic interests and thus securing a degree of economic success and international respect for the country. After Tito died in 1980 without a competent heir, nobody expected this apparently stable union to break apart as spectacularly as it did.  Economic problems contributed. But when Milosevic’s Serbia with its Orthodox and backward-looking perspective made clear its intensions to turn what was Yugoslavia into a nationalist “Greater Serbia” the states with more westernized traditions rebelled. Slovenia managed to break free in 1991 with a minimum of casualties; but when Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina followed suit internecine war broke out. The jewel-like tourist draw-card of the Adriatic coast, Dubrovnik, was besieged, shelled and severely damaged by what was now effectively a Serb and Montenegrin army. And between 1992 and 1995 Sarajevo, the tolerant multi-cultural capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, to give just one example, underwent a brutal four year siege with constant shelling from the surrounding mountains. The United Nations were called in but seemed to have no strategies to end hostilities.  Sarajevo’s siege alone cost 11,000 lives in the city. It took years and further terrible atrocities were committed before the UN eventually relinquished its ineffective peace-keeping role in this region and selectively bombed the trouble-maker, Milosevic’s  Serbia. After that, Serbia’s allies fell away. In 2006 even Montenegro, hitherto its staunchest friend, voted for independence. Kosovo, formerly an autonomous Yugoslav province but populated mostly by Albanians, also fought for independence. It has had strong international support although Serbia is still claiming ownership.  During what were in the rest of Europe hopeful post Cold War years, the extraordinary brutality of the Balkan wars seemed particularly shocking to us all. Eventually the International Court in The Hague, where the worst Balkan war criminals were tried, confirmed the general sense of outrage. The Bosnian Serb General, Ratko Mladic, held responsible for the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre of 8000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, has just been sentenced to life imprisonment by the International Court.

At the time of the Balkan wars our University German Department had recently merged with the Slavic Department. In consequence not only their pigeon holes but ours too were being targeted with horrifying graphic propaganda from both sides. Our staff-room lunch-times were invariably dominated by discussions about the Yugoslav wars. Yugoslav problems also appeared to spill out into wider Melbourne in those years; one heard of brawls between Croat and Serbian soccer teams. Refugees who fled or migrated from one or other of the Balkan states crossed our path, sometimes as students. I remember one woman being described as “typically Serbian” and it was obviously not a compliment. Why would people who had gone through two terrible World Wars in recent times still look to war and massacre to solve their problems when other European countries were doing all they could to consolidate peace?

Though I knew young people who had passed through the Balkans in overnight buses on their way to or from Greece, the Balkan countries had never seemed to be a travel destination in their own right.  So I was quite excited when a small group tour operator with whom I had traveled once before offered a tour through eight Balkan states for September of this year. This allowed me three months of preliminary reading and in combination with the notes we were sent, the preparatory lectures then given on the bus each day, and the introductions and explanations offered by local guides at the various places we visited, it was enough to enable us to listen intelligently and have the confidence to draw some conclusions. It is about this trip that I here want to write. But ultimately it will be mainly about what our guides, these impressive, well educated, thoughtful and mostly passionate representatives of their various nations had to say as hosts, experts, critics and advocates.

Friday, September 8^th

I arrived at Dubrovnik after an almost sleepless flight from Melbourne via Bangkok and Vienna. On the last leg the plane was half empty and the arrival routines in Dubrovnik were quickly absolved. I was glad a pick-up had been arranged. As we drove out of the airport there seemed to be a whiff of Italy: it was the pencil pines rising up in dignified clarity from the bushy forest.  The half hour drive to our hotel along the high slope provided picture-book views of the Adriatic with its little coastal settlements and off-shore islands. Tony, the young driver, would be with us for the fourteen days of the tour, he told me. I asked him whether he had done the trip before without getting a clear answer. Later I heard that our tour leader Mark had initially been hesitant to employ a twenty-four-year-old and relatively inexperienced driver who had not yet been to most of the places on our itinerary.  But Tony turned out to be skillful, efficient, friendly and usually eager to be a tourist with us whenever he was given the chance, in other words he was an almost perfect choice. During that first drive I asked him what he thought of tourists.  Tourists were Dubrovnik’s only industry, he said; there was no work for anyone here in the five months of the off-season. You had to like them.

Our hotel, built into the steep slope of the shore-line, provided uninterrupted ocean and sunset views and a private balcony with every room.  I was on floor 7 from the top and when I walked down a further three floors with the bathing towel I was immediately handed so I could enjoy the facilities while my room was still being serviced, I was at the level of the pools, the protected sunken gardens, the sun-baking terraces with their deck-chairs and snack bars and then quite soon the last terrace with its small patch of real beach and its large swimming net. When I arrived our tour leader Mark had been waiting to welcome me. I would meet the seven others before dinner that evening for an introductory chat; altogether we would be three couples, one accompanied by an old friend, and then me.

For the next two weeks we did most things together. Meals at this hotel, and at almost all those we later stayed at were buffets to which we could come in your own time. For our group that was usually 7.30 at night.  Throughout the Balkans the food was excellent and surprisingly cheap but Dubrovnik’s Hotel Valamar President in particular offered a confusingly vast and spectacular collection of foods. Novices like me had to avoid the temptation to start without a strategic plan.

Saturday, September 9^th

Next morning it was raining quite heavily. After many scorching weeks, the dramatic clouds through which we had descended on landing the day before were making good their promise. It was Sunday and Tony had his prescribed day off – Croatia is now a member of the EU with its strict regulatory approach – so his boss was standing in for him and giving our brand new Mercedes bus a practice run. Old Dubrovnik was just ten minutes down the road from our hotel but that did not mean one could get there quickly. Once arrived we had to inch our way through an interminable drop-off loop before we could finally be let loose. In spite of the rain the place was overrun; we had seen three huge cruise liners in the harbor and next day we noticed another in the vicinity. That added up to many thousands of tourists set to experience the “Jewel of the Adriatic” in its spectacular two kilometers of walls. The prospect of still visible scars from the 1991 war may also have rendered Dubrovnik enticing for some (though the predominance of new red roofs over golden lichen-covered ones indicated how much with UNESCO’s aid had already been repaired.)

Our guide Thea, a dark Roman beauty, was waiting for us. The first question Mark asked her was whether she remembered the war. At the time she was only a little girl, she said, but she remembered the night-time flight by boat without her father and grandparents and later the trip back to the badly damaged city where the returning families were temporally accommodated in hotels.  There school was organized for the children. Her family, Thea said, had lived in this communal set-up for a year and a half. Though their own large house was intact, it was not available because the army had taken temporary possession.

Thea showed us a few carefully selected sights in the hour or two she had with us: the first was the 15^th century fountain of Onofrio. It was originally a two storied structure, but the top section was destroyed in the 1667 earthquake, an event which had killed half the town’s population; that it immediately followed a plague year with 1000 local victims appeared cruel beyond measure.  The Onofrio fountain stood for the city’s sensible and precautionary response to emergencies. This cistern had secured and protected the town’s water supply, essential for its independence and healthy survival, for many centuries. The water came from a stream that originally divided the town in two. It was then paved over to create a unifying central thoroughfare, the Stradun, while its water became the city’s most important resource. 

