That for me was the best summary of the Balkan conflicts, and why it was so difficult to resolve.Located in the centre of Skopje and close to many restaurants and pubs, Hotel Tim′s offer 24-hour front desk and modern rooms with free high-speed optic WiFi. Speaking about how mixed the Balkan countries were… with Croats, Serbs and Bosnians living in Bosnia Herzegovina under a complicated federal system… the Bosnians in Novi Pazar… the Serbians in Kosovo… people having to go back and forth between countries for education, work, to see family… I shared my observation with one of them: “It’s like there are no borders. In the evening we met up with her friends at a cool studenty bar. With its chaos, the condition of its buildings and its roads - some of which were still not tarmacked - Pristina felt more like a city in a third world country than in Europe.Īs it happens, at the hotel we met another Swedish girl, Emma, who was living at the hotel whilst doing an internship at Cultural Heritage without Borders. We were finally in Europe’s newest country, which had declared its independence in Feb 2008. “Kosovo!” we both said, standing by the side of the road where the minibus had dropped us off. We were surprised that the officer checking our passports at the Kosovo border was Swedish, and he was surprised to see a fellow Swede.īy the time we arrived in Pristina, it was light, and we were shattered and happy. We also saw some buildings with bullet holes (but not as many as in Mostar) and cemeteries where death dates on gravestones were between 19.įrom Sarajevo Elisabeth and I took an overnight bus to Novi Pazar in Serbia, from where we got a minibus to Pristina, Kosovo, in the middle of the night. It seemed to be a meeting point for the eccentric people of Sarajevo. It was a place you would expect to see in Paris. In the evening we went to one called Zlatna Ribica, which was cluttered with antique furniture. I also met a religious guy from Turkey going to university there - given that Turkey had larger and more internationally renowned universities, I thought it was a curious choice to study in Sarajevo. Pointing at a rundown sweetshop, one of them was sharing her childhood memories. Walking on the main pedestrianised street, I overheard the conversation of two elderly ladies in western clothes, complaining about how more women now were covered than in the past. The old town had been renovated with donations from conservative cities in Turkey, and resembled an Anatolian town rather than a Balkan one.
There were signs that Sarajevo was once upon a time more multicultural than it was now. It was moving to notice that almost all people had died in 1992, during the war. That night we also came across our first cemetery in former Yugoslavia. By the time we reached the top we started hearing voices and felt it was better to come back in daytime. As we climbed the stairs, it became darker and more precarious. There were also holes in the floors and no handrails on the stairs. The floors were covered in debris and broken glass. We couldn’t tell whether the walls had been blown out or construction had never been completed. It was actually just the shell of a building.
This was the building from which snipers fired on people during the war. On the way to the hostel, the owner who came to pick us up, pointed at a tall building, saying, “That’s the snipers’ building.”Īfter dropping off our bags, that was the first place went to. She invited me to join her at the hostel she was going to stay at. To which she replied: “From Herzegovina.”īefore we arrived in Mostar, I started talking to Elisabeth, a journalist from Sweden who was sitting behind me. On the minibus I asked the local girl sitting next to me whether she was from Bosnia or Croatia. It was when the minibus crossed the border into Bosnia-Herzegovina that the journey really began.
Split was a pleasant Mediterranean town with a white Roman Palace in its centre. From Zadar by minibus, via Split, I first went to Mostar.
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