Shot/Seen

On the Turkish-Greek border

There’s no evidence in my passport that I’ve ever been to Macedonia or Bosnia.

For two days, I had a Macedonia entry stamp, on a loose piece of thick paper a border guard had tucked into my passport, but when we rolled out of Macedonia and into Serbia, they took it away.

When we entered Bosnia at Metković, a pleasant young uniformed woman walked through the bus and gave each passport only a quick glance. It was the same when we left, near Bijeljina: quick glance, no stamp.

In four weeks, we crossed borders seven times, stopped twice each time – once to exit the current country and then, anywhere from seconds to long minutes later, to enter the next. We never had a problem, but others did. Leaving Macedonia, an overly-made-up 20-something in short skirt and towering heels, who had ridden with us since Skopje, was last seen talking earnestly to a border guard as the bus pulled away. Entering Croatia, a young man was led off the bus but he made it back.

Border crossings are signs of change, proof you are moving, trading what’s been seen for new territory. There’s excitement in entering a never-visited country. Although the surrounding landscape rarely changes, it seems fresh because it is unseen. It is almost ceremonial to present your passport, be scrutinized and to get the stamp. (Travelling by bus and train, you lose the ceremony: a conductor, driver or a border guard collects all passports and hauls them off to a room, which we could sometimes see into, to be quickly paged through and thumped with largely illegible entry or exit stamps.)

Our crossings were efficient and smooth. If there was a common mood, it was boredom, either on the part of officials (such as the bored and unhappy woman who took my 60 Euros and pasted the Turkish visa into my passport) or on ours (staring at the institutional scenery of a crossing for the 10, 20 or 30 minutes it took to process a busload of passports).

Two crossings stand out.

We went into Montenegro, near Gostun, in dark, early morning hours. Because of construction further down the road, the Montenegran border guards were temporarily housed in a large shack on the side of a narrow road in a steep-walled mountain pass, well away from any town or village. From the bus, I watch four uniformed men, sitting at a picnic table, in a pool of a halogen streetlight, process the passports. It is a wonderful scene, straight from a ‘60s east-vs-west spy movie, but there was a large sign banning photography and I didn’t risk it.

Days earlier, also in pre-dawn hours, we passed from Turkey into Greece by train. The customs house was a large, rambling wooden building, its windows largely dark. But at the far end of the station, in a smaller, separate building, a large, electric sign glowed, and bright light spilled from an open, welcoming door.

It was a duty-free shop, which I presume had been opened at 4:45 a.m. for our train, especially to sell alcohol and cartons of cigarettes.

Entering Greece by train at 3:30 a.m.

At first, Mostar’s war wounds are fascinating. Walk down a street, and it can be almost any street, and you are confronted with the walls of homes and businesses, still peppered with holes created by light and heavy arms fire.

This Bosnian city is, of course, most famous for its bridge, the Stari Most, an elegant arch over the Neretva River. It was built in the 16th century, pounded to rubble by Croatian Defense Council artillery in 1993, and reconstructed, largely thanks to outside money, and reopened in 2004. It is truly a wonder.

Mosques and churches have also been rebuilt or repaired. Along the cobbled streets that lead to and from the Stari Most, the bazaar of souvenir stands (souvenirs include pens made from bullet casings, in a variety of calibres), cafes and restaurants has re-emerged from carnage.

But those bullet holes are pointers to a sobering part of the reality of Mostar.

It doesn’t take long for the initial fascination with the reminders of the too-recent war – the sense of being in touch with history – to turn to a powerful feeling that’s akin to despair. After a while, almost all you see are the scars, the holes punched through thick stone walls, the condemned ruins that were blasted almost to bits.

I don’t want you to take this wrong. Mostar is a lovely small city. The rebuilt bridge is a marvel. And despite the bullet and shell holes and whatever psychic wounds they carry, the people we spoke with are relaxed and friendly, with a tremendous sense of humour.

There’s one building in particular, three storeys tall and covering half a city block, one street above the tourist-heavy market street. Former building, I should say, for while its walls still stand, its interior is a mangled crush of wood, bricks and mortar. It looks like someone has painted red around the gaping, glassless windows to suggest the flames that must have once raged.

You can see the savagery of the destruction clearly from across the street, from a concrete bench in what used to be a park. It is still green and flowered, but now the flowers are on row after row of closely fitted clean, white gravestones. On every one of them, the date of death is 1993.

(Second in a series of short photo-and-word essays that arise from four weeks of travel through the Balkans.)

There are many strikingly attractive women in Belgrade. They work hard at it, according to Katharina, my informant on Serbian matters. They have to, because there are three (or four or five) women for every man here. Looking good is competitive.

(In Banja Luka, the capital of Republika Srbska in poor, divided Bosnia, the ratio is apparently 7:1, but I didn’t go there so cannot attest to the beauty of Bosnian Serb women.)

It’s not just the young women in their tight jeans and stiletto heels, though. Genetics are at play: there are also many beautiful older Serbian women on the streets and in the cafes of Belgrade.

I have no comment on the beauty of the men. The young ones, of which there are many, are still in the process of being formed. As for the older men, I was distracted by the women with them. When it comes to the men of Serbia, you’ll have to go look for yourself.

(This is the first in what I hope will be a series of short essays, written as the result of four weeks of travelling through southeast Europe.)