Close to the Pile Gate by which we entered was also the Franciscan Monastery with its beautiful Italian-inspired cloisters and its pharmacy built in the early 14^th century and still in use. Here there was a modern scientific approach to illness far ahead of its time and unique in the region. Dubrovnik, we were told, was founded by refugees fleeing the Slavic incursions; it had never been a Slav city, was Catholic rather than Orthodox, and always more Venetian than Balkan. Of course that did not mean that Venice across the Adriatic Sea was always its friend; Dubrovnik’s Patron Saint Blaise was revered because he had warned the city of a planned attack by the supposedly friendly Venetian fleet anchored nearby. So while Dubrovnik, or Ragusa as it was also known , was a seafaring and trading city state following the Italian pattern, it had to hold its own both here and across the Adriatic and survive as best it could with the help of diplomacy and clever dealing. At times it had a fleet of  200 ships (massive ship-building consumed the oak forests which gave Dubrovnik its name) but it was still not set up to respond to force with force. In the Middle Ages it had some support as a vassal state of Hungary and in more recent times its UNESCO world heritage status also appeared to promise much needed protection though that failed when the Yugoslav Serbs decided to hold on to what they considered their possession. In many ways Dubrovnik has always been on its own. Even its present incorporation in Croatia seems tenuous for Neum, in a narrow corridor of Bosnian territory, cuts it off from the rest of the country.  And while Dubrovnik’s massive walls look insuperable, it is ironic that today they attract people into the town rather than keeping them out, which must make it hard to preserve a living culture. As a source of income, of course, its spectacular walls help to support the city. Flexibility has always been the key to surviving in changing times.

Down near the port, past the church of Saint Blaise and beside the Cathedral  (already the third built on this unstable ground, as was recently discovered) the 15^th century Rector’s Palace was perhaps the most thought provoking site we were shown.  The Rector, chosen from among the city’s 100 or so aristocrats, was always in charge for one month only. And he was kept a virtual prisoner in the palace, his main duty being his custodianship of the keys of the town. In the morning he had to accompany the guard to open up the city gates and in the evening to close them.  Whatever practical importance this ritual may have had, it meant that the safety of the city would have been foremost in his mind at all times. As an aristocrat, the Rector was chosen from among those families which seemed trustworthy because they had been loyal and committed to the city over generations. All the same,  the harsh routines helped to make sure the rector had neither time nor opportunity for conspiracies and ambitious power play and that the office itself was arduous rather than attractive.

Earlier, in the museum of the Franciscan monastery, Thea had pointed out the gold jewelry displayed and particularly those items that Dubrovnik women wore to identify themselves as citizens. She told us that her grandmother, whom we had no difficulty imagining as an aristocrat,  would never have gone out in public without her jewelry.  On one occasion, Thea said, when an earring needed to be repaired, she staunchly refused to leave the house till she had it back.  I think what Thea’s account was eager to stress was the absolute commitment of Dubrovnik citizens, in particular of its leading aristocrats, to their city and their community. It was obviously something she had had the opportunity to experience and now embodied herself.

After lunch Mark accompanied Jamie (his delightful young assistant) and me for a walk along Dubrovnik’s walls with their ups and downs, ins and outs, widenings and narrowings, their sometimes precariously steep steps, their fortresses, look-outs or rallying platforms, occasional snack and souvenir kiosks, and of course their massive and beautifully sculpted stone over which the ant-like procession of tourists wended its way. Jamie and I were the only two in our group who had not walked the wall before. We enjoyed the wide views that encompassed everything between the sea and Dubrovnik’s mountainous backdrop; but we could also see the chairlift station on the hill that was the origin of much of the shelling. And though looking across the red and gold roofs of the town now easily evokes a sense of peace and protectedness in the viewer,  the scars from the shelling show how vulnerable peaceful communities can be.

A little later we were told the story of Tony’s boss. He had been taken prisoner by the Montenegrins during the 1991 war.  One of them in particular had taken pleasure in torturing him, forcing him to do long precipitous treks naked and in winter.  Recently, he was taking his tour group to a new restaurant and there discovered that it was owned and run by his torturer. It cannot be easy for people with such experiences to live together as neighbors again.

Sunday, September 10^th

We left for Montenegro.

Border crossings in this part of the world can be troublesome and time consuming and most guards appreciated a few bottles of chilled water, once even a 5 Euro note to sweeten their hot and tedious work. On the other hand, most border crossings also had signs asking motorists to report improper behavior and occasionally the presence of a supervisor could be sensed. The supply of water for passengers and guards was always the driver’s responsibility; it obviously had to be liberally calculated. Tony tended to choose less frequented check points, partly to avoid having to queue with the coaches. Only on one occasion out of ultimately 26 were we inconvenienced and the bus searched.

Montenegro is a land of national parks protecting its superb, highly romantic and dramatic natural settings. We first drove along the Bay of Kotor till we reached the medieval city itself with its tightly packed white walled and red roofed stone buildings, its labyrinth of small trade designated squares and its almost five kilometer wall running up the mountain. Kotor’s origins are Roman and much like Dubrovnik it was once an important trading city with a big fleet; it too was now flooded with tourists.

There our guide Hannah first took us to the Romanesque Catholic Cathedral of Saint Tryphon (an anomaly in this very Orthodox country). This saint, much like Saint Blaise in Dubrovnik, is venerated because he once warned the city of an imminent attack. Originally an Armenian martyr, Tryphon has also made himself useful here as a healer, mainly of broken limbs it seems in this country of mountaineers and adventurers; there are a great many silver and gold votive arms and legs in the upper story treasure house of the church.

In the manner of town halls, Saint Tryphon also has a wide upper balcony that gives a good view of the main square. The buildings around town are sturdy, un-ornamented palaces made of the native rock, most apparently still owned by the original families and housing more than one generation.  For Hannah the little old town, safely hidden away between mountains and at the end of its bay, seemed to be like a template for an ideal society, while the irregular ringing from its clock tower comically proclaimed defiance of present time. Kotor too suffered serious damage in an earthquake as recently as 1979; and as in Dubrovnik UNESCO has come to the rescue.

We left Kotor without fully doing it justice to start the hair-raising hair-pin climb to the upper regions of Montenegro. This was a road for courageous heroes, mostly single lane with a plunging precipice on one side and today overcrowded with Sunday buses that repeatedly set themselves up for dangerous precision backing or gridlock.  Tony who had only driven the road once before performed admirably. Arrived, the view we had from the top was breathtaking, also being enjoyed by an almost invisible adventure sportsman on an outsized valley-wide flying fox.

The old capital Cetinje is now a sleepy town but it retains the miniature-sized palace of former King Nicola, the only king Montenegro ever had. His main achievement was probably marrying his many daughters off into the royal houses of Europe. In Cetinje the royal children each had their small sitting room, furnished according to their own tastes, and they seemed to have grown up with a good deal of freedom to express themselves even while they were being groomed to fulfill their father’s ambitions. One daughter was an early photographer and automobile driver. Few of these princes and princesses probably then felt particularly comfortable with their royal in-laws who are unlikely to have valued what still seem to be Montenegrin ideals: a close and lively family life, unpretentious tastes and toughness in the outdoors.

Monday, September 11^th

Next day after inspecting the heavy walled remnants of the ancient city of Budva  by the sea, also recently earthquake damaged, we drove up to the current capital of Montenegro, Podgorica, Hannah’s home, by a less arduous route. We first visited the crude hermitage and monastery of Bajbabe, a small cave and two side passages roughly hewn out of the rock and piously decorated in obedience to a visionary experience. It has become a pilgrimage site. Edith Durham met the founder in her day, as we read in her 1902 travel account. Immediately after, we were then taken to the enormous, lavishly ornamented and recently dedicated new Orthodox Cathedral, still standing alone in an unshaped wasteland. Would it be a white elephant one day? Hannah told us that many of her generation who watched the building’s decade long progress under the hands of local craftsmen now wanted to return to Orthodoxy (which of course here also means to Serbia) but Tito’s socialism has so estranged their parents’ generation from all religion that now nobody any longer knows how to handle ritual.

