Road trip (Balkans)

A road trip means setting off with only a rough route in my head, no clear destination, certainly no reservations or predetermined stops. A road trip means surrendering to surprise, enjoying mistakes, trusting the unknown, falling in love with chance, discovering whatever happens to appear in front of me. It means the joy of the moment, the freedom of the road, the smells and the colors, the strangers, the rivers, the gorges, the passports and the gas stations, the cheap rooms and cigarette butts in bottles with a little water left in the car, the foreign-language radio stations and the miles on roads away from the highways.

This road trip, however, had two wishes from the very beginning. One had to do with a brass music festival held in a small village in Serbia, and the other with the story I will tell you below.

A private story, written because of an extreme public historical moment.

In the 1990s, the war in the former Yugoslavia and its atrocities filled our screens and our lives with sorrow and anger over a tragedy that left behind corpses, civilians homeless and without a country, small children orphaned, and a reminder that humans—regardless of religion or color—are the most savage beings on the planet.

On a personal level, at that time I was having children; I was pregnant—I remember carrying my daughter when I saw the bombings in Mostar and the frenzied destruction of that bridge. Surely, symbolically, its collapse—after sixty bombs—was no accident. It was what united people, even if they belonged to different religions.

So, in Mostar, two little boys had been born who, in ’92 (the bridge fell in November ’93), lost their father at the age of thirty-three. Their mother grabbed them and fled to a nearby village so they would be safer. They went to Nevesinje as refugees, stayed there for two years, and in ’95—strangers in their own land, with no belongings at all—they left for Bileća, a village outside the immediate war zone. Our stories intersected when, through a support program, I adopted those two little boys and a little girl. We began exchanging letters, each of us writing in our own language, which were translated back and forth by the women who accompanied the aid—taking money, clothes, and toys to the children. In every letter, my little Neb included the outline of his tiny hand. The years passed for all of us, as years always do.

While emptying my house, I found the letters and decided to look for them. I hesitantly sent messages through Facebook to anyone with that name, asking whether they had ever had any connection to Greece. I truly didn’t know how to say it. And then, two days later, I received a reply—in the form of a photograph. My own letters, which, through the displacements of war, had been preserved, as he told me, like a talisman, carried from city to city.

Those boys—now the same age as my own children—are the reason I came: to see them, and to see their mother too, who is the same age as me.

I don’t know if there is anything greater than a human ENCOUNTER, one that transcends languages, religions, borders, differences.

We met at the village gas station like a family—truly, that was the feeling. We spoke through embraces, tears, a few words of English, and whatever else they knew and I knew. Every so often we held hands across the table, as if trying to grasp the moment. Both children—now men—studied and work, just as their mother still works. The past will run through their lives like an iron crowbar, but life is here, and it goes on.

For this meeting, then, we crossed North Macedonia and arrived in a paradise in central Serbia, in Mokra Gora—a paradise of fir trees and endless green, farmhouses nestled in the forest, a wooden train from the 1800s wheezing its way through the mountains, sweet, gentle people, colors, and a kind of silence cities have forgotten. Alongside all this, the village built by Kusturica for the needs of a film, now hosting artists from all over the world in a regime of freedom and order—a magical combination. Its name is Kustendorf, with squares named after Mikhalkov, graffiti of Dostoevsky, and photographs of Bergman and Che. These are the hidden joys of a road trip.

And then Guca, for the Balkan brass celebration. Guca—a small village that, for three days, is flooded by brass bands from all over the world. Roma with horses and carts, and musicians from across Serbia competing in its festival. There are no hotels in the village. How can one possibly convey the sounds, the sensations, the sudden encounters with people, the unfamiliar languages that never become a barrier to communication, the joy music gives, the shared dish of food cooked at three in the morning in a large cauldron in the field where you sleep in your tent, the human need to shake off all the ugliness, the gloom, the betrayal, the hardships, and—even if only for a while—to reconnect with the hope of joy? In this village, which for three days a year dances, drinks, grills, shelters people from all over the world in nonexistent infrastructure, opening homes, courtyards, and fields, guided by the Dionysian sound of brass coming from everywhere.

Then Sarajevo—a city that could be just another beautiful European city, with its bridges, its market, its stunning old houses, its river—if death had not saturated its atmosphere.

Built among mountains, the first thing you see when arriving from Serbia is, on your right, a vast hill covered with graves—and the same sight appears when leaving toward Croatia at the city’s exit.

The city where a church, a mosque, and a synagogue stand together on the same block has paid the price of terror, and despite all efforts at forgetting, it is all still here.

I am not an expert; I am probably historically ignorant, yet my soul felt heavy, even as teenagers dance in the streets and in the bars until morning.

That was my feeling, and that is what I can offer as testimony about an apparently beautiful city that could have been “Switzerland” if neutral, colorless, cold blood flowed through its veins.

What would life be without disorder and mistakes? Boring, I always answered, even as a child, though I barely understood the word. And so, leaving Sarajevo, I thought the GPS was suffocating me, that I would surely find a route more compatible with my character—and of course, we got lost. And rightly so. We found ourselves inside an unbelievable forest, with buildings from the Tito era, in the Dinaric Alps. We found a tavern with local music and campers, then took a dirt road toward nowhere, with the GPS stubbornly silent. And there, in the middle of the absolute forest, a young couple hiking the mountains—who spoke English—informed us that where we were headed there were still landmines left over from the war. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the road trip rocks.

Leaving Bosnia and Herzegovina, we descended into Croatia and Dubrovnik (you know it now from Game of Thrones), and stayed in beautiful Šibenik, aiming to cross into Montenegro.

Montenegro, then, was the surprise. I am certain that when the architect was creating it, they said: here, I will sow mountains. Big mountains, small mountains, rocky ones, close ones, tall ones—nothing but mountains. Then they looked at it and took the ice-cream scoop, carving out balls of earth that immediately filled with sea, forming the country’s coastline. The rest remained mountainous and rocky, but for pleasure’s sake, trees were scattered everywhere: firs, spruces, beeches, and every green thing at hand.

Kotor and Perast are beautiful villages along the continuation of the Dalmatian coast, buzzing with tourists, sailboats, and investments. Not my piece of cake. I took to the mountains again, to find myself near the Bosnian border in magnificent Žabljak—a virgin forest of unbelievable beauty, bordering Durmitor National Park, with the Tara canyon and river cutting through the entire country.

All the way to Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro—an ordinary provincial city—for over a hundred kilometers, the forest continues: dense, shaded, magical. Montenegro is sparsely populated and therefore little scarred by human hands—but this will end very soon, as investors have already arrived to turn it into a resort. Hurry.