In my next few blog posts, I’m going to pull entries from my personal journal. It’s interesting to look back and see the evolution of our stay. Here is a documentation of our week-long trip around the Balkans.
June 19th
And so it begins, my weeklong venture through the Balkans.
First stop: Albania.
6 a.m. – 13 of us cram into an oversized minivan.
On our way to Tirana, the destination of the day, we stop at Kruje, a village in the mountains of Albania. There we visit a fortress and learn about Skanderbeg, an Albanian hero from Ottoman times. I feel quite clever, having read a chapter about him prior to the stop.
The highlight of the day, however, comes in the night.
In Tirana, the streets are coated in red. As dawn turns to dusk, thousands gather to watch Albania play in their final group game of the Euro 2016 tournament. The game is in France, but large screens are set up just blocks from Skanderbeg Square.
My roommate, Brittainy (a photojournalism student who is here for the same reasons as I), and I grab our cameras and follow the crowds. We get separated, but it’s for the better. We spend the next 3.5 hours making images, capturing energy, and baring witness to the emotion at hand.
Albania get their first ever Euro win, and the streets explode with roars of excitement. They did not win tournament. They are not likely to advance out of their group.
It doesn’t make a damn difference.
June 20th
We’re scheduled to leave for Montenegro at 7:30 a.m., but we don’t get on the road until nearly an hour past. Time doesn’t exist in the Balkans, and bold-printed schedules act as mere suggestions.
We arrive in Budva, a beautiful town on the Adriatic, where we will stay the night.
The water is sparkling and the surrounding mountains tower high, framing the scene. Old city walls stretch along the coastal area, and bright flowers pop against the sand colored structures. It reminds me of somewhere that I have been before. Maybe Bled, Slovenia? Maybe.
And now comes the part where I lose my roommate Brittainy.
It’s early evening in Budva, and we’re walking down the equivalent of a “boardwalk”. Little shops line both sides, and vendors are awaiting the attention of tourists like us. It’s the kind of thing that I tend to dislike, but I have little room to complain given the setting in which this scene takes place.
It’s only one day, after all.
So we’re walking down the boardwalk, back to the hotel to change into our bathing suits and head to the beach. It’s a short walk, less than half a mile, but Brittainy is a photographer. What should take no more than 5 minutes time, has taken us close to 30. The light is good, and the people are interesting, and we haven’t traveled more than 5 yards without stopping for a photo.
Eventually I concede. I take the key, and head back to the room, where she says she’ll meet me soon.
But an hour passes. And then another. And she’s nowhere to be seen.
For the sake of time, and of word count, I’ll cut the story short, and leave at this: we never made it to the beach.
Where the story goes, Brittainy goes… and I couldn’t help but follow.
On the walk back to the hotel, she happened upon a small amusement park, just off of the main path. It was so quirky and colorful that she couldn’t help but fall into its traps.
Later that night we went back together, in hopes of putting together a photo film. We both took photos. We took turns getting sound. We suckered a Kosovar-Serb into working as a translator, and before you knew it, we were on our way to what we thought would make a really great piece….
Unfortunately it was a bit trickier than anticipated.
Translation was skewed. Sound equipment was testy. The people at the park didn’t have much to say.
We had fun regardless.
June 21st
I’ve never been quite as infatuated with a place, as I am with Bosnia and Herzegovina:
With a famous bridge in Mostar.
With a cinema club in Sarajevo.
I’d say so much more, but I can assure you that this is piece best saved for later.
June 22nd
Day 2 in Sarajevo.
We sleep in an hour later than previous days allowed. This is the first morning in which we will not pile on to a bus and cross borders into a separate state.
I am not disappointed.
The day is comprised of meetings – the first of the four that we will have on this trip – sought out to provide a mixture of commentaries on past conflicts and the current political state.
In the morning we travel to the Sarajevo School of Science and Technology to hear from two professors on economic topics related to conflict and resolution, responsibility, and reconciliation.
I struggle to keep my eyes open, fighting fluttering eyelids to the best of my ability, desperate to make it through unnoticed.
The second meeting I found to be significantly more engaging – not because the first was uninteresting, it was far from boring. The nature of the second meeting was, however, more closely suited to my personal taste.
We met with a handful of people from NGOs based out of Bosnia, one of which was Women for Women, an organization that works to offer financial and emotional support to women displaced during the Bosnian War.
I preferred this lecture to that of the academics because of the rawness of the words. The academics took a logical approach, while the women spoke words charged by emotion.
June 23rd
Do you remember when we learned about Srebrenica in school?
You wouldn’t. Because we didn’t.
At least I didn’t.
When I was first posed with the possibility of