Hannah seemed happy with Montenegro’s very affordable education system and the state’s support of the underprivileged, remnants of  Tito’s socialist system (the town was named Titograd then) under which her family appeared not to have suffered too much. What they grew in their gardens allowed them to live healthy lives in spite of low wages and Tito’s unique position between East and West gave them international respect, support and the freedom to travel. Now Montenegrins have to make up their minds whether or not to join the EU. And the EU while linking them into Europe with its better job prospects, which one of Hannah’s friends, a child psychologist, was eagerly awaiting, would forbid them to grow their own fruit and vegetables, to fish in their streams, make their own wine and run their farmers’ markets. But these agricultural activities were quite central to their identity, their communal life and their sense of security. And Montenegrins, Hannah pointed out repeatedly, are pigheaded individualists who will look after each other but can not be taught to follow other people’s rules. Perhaps the country would be able to survive on its own with the help of agricultural enterprises and adventure sports for tourists. To make her point Hannah arranged for her sister to bring several varieties of figs from her mother’s garden for us to taste, figs that would no longer be grown under EU rules. Hannah was the only one of our guides who regularly solicited and obviously needed our expressions of enthusiasm.

From Podgorica we then drove along the wild Moraca river valley with its increasingly dramatic canyon, and also through ever heavier rain, to the ancient Moraca monastery with its famous frescoes, icons and relics. It was founded in the thirteenth century by a prince of the revered Serbian Nemanja dynasty. Our group waited for a while in the narthex while the religious needs of earlier visitors, for whom a sarcophagus of sacred relics had been opened, were served. Rooms in the monastery, facing towards a beautifully tended almost Bavarian-looking flower garden, had been made available to house people in need of a home.

On our way back to the hotel in Budva we passed huge Lake Skadar in the rainy dusk. It lies on the border between Montenegro and Albania, in another spectacular national park one would love to visit one day.

Tuesday, September 12^th

Everywhere in Montenegro’s lakes and waterways rocky outcrops and promontories, no matter how small, have been seen as attractive building sites, both for tiny chapels or compact towns like Budva. Perhaps the prettiest of them all is Sveti Stefan, initially a fisherman’s village that has now become one of the world’s most picturesque, exclusive and expensive hotels. It is strictly out of bounds for all non-celebrities of course but it provided a good photo opportunity which we, like most tourist buses, took before we crossed into Albania.

Shortly after the border when the rain eased unexpectedly we decided to veer to the right off the highway and up the narrow congested track to a hill-top fortification of huge dimensions but somewhat indeterminate design.  It had probably already guarded the near-by city of Shkoder or Scudari when it was the capital of an Illyrian kingdom in the fourth century BC, and it had played its part in the 2^nd century BC when the Romans subjugated that troublesome pirate society and proceeded to enlist its warriors in their legions. Later the hill was a Venetian and then a Turkish stronghold, obviously always a superb vantage point with its view across a long strip of the Montenegrin and Albanian coastal plain.

It is good to be reminded right at the beginning of our trip that Albania and its people (it is presumed they are descendants of the Illyrians) who were sometimes thought of as the most backward in Europe, are historically one of the oldest. For centuries Albania was severely handicapped by its language which was spoken by no other people, prohibited by the Turkish occupiers who stifled all development and self-expression, and long not easily accessible in written form because there was no suitable alphabet for its unusual sounds. Having English as a world-wide lingua franca is now to their benefit. The north of Albania in particular was also held back by its tribal culture structured around the blood feud and honor system, as Edith Durham observed and recorded it a good century ago. This was a rigid and inhumane legal structure characterized by an extreme disregard for the lives of men and the dignity of women. The brutal cultural revolution enforced by Albania’s Communist dictator Enver Hoxha between 1944 and 1990 may ultimately have helped to destroy this way of life and introduce more contemporary and humane values. Hoxha’s merciless outlawing of religion, on the other hand, was less relevant in Albania, where religious differences were apparently never much of a problem, than in the Yugoslav countries in which Tito handled this Communist agenda less rigidly. Religious differences interpreted as social barriers between Orthodox Christians, Catholics and Muslims have for centuries been a constant source of strife throughout the Balkan region and to some extent they can still be that.

Albania is a predominantly Muslim country – perhaps it was the tax exemptions granted to Muslims, perhaps the more legalistic approach of the religion, perhaps the Albanians’ desire to distinguish themselves from their Slavic neighbors, perhaps the tyranny of superior force, or even the wish to be on the side of power that originally influenced the majority’s decision. We saw numbers of mosques and as we drove through, the trading streets of Shkoder gave a distinctly oriental impression.  Mark found a restaurant for us situated in a green area of the city, with locally-crafted un-European décor,  a feel of genuine hospitality, and simple, healthy and surprisingly cheap “Muslim” food. 

Rested, we drove on to the medieval city of Kruje up on the first high slope of the backdrop of mountains. It too has a magnificent view across the countryside. The town has more than once been the capital of Albania and always central in its fight for independence. It was there that the Albanian national hero Skanderbeg  (Alexander Lord) had his tower and rallied his forces against the Turks,  delaying their conquest of Albania by decades. Like so many Balkan boys Skanderbeg had been taken hostage as a child, forcibly converted to Islam and trained as a soldier by the Turks.  But in middle life he then returned to fight for his people and the Albanian Christian cause. The great heroes and benefactors in the Balkans were often those who were able to widen their outlook and education in this way and had thus acquired the skills and the determination to fight for their people.  A Skanderbeg museum has been built near his tower on the mountain-side at Kruje; it was designed by dictator Hoxha’s architect daughter as a socialist-realist celebration of heroic battle. (During our visit this museum was unfortunately at the mercy of a tradesman and his power tools. He was, typically, we were told, being advised by half a dozen idle onlookers.) Adjoining was the Ethnographic Museum located in the 18^th century villa of the Muslim Toptani family. We were there familiarized with the running of a wealthy Muslim family’s household by the curator who embellished each piece of information with a comic punch-line. Kruje had a huge bazaar with what looked at a glance like beautiful oriental craft-work. Most other bazaars we encountered on our trip sold mainly cheap imported wares. But we had to hasten past and back to our illegally parked bus waiting to hurry us on to our hotel right on Skanderbeg Square in the center of Albania’s capital, Tirana.

In Kruje we also picked up Jenke, our Albanian guide,  and on our drive she proceeded to tell us more about Kruje and its Muslims. Kruje had at times been an almost purely Bektashi  town, she said. The Bektashi are a dervish sect with unorthodox beliefs and rituals. From Sufi Mystic beginnings they had taken on, for example, the Shia veneration of Ali. Their celibate monasticism is also not mainstream Mohammedan, nor is the equality in worship they accord women or the ritual of confession they sometimes practice. They tend to treat the Muslim disciplines of regular prayer and fasting dismissively and instead emphasize community. But they have no exclusive set of beliefs. It seems the individual groups are constantly exploring their religious needs and quite comfortable with borrowing from their “enemies”, be they Shia or Christian. Many of the kidnapped Christian boys in the Sultan’s Janissary Army apparently took on this hybrid religion which may have eased their consciences.  When the Janissaries were dissolved Bektashism also fell into disfavor in Istanbul and the new Turkey under Kemal Atatürk out-lawed it. Now its headquarters are in Tirana in Albania but there is also an active and missionizing branch in the US. Jenke spoke of the Bektashis of whom I had never heard with considerable warmth, as though they might set a commendable example in the religious troubles of the Balkans. In retrospect I then realized that Mesa Selimovic’s novel Death and the Dervish, which had somewhat puzzled me, was referring to this sect, though much less favorably, not because of its heresies (the author leans towards socialism) but because ultimately it, like other religions, made it possible for adherents to escape from life and its ethical demands into a conservative and dishonest world of inconsequential and cowardly piety.

