Borders

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.