Wednesday, 13^th September

I spent an uneasy night in my well-situated room overlooking Tirana’s huge Skanderbeg Square where the music celebrating some occasion had continued on for most of the night. In the rainy morning Jenke came and took us to the historical museum and we tried to gain some comprehension of Albania’s recent history: from oppressive Turkish occupation to King Zog, Mussolini to the Nazis, then on to Hoxha and his concentration camps, his paranoid construction of 750,000 mini-bunkers (to protect ordinary people from what?) and one maxi-bunker for himself and his closest supporters. This bunker was now a museum just down the road from our hotel and Mark and Jamie later paid it a visit without telling us, fearing we might need more oxygen than the underground passages provided. We then walked through the city center to admire the finely flower-decorated walls of the Et’hem Bey Mosque and down the road to the monumental Mussolini-inspired buildings. After this we got back on our bus to drive to the ancient and still busy port of Durres where we had lunch in a pleasant bayside restaurant. Then we walked a little way up the hill behind to find to our amazement an enormous, partially excavated amphitheater right there in the suburbs. It had tunnels, cages, a fresco and mosaics. The recovery work was presently stalled because over the last decades the recording of property ownership in Albania had been so irregular that nobody knew whose houses would have to be demolished for the next stage.

It seemed that much was still chaotic in this country. The transport system has broken down completely, Jenke said, but Albanians were resourceful and now private cars stopped to pick up people by the side of the road for a small sum. It was working quite well. There was also apparently no license system for drivers as yet and they made up their own road rules. (This we and our driver had certainly already noticed.) Leaving the dusty amphitheater we made way for a bride in her meters upon meters of ground-length white tulle. Jenke said that it was a common site for photos. Albanian weddings were normally not religious affairs she said and since that meant no photographs in churches, many chose sites  of national significance. Marriage here was a family matter; there was traditionally a Saturday of festivities with the bride’s family before the groom’s people picked her up for his family’s Sunday party. Mixed marriages were very common in Albania, she said.  It seemed important to her to convince us that Albania, unlike other Balkan countries, was without religious hostilities.

Thursday, 14^th September

We drove to Berat and made our way up the hill to the castle and its high village. The castle church here contains an icon museum and the curator explained to us the significance of the 16^th century icon painter M. K. Onofrius who, though using the visual language of the times, had managed to convey his own unconventional perspective even at this early date, perhaps partly influenced by his time in Italy. Among other things his towns contained not only churches but also mosques. Sadly, the elder Onofrius’ son and other later artists had lost this creative spontaneity and openness.

We were told that the castle village once contained 24 churches though there were now only half that number. When I asked why so many, the answer was that in those days everyone wanted to present the gift of a church to the saints. In the course of our travels we began to understand that Orthodox churches were conceived primarily as sites to experience holiness. In them worshippers stand among the sacred icons and the relics of saints, their life-sized images all around on the walls, and reverently look up to where Christ, Mary the Theotocos, and the angels float on high in the cupolas. It is almost like being  in heaven. As these churches were not designed as gathering places or lecture halls they could be quite small. In the town of Ohrid which was our next destination there were apparently in all 365 churches.

At the bottom of the hill, on either side of the river but with houses of similar design that had large windows facing out towards each other were the Muslim and Christian parts of town. In Berat the two religions had apparently always got on and we were by now prepared to believe Jenke that while Albania, like most of the recently liberated East European Communist dictatorships still had wounds to heal and all sorts of practical problems to solve, identity was not one of them. There had never been any temptation here to use religion to define or invent who you were. Albanians knew that they were an ancient people with a unique language and culture quite different from that of their Slav neighbors and that the land they inhabited had been theirs for millenniums. Unfortunately the two mosques we intended to look at in Berat were closed over midday.

We then enjoyed a lunch of snacks at a wine-tasting that lasted a little longer than intended. The wine-making family had been dispossessed of their 100 acres of vineyards by the Hoxha regime and so far only one acre had been restored to them. But though Albania was a strictly closed country under Hoxha, their influential family had found a way to have the new generation trained in Italy and so they were ready when the opportunity arose.  Their English speaking daughter, who was hardly out of school, was our lecturer.

The last visit on today’s list was to the excavation site of the sixth century BC Corinthian and later Roman port city of Apollonia, once an important harbor and the start of the Via Egnatia which led all the way to Thessaloniki and Constantinople. The later Emperor Augustus, Caesar’s adoptive son, was studying at Apollonia’s  famous school of philosophy when he received the news of Caesar’s murder. In its heyday the city had an estimated population of 50,000. But it was then so completely destroyed by a massive earthquake, which also changed the topography and silted up its port, that it was abandoned and eventually forgotten.  Unfortunately here too lack of money was stalling excavation work. Still, we could enjoy the idyllic sunset scene that reminded you of an 18^th century classicist painting of “romantic ruins in the light of evening” and we could inspect the finds Tirana Museum had had no use for in the onsite museum. We then spent the night in a pleasant little hotel in Fieri before heading east through the mountains to Lake Ohrid and Macedonia next day.

Friday, 15^th September

Our route along what had been the Via Egnatia led through the Albanian mountains and past the city of Elbasan. In Communist times Elbasan was a significant industrial center but we were told it was now struggling to adjust to Capitalist markets.  Arriving around lunch-time we first strolled through the narrow lanes of the old town, hidden behind an imposing section of the castle wall, in search of a house that had once belonged to an English expatriate, Margaret Hasluck. She had donated it to a local orphanage school when she left. We did eventually find the compound and somebody opened the gate for us so we could look at the church. A black robed priest, clearly suffering from Parkinson’s, was sitting in the sun outside.  He agreed to take us inside where like elsewhere in Albania the frescoes had been whitewashed by the Hoxha regime in its attempt to enforce the creation of the world’s first atheist nation. Whitewash contains acid and that was destroying the old paintings but unfortunately the current state had no money for restoration.  In an Albanian Italian, which Mark and another in our group jointly managed to more or less translate, the priest told us his story. His father was a specialist in Byzantine church music (he tried to play some to us but for unknown reasons the technology was not working). He himself had unfortunately grown up in a closed and antireligious country. Now at last the Albanian Orthodox Church had been able to reconstitute itself with some friendly help from the Greek Orthodox Church, which however, and he was firm on this point, remained a separate institution. Having your own national church was probably the best way for the Albanians to avoid Serbian or Bulgarian domination and keep out of the religious hostilities of the region. In conclusion the priest asked everyone for their names to see what saints we shared and of course there were several. Lunch was then in a lovely Muslim garden restaurant beside the old wall.

We arrived in Ohrid in the afternoon. You first look down on the huge shimmering pale blue lake that is half in Albania and half in Macedonia from the mountain above. Lake Ohrid is geologically the oldest lake in Europe and its shores have been inhabited since the Stone Age. It is mysteriously nourished through underground channels by the much higher and colder Lake Prespa, and its eco-system is reputedly unique. Its calm pale blue surface emits peace and inspires awe like few other places. Our hotel was across the road from the lake but outside the main town. The steep hillside at the rear upon which my room looked had evenly spaced old-growth pines with straight red stems that were set up like an exercise in meditation.

Saturday, 16^th September

Our morning with guide Ljupco began with a hike up the hill to the huge 11^th century Tsar Samuel fortress. After this came the large 11^th century  basilica church of Holy Wisdom, Saint Sofia, with its cupola fresco of angels circling the figure of Christ; further down there was the church of St Clement. The large excavation site we passed was closed at the time though you could admire mosaic floors from a distance. 

The saints of Ohrid are Clement and Naum who were both disciples of

Saints Cyril and Methodius: missionaries, linguists and educators who brought Christianity to the Slavs and first developed the Cyrillic alphabet, suited to rendering the peculiarities of the Slav language.  Clement and Naum too were educators. The first Slav university, the Ohrid Literary School, was their legacy. In contrast, the Serbian saints tend to be either Nemanja kings or heroic martyrs who have suffered frightful deaths. They derive from a militantly perceived world that seems to preempt the Turkish conquest; there is obviously a significant difference between these two traditions. Going back still further in time: Macedonia perceives itself as the gateway of Christianity into Europe because Saint Paul visited it on one of his early missionary journeys. A Roman Christian tradition long predating the Slavic saints would be shown to us at the Heraclea Lyncestis excavation site near Bitola.

Ljupco made sure that our luncheon salad today included the magnificent huge and dark red Ohrid tomatoes that were certainly tastier than any other I have had. A half hour cruise on the clear lake and around the picturesque promontory with St John’s church, often on guide book covers, was a beautiful experience.  Then with a rougher driver than Tony, who had his day off again, we hurried to the last Macedonian possession on this side of the lake, the monastery of St Naum. But we didn’t manage to beat the bridal party and that meant a long wait till a very long nuptial service had been sung to the last note. We therefore had time to enjoy the lake at just the spot where the freezing waters of Lake Prespa pour in, to watch two albino peacocks parading in the park, have a cup of coffee, eventually savor the halva which the wedding party was hospitably offering around and admire the exceptionally beautiful bride. Saint Naum is buried in a stone sarcophagus in a side chapel of the monastery church and we were told that if you place your left hand on the spot where his heart lies and put your ear down to the stone you may hear his heart beating and can tell him your wish.

When we got back to the hotel I took up Mark’s and Jamie’s suggestion and joined them for a sunset swim in the cool clear lake. And it felt just like a sacred lake should feel.

Sunday, 17^th September

Today we had a long day’s drive to Thessaloniki in Greece ahead of us. Bitola, an important Macedonian city and on its outskirts Heraclea Lyncestis were our half way stop.  It took perseverance to get to the excavation site without signage on badly maintained suburban roads, the final one with a telephone cable collapsed across it. Luckily Jamie was able to hold it up high enough so our bus could pass under. Though this was an exceptionally rich and potentially easily accessible site little had been done to protect it. As we wilted in the hot sun, our guide Victor, with his very substantial learning in early history, did his best to give us an understanding of the many layers of time and building techniques being brought to the surface here. He himself had recently discovered that his family, perhaps on both sides, were descendants of the Latin-speaking veterans of Roman legions that were settled here in early Christian times.

The showpiece of the site was a long mosaic floor depicting native trees and birds as well as wild animals that may still have roamed the mountains in those days. Victor interpreted it as an allegoric sequence that in its first section represented the fight of Christ the lion with the horned beast and later showed creatures drinking from the clear waters of the 23^rd psalm. While there were strong resemblances with the apparently merely decorative mosaic representations of mythic battles on the floors of the Macedonian palaces of Philip II’s time, which we were about to see, the mosaics here in Heraclea Lyncestis had been cautiously injected with a new meaning that at the time perhaps not everybody needed to know about.

Somebody asked Victor about Macedonian folk music and he took us up to the amphitheater where he quietly sang the pure version of one of the old songs to us.  It was infinitely superior to the CD we had played on the bus.

After lunch in Bitola we had a brief visit to the museum which was of particular interest to those who had travelled in Turkey because it had a section on the life of Kemal Ataturk, born in this town. There was also a rich archeological collection with some matriarchal representations that were new to me.

To come down from the Macedonian mountains to the plain of Thessaly required on estimate twenty tunnels before we reached the level of the well-watered and densely planted peach orchards. To our right in the distant haze we could vaguely discern Mount Olympus and in front of us cream-colored Thessaloniki was gradually rising from the ocean haze.

Monday, 18^th September

Vivienne our guide, who had the large beautiful eyes and triangular face of ancient Byzantine queens, was to show us Thessaloniki today. We started at the top of the town where there were still remnants of the walls and a view of the whole city. 70% of it had been destroyed by a great fire in 1917. Until then the population had consisted almost entirely of Sephardic Jews expelled by the Catholic monarchs of Spain in the late 15^th century. After Greece’s misguided and failed attempt to re-conquer Greek speaking pockets of Turkey, the expulsion of Greek citizens from Asia Minor, and soon after of Turkish citizens from Europe, caused huge and enormously disruptive population exchanges based solely on ethnic identity.  The Jews of Thessaloniki, for their part, were eventually all handed over to Hitler during WWII and it is believed none survived. For us, coming from a hitherto stable country, it was hard but instructive to visualize the turmoil and suffering that ideas like ethnic nationalism or racial inferiority could bring to a region. It was above all these tragedies that linked Thessaloniki with the Balkan countries through which we had been travelling. Today’s refugee problems are nothing new here.

Vivienne, however, preferred to concentrate on the town planning aspects of Thessaloniki’s history. Its protective walls, eventually sometimes managed by the private citizens themselves, had already been partly demolished by the Turks so that the city could grow. After the fire and the end of the war only few of the traditional houses were left and Thessaloniki was redesigned and beautified as a modern city. The extensive and newly planted bayside parklands we could see before us showed that the project of modernization and beautification was continuing.  We visited two large Orthodox churches. The martyrdom of Sancta Sofia, which had consisted in watching her three young daughters, Faith, Hope and Love being martyred, had been celebrated in the Sancta Sofia church the day before and was still attracting a crowd. There was a tub of basil for the worshippers to pick and take home in honor of that day. Otherwise the city’s museums, beginning with the old White Tower that now displayed the stages of the city’s history on its many increasingly airless floors, occupied most of the rest of our day. In the evening we had dinner on one of the city’s convivial squares, listened to the music and watched the couples and local families coming and going.

Tuesday, 19^th September

Next day we drove through the countryside north-west of the city to Pella, the birthplace of Alexander the Great. The celebrated Museum harbors some magnificent mosaics depicting mythical battles embellished with a border of floral ornaments. But uniquely, the shelves are also full of small figurines, ornaments and objects of daily use all depicting the lives of ordinary men, women and children; they were found in grave sites. There was, for example, a whole collection of hair styles women could choose from, there were the toys children played with, and the tools warriors required for their way of life, all things the owners must have thought might be useful in a life beyond. These people seemed to get by without anything we would recognize as religion. They appeared to want exactly the same life they had had up to now after death: no yearning for a better beyond. Vivienne was in her element here. In Ohrid our guide Ljupco had opined that the great Alexander was not the visionary of a united world, as some had claimed, but simply someone curious about what lay over the hill and with the means to find out.  Was this way of concentrating on daily life and practical use without looking for transcendence or meaning less destructive than the religious life?

In Pella there were also the remnants of what was probably Philip’s ancient Macedonian palace with its mosaics. We then drove on to another nearby village, Vergina, where the grave mounds of Philip II and his grandson Alexander III with all their tomb wares had been turned into a museum and made accessible to the public.  Some of these objects were of extraordinary beauty, in particular the ceremonial crowns and wreaths made of the plentiful local river gold apparently easily caught on sheep’s fleeces. Philip, it was discovered, had worn his crown on the funeral pyre and it was apparently not removed before suffering some slight damage. 

Wednesday, 20^th September

We drove back into Macedonia by the more northerly route along the Vardar valley after which some think the young nation should be named Vardar-Macedonia. The name Macedonia has traditionally designated a fairly large region but the Greeks want it to be reserved exclusively for the province situated in their section of greater Macedonia. The reason for this passionate campaign as a result of which Greece has been vetoing the entrance of the Republic of Macedonia into NATO is apparently Greece’s insistence on exclusive ownership of the heritage of Alexander the Great.  To pick this conqueror and squanderer of human lives, as some have seen him, as your representative figure, when you have Homer and the dramatists and the great philosophers to choose from is one thing. But to define your identity on the basis of exclusive ownership, though not unusual in political argument, seems at least as problematic. And if you take into account both that Macedonia conquered Greece and that Greece in the person of Aristotle was Alexander’s tutor it becomes complicated. While it can obviously be confusing to have two places of the same name, we know that Philip’s Macedonia stretched well into the present Republic and that must give it some historical entitlement. Would the conflict be easier to resolve if it was just a matter of who registered the name first, or whether a country has superior rights over a province?

The Vardar river waters fertile agricultural land, and its vineyards are respected by wine-lovers.  Our lunch was a wine-tasting at a large state-of-the–art  wine-maker near Stobi. Stobi is another extensive excavation site which, with the help of American money, attracts archeology students world-wide each year. Much of the work is tedious. The better mosaics, for example, are covered with centimeters of sand in the winter and that has to be removed again once the tourist season starts. While I did not catch everything our guide Petar told us, he did say that they found evidence of a lot of gambling.  It was probably those retired legionnaires who had not settled down well to sedentary life.

We arrived in Macedonia’s ancient and yet very new looking capital Skopje in the late afternoon. This needs some explanation. In Skopje’s vicinity there are a number of small rivers that almost immediately combine to form the Vardar and while Skopje’s wealth of water has benefits, it also exacerbates the earthquakes that derive from its underlying fault-line. The last devastating earthquake to hit Skopje occurred as recently as 1963, the year my third daughter was born, and it destroyed 80% of the city. Our guide, Radmila, would tell us next day that it came at a fortunate time, in the summer holidays when many people had left town. Though it only had a magnitude of 6.9 on the Richter scale and lasted for no more than 20 seconds, it destroyed 80% of the town. Over 1000 people were killed, 3000 injured and 200,000 people were left homeless. In the wake of this catastrophe, city planners had to take into consideration the significant likelihood of such an event happening again at any time. So they decided that the new buildings should not be too tall. Planners also took into account the multicultural mix of the city and realized the benefits of settling Albanians, Gypsies, Jews, Muslims, Orthodox Christians etc.  in ethnic or religious neighborhoods or communities where they would make friends and give support to each other. This approach has its risks; Radmila said the city has just had to agree to build a Skanderbeg square for the Albanians who were feeling neglected.

But in the “Skopje 2014” project city planning has gained another dimension and is attempting to replace less tangible losses. Typical historical buildings were reimagined, with exaggerated height, shimmering marble, columns and fountains.  There is even a triumphal arch. Wide pedestrian zones were dignified with statues that recalled a worthwhile and interesting past, now no longer lost in the rubble.  One statue-lined bridge commemorates statesmen, churchmen and other leading public figures back to earliest times, another artists, poets, musicians and actors. Partisans are honored, as are the charitable, here of course first and foremost Mother Theresa who was born in the city.

The historicist aesthetics of the project have been criticized by modernists and people of good taste but the whole point of these works is to retrieve history in a way that is dignified and naturalistic and therefore easily accessible to people of different backgrounds. That includes the proletariat Tito’s socialist regime championed within recent memory and the city’s many ethnic groups. Some of the statues too are ridiculously oversized, perhaps to create a hierarchy of importance in which allusions to the family of Philip II of Macedonia, for whom of course Greece has claimed ownership rights, are unmistakable. Connoisseurs of art shake their heads. But the people of Skopje do go walking over these squares and bridges, they show them off to visitors and maybe laugh. It is all a bit over the top but it’s not embarrassing: a theme park maybe, and a very costly and post-modern one at that, but what’s wrong with a theme park? There is a sense of carpe diem in the hectic pace at which art is created here; make the best of the time you have before the next disaster hits! Archaeological excavations can wait a bit longer. Skopje 2014 does not compete with Macedonia’s superb excavation sites; it complements them by resurrecting the players.

For those still on the streets at dusk the first of a series of restaurant boats has been moored in the river just near our hotel; they are to create opportunities to eat out and develop a novel if slightly corny culture of good living. The town planners are obviously making sure that people in this city will not dwell on their losses and tourists will not by-pass the city. And they are probably hoping that teachers will set their students projects on the statues on the bridges so their heritage becomes a talking point. You can talk about statues, statues stand for people and it is people who make a country. Someone with us remarked on the friendliness of the people of Skopje, the good mood of the city. People have fun in theme parks and tourists are attracted. (There is also no reason why a new generation should not one day produce new and “better” art, if only in protest against what is there at the moment. It’s what new generations have always done.)

Thursday, 21^st September

When we joined Radmila for the inevitable trek to the fortress next morning a dozen dogs also showed up. She explained that the city was solving its problem with strays by neutering them and then releasing the unaggressive ones back onto the streets with yellow tags in their ears. People fed them and in return the dogs had taken to shepherding the tourist groups. The dog that adopted us looked just like the Australian Shepherd my son’s family had just bought; after a while when it realized we were compliant it switched to a bigger and more straggly group.

Some of the old parts of town had survived the earthquake, in particular another of those beautiful mosques with their clear architectural lines and delicately applied tracery of vines and flowers characteristic of this region, also the Church of the Holy Savior with its celebrated iconostasis carved from walnut wood. This church was built quite low to comply with Turkish government rules of the day. For though the Muslim conquerors did not prohibit Christian observance outright, its inferior status was made tangible and audible with low height, no church steeples and no bells to summon the faithful. Today the 300 years of Turkish occupation, tyranny and exploitation of the Balkan states is no longer actively resented but presented to the visitor as simply another layer of culture belonging with another respected religion. Skopje still has an interesting Muslim bazaar and we had our dinner that evening in what was once a caravanserai.

After seeing the city we then drove up cross-crowned Mount Vodno (not surprisingly Vodno means water) that rises steeply behind it to the 12^th  century Orthodox church of Saint Panteleimon high on the wooded slope. It was built in the hope of healing a sick child. The saint venerated here was a gifted healer who always donated his services to the sick. For once we could photograph the profusion of superb Byzantine frescoes and so remember them better.

On the way down the mountain Mark took the opportunity to tease Radmila about Skopje’s sneaky theft of “Greek” heroes like Philip II and Alexander the Great,  or ethnically Albanian Mother Theresa, all represented in giant but vaguely labeled statues.  Her response is worth recording: The Vardar valley, part of Philip’s Macedonia, had always been at the center of trading routes.  Three major Roman roads were accessible here, the Via Egnatia which we travelled on being one, and along these roads the legions and the merchants with the supplies they required moved, linking Rome in the west and Constantinople in the east. Similar to its trading partner Dubrovnik, Macedonia has always been a place of movement, of commerce, influence and exchange, a multicultural place. Unlike Greece, Skopje did not define itself in terms of cultural possessions anxiously guarded but as a place that was open to the world.  The intention was not to contest Greece’s ownership. What Skopje was displaying was the people and influences that had passed through; that was in its way as legitimate a self-definition as one of ethnic or cultural possession, and perhaps a friendlier one too. Against all the odds Skopje had survived where other Roman towns along the route left only excavation sites; whatever the changing borders of Macedonia might be, Skopje had a right and a responsibility to commemorate and continue this history.

Friday, 22^nd September

The next stage of our trip required a little maneuvering for we were to drive through Kosovo, which Serbia prefers to call “Old Serbia” and claims as its possession, while most countries, including Macedonia, have accepted the province’s declaration of independence. Though the quickest way would have been to cross straight into Kosovo, it was prudent to go the detour via Serbia. That Serbian border crossing was then the first and only one on this trip where we had to vacate the bus so it could be searched and present our passports individually. We might have expected this; even travelers from a century ago like Edith Durham told of Serbia’s paranoid suspiciousness of foreigners. In this case what the authorities feared was probably simply that we could be smuggling in asylum seekers. It should be said that the border guards were hospitable enough to let us use their toilets while we were waiting.

The Kosovo plain we drove through still showed the scars of war and at times looked unrepaired and untended.  We stopped at the famous Gracanica Monastery church with its particularly intricate five cupola, many arched design and its wealth of frescoes. This included a family tree of the “sacrosanct” Nemanja royal family who built this and other famous and still revered Serbian monasteries. Unfortunately the guide there was awaiting a school group and we had to be satisfied with a brief inspection; an illustrated book put together by the nuns was however available at the kiosk and could substitute. Our next stop was Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, a chaos of too many cars and undisciplined drivers. This was not surprising, as the population here is mainly Albanian and we had experience of Albanian drivers. After the recent war the city was rebuilt with overseas assistance and it has attracted some daring architecture.  We walked up and down the over-wide main pedestrian area culminating in another Skanderbeg equestrian statue and had a quick lunch on the way. Driving back into Serbia we were appalled that for kilometers the roadside had been used as a dump. By whom?

The road now took us through lovely very hilly, partly wooded, partly agricultural country till we finally reached the famous Studenica monastery in its secluded valley with its two white marble churches in the center of a walled complex. Just outside was a guest house that offered accommodation: small monastic rooms with worn and somewhat ragged grey blankets on the bed, a table and chair for study, and a good en suite bathroom.  The local fish we were served for dinner by the officiating monks was particularly tasty.

Saturday, 23rd September

At five in the morning Jamie and I went to listen to morning prayers being sung in the dark little church, a chant of extraordinary purity that seemed to emanate from a reassuring region between the divine and the earthly where you were at home in both. At one stage I left the church for a moment to cough outside, found another of our group and brought her inside. As though that were all part of the plan.  Later waiting for breakfast we met a young Melbourne man from a Serbian family who had taken to spending his annual holidays at one or other of these ancient Orthodox monasteries.

On arriving last night we had been welcomed by the prior of the monastery. He now had the title of Father and had ritually changed his name, choosing Agape, the Greek word for unselfish love. We were expecting him to show us round the two churches that morning but he had organized for a young guide, Alexander, to replace him. We were told that the founder of Medieval Serbia, Stefan Nemanja, had built the Studenica church in 1190 before handing over to his son, the first king, and then following his soon to be sainted son Sava, the first Serbian archbishop, to Mount Athos. There Stefan consumed only the sacrament for the last weeks of his life (which is probably why he died, added Alexander under his breath). After his death Stefan Nemanja became a saint taking the name of Simonides and his relics were transferred to Studenica. His wife Ana also retired to a convent when her husband left her and was belatedly sainted late last century under the name of Anastasia. Serbian women donated great quantities of their jewelry to create a beautifully wrought sarcophagus for her which was now in this church. Alexander showed it to us. We were also told about another royal wife, Queen Simonida, the daughter of the Byzantine emperor Andronicus II Palaiologus. At the age of five she was sent to be one of the wives of King Milutin, obviously a political marriage, and was then never able to conceive because Milutin had insisted on sleeping with her at far too early an age. She too eventually entered a convent and was revered as holy. Because of his sin Milutin was not sainted but he went on to build many monasteries, the last and most perfect Gracanica which we had visited the day before; he is referred to simply as “holy king”. Milutin also became known as “the insatiable builder of divine temples”. The monograph on Gracanica tells us: “His marriage to the Byzantine Emperor’s daughter led to a severance of relations with the West and an increasing imitation of Byzantine court customs, institutions, ranks, and titles, as well as strengthening of the central government and the use of a mercenary army.” Milutin’s extraordinary riches derived from seven large gold and silver mines he controlled. Listening to Alexander’s sometimes tongue in cheek account I wondered how differently Milutin might be judged had he lived in our time when this mixture of religion, politics and child abuse leaves most of us uncomfortable. (Milutin had also fought a civil war with his brother and rival King Dragutin whom the Greek church initially favored; riches are always a big advantage.)  Unfortunately the frescoes in the Studenica church have been systematically chipped in what was apparently a mistaken preliminary to restoration.

Our first stop was then another Nemanja monastery and church, Zica, this time founded by King Stefan The First-Crowned, brother of Saint Sava. It became the site where Serbian kings were crowned.  As there was a baptism being conducted at the time we contented ourselves with seeing the church from the outside.

By late lunchtime we were in Kraljevo where Mark knew of an upper floor balcony restaurant from which we had a beautiful view over the town’s large square with its central rifle and bayonet bearing WWI hero and the mountains behind. We were now headed for the border and the famous bridge over the Drina at Visegrad in Bosnia, celebrated in Ivo Andric’s chronicle that is compulsory reading in Serbian schools. Unusually, the bridge has a central kapia, a two-sided platform with inbuilt seats, that encouraged those passing from the Muslim bank and those from the Christian bank to take time to chat, get to know each other and discuss the town’s business. Both Hannah and Jenke told me it was their favorite book. Driving on, we had somewhere passed an unspecific sign indicating a detour but no one seemed to take any notice and so we continued.  A considerable way further a high bridge spanning a gorge turned out to be under repair. The cars in front had turned down a steep track which was probably the old road. Fortunately we were not too far down when there was a halt; apparently a truck had got stuck. Everyone started to do precarious turns to come back up and our bus followed suit, the only moment, Mark later admitted, when he was genuinely afraid.  Where to now? The next border crossing would take us three or four extra hours and it was now well into the afternoon.  Luckily Tony got talking to a local driver who said you could get back onto the road on tracks through the mountains. He agreed to show us the way and for the next half hour Tony could demonstrate all his driving skills and the little Mercedes bus rose and dipped as the occasion demanded while we held our breath and got a glimpse of forest and remote and picture-book farming country in the afternoon sunshine.  And to everyone’s relief the maze of tracks eventually did lead back to the highway.  The border guards deep down by the river were then relatively friendly (perhaps due to a reduced work load) and we could drive on through the wild mountains of the Dinaric Alps, our road running halfway between the river far below and the high ridges. It led us through thirty or so tunnels.  No wonder the next border crossing would have been such a detour.  After the last tunnel Tony needed a rest according to very sensible EU rules so we hung around the little service station, the only spot to park, for a while. But we still managed to see Visegrad with its beautiful eleven arched 16^th century “bridge over the Drina” before dark and missed only the last section of the way to Sarajevo. There the poor cook in our hotel had waited back to serve us our dinner.

Sunday, 24^th September

In the morning we first climbed to the roof of our hotel from where we had a view over the city and the ring of mountains around it. From these mountains the Yugoslavs had besieged and shelled Sarajevo for four whole years during which the peace-keeping United Nations took no action while 11,000 Sarajevo  citizens were killed. I had read Zlata’s Diary and we later saw the as yet unrepaired bullet holes in the buildings. Since it was Sunday and most of the sites we had expected to see were closed, our young guide Hassan took us out to the Tunnel Museum beside the airport first. By the time we got there it was completely overrun by tourists who obviously had all come up against similar problems; but we did eventually manage to get in.

A family with a house near the airport had made it available to the town and from there a tunnel under the airport into friendly territory was hand-dug in four months. At the time the airport could not be shelled because it was held by the United Nations. Through that tunnel, too low for a man to stand upright, everything the town needed including electricity, water, medicine and food would be carried or passed for the next three and a half years in an extraordinary effort of community solidarity.  The museum showed photos and films and displayed rudimentary equipment; a small section of the tunnel had also been retained so that visitors could experience it themselves. Hassan was born after the war but he had grown up with his father’s accounts of those days.

Back in town we walked first through the Christian section with its stately Austrian style buildings, many of them still unrepaired and somewhat neglected looking, saw the unlikely spot where the First World War had, so to speak, begun when the Austrian Crown Prince and his wife were assassinated by Gavriel Princip, and looked at the Muslim precinct with mosque, baths and bazaar. We tried some burek in a former caravanserai and then some of us made our way back to the hotel on our own (which due to sketchy instructions and faulty memories took far longer in the heat than it should have). Though I wasn’t always able to concentrate on Hassan’s message,  it seemed that he saw trade and the city’s generous hospitality to merchants and travellers of all kinds to be at the center of Sarajevo’s multicultural tolerance and economic success. That night we had our slightly premature farewell dinner at another old caravanserai. It seemed flooded with the amazing voice of its singer.

Monday, 25^th September

This was our last travelling day.  The three hour drive through Herzegovina to Mostar with the dark green Neretva river below and the ever more grey and antediluvian karst-like mountains above was of extraordinary beauty.  Mostar, a largely Muslim town, much like Sarajevo the victim of the combined rage of Serbians, Montenegrins and Croatians at the break-up of greater Yugoslavia, had by now been largely repaired with UNESCO’s assistance. That Christian helpers had replaced the shelled church with a ridiculously high tower to outdo any minaret and also planted a huge cross on the mountain behind suggested that they had still not understood the message these successful multi-cultural towns could teach.

Our young guide Farouk gave us a comic description of the encounter of the conquering Turks with the Slavic farmers of the area: Why should we turn Muslim? - Your taxes will be lower. - That’s good. But we have vineyards; we  are wine makers. That’s how we make our living. - Well maybe if you just make wine but don’t drink it …. ? – And don’t sell it? … Farouk then took us to a mosque which had a frieze of grape vines painted amateurishly on the wall. Near the far wall was a little table with stools. These were, he said, intended for the quiet confession of sins, the sins of inevitable compromise. With God rather than a priest listening, for Muslims don’t have priests, these sins would perhaps not be considered all that formidable.

Farouk’s second lesson concerned the endless string of young heroes willing to risk their lives to leap from the high-arched and singularly beautiful Mostar bridge. Many of them, he warned, had not taken into account the freezing temperature of the water, or its currents, or its insufficient depth, or the many other hazards he listed. As we stood there looking, another hero was being taken off for advice and training. We walked on through the bazaar to an old Muslim home built overlooking the river. It had a courtyard with river pebble mosaics, a well and fruit trees. Inside, the carpeted and cushioned men’s sitting room with its many windows looking out onto the river was of such simple warmth, comfort and dignity that you felt like relaxing and staying. The Muslim living spaces we saw in the Balkans were mostly like that, inspired by a deeply humane view of life and community. According to some, many of the early Muslim converts from Christianity in Bosnia-Herzegovina were Bogomils who had escaped from Bulgaria where they were being persecuted by the church. They were an early heretical Christian sect with a Manichean philosophy.  According to their beliefs the physical world would have been nothing but the realm of the devil to be abjured as purely evil. One wonders if many of these so-called Christians might have experienced the Mohammedan faith as a welcome relief from such a depressing view of life and whether this made them more than usually receptive for the joys of daily living once they were safely converted. - Later when we were having lunch at a restaurant overlooking the river we saw the hero jump and survive. Thank goodness.

Some time after leaving Mostar we crossed into Croatia and could soon look down on a rich and well watered agricultural plain. Further on, when we got to the coast, there were islands and long spits of land sheltering the bays much of the way. In Ston we stopped to taste the famous oysters (which were unusually salty) and marvel at the five kilometers of wall running up the hill: after China’s wall reputedly the longest in the world. We saw the old salt pans, watched the market between the square old limestone buildings close down, and prepared ourselves for the end of the trip. But before reaching our initial starting point we had two more borders to cross, in and out of Bosnia-Herzegovina through that anomalous little strip of Neum. However the guards knew Tony and waved us through. Now we were almost back in Dubrovnik, just one last dinner together. By that time Tony and the bus had returned to the depot.

In the back of my mind as I travelled through this so frequently troubled region was always Amin Maalouf’s long essay On Identity with its passionate plea to recognize that individuals within a society have complex identities and should be allowed to acknowledge and live with all their affiliations rather than having to adopt the tribal identity of the society in which they are living. For tribal identities are far too readily pitted belligerently against the tribal identities of other groups. Maalouf writes from a very personal point of view; he sees himself as both a Lebanese and a Frenchman, a Christian Melchite (somewhere between Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy) and a modern man of no organized religion, a native speaker of Arabic and a successful novelist living in France and writing in French. Most Balkan countries we passed through now seemed to be learning the lesson he is trying to teach: of complex individual identity and its mediating influence. They were certainly emphasizing their multi-culturalism.

But Maalouf’s essay does not really examine the complexity of national identity, what it means to feel “French” or “Serbian”, or that these are ultimately complex ethical concepts that must be worked on by the nations concerned.  Nor does it acknowledge that the stability of nations, and particularly young nations, depends in part on their ability to develop and then project an image with which their populations are happy to identify and which will distinguish them from their neighbors while not pitting them against these.

Where, as in the case of the former Yugoslavia, an apparently homogenized confederation of states breaks up dramatically, be it because of the death of an irreplaceable leader, or changed economic circumstances, or an inequitable distribution of power between the constituent republics, or because cohesion was achieved artificially and old differences have not been settled, or because the political ideology has changed, or because a trouble-maker has gained power, or for any other reason, it is particularly important that the separate states put time and imagination into defining the identities of the individual communities they have chosen to be. And if the criteria are not to be racial or nationalist, they must presumably be ethical.

This, in my view, was the stage many of the Balkan states were at when we visited them, a stage when a new generation has gained influence, when tourism is flourishing in what are now accessible and welcoming countries, when tour guides have a prominent position and can be at the forefront of the national consciousness, and when interested tourists are likely to be attentive and constructive questioners and listeners. And currently tourism is, as we saw, the dominant industry in many of these Balkan states for a good seven months of the year. Our group was privileged to be listeners and sometimes questioners.

Appendix:

The following, or something similar, is a questionnaire one could imagine being put to senior students in some of the Balkan states that have insisted on the separate individuality of their identity.

1. What do you perceive as your ethnicity? Does it differ from that of your neighbors? Is it  determined by race, customs, looks, habits, mythology, past history or other things?

2. Would you prefer your national community to be inclusive, selective or homogeneous?

3. How do you see your nation’s international role? As a leader, regulator, beneficiary, raider, advisor, competitor, contributor?

4. What events and personalities in your nation’s history do you identify with? Which do you deplore?

5. What is your attitude to your land? Custodian, owner, exploiter, transformer, modernizer?

6. Is there a political ideology you could identify with?

7. Would you prefer your country to have one religion, a variety of religions, or no religion?

8. Are there historical traditions you would like to see continued?

9. What are the three qualities you most admire: creativity, loyalty, kindness, consistency, toughness, pride, industriousness, innovativeness, obedience, initiative, hospitality, honor, responsibility, or any other?

10. Rank the ten commandments in order of importance:

Have no other God

Do not take the name of God in vain

Keep holy the Sabbath

Make yourself no image

Honor father and mother

Do not commit adultery

Do not kill

Do not steal

Do not bear false witness

Do not covet your neighbor’s wife or possessions

11. Are there grudges you bear other Balkan states? What are they? Can they be remedied?

12. What are the disasters you most fear?

13. What languages should be used in your country?

14. What do you see as your state’s primary responsibilities?

15. What is your attitude to English/American modernity?

16. Do you think membership of the EU can a) create a bond between Balkan states, b) assist them economically, c) integrate them into Europe, or d) be a threat to their culture?

17. How do you react to people who are racially or ethnically different?

18. Describe the culture of your country in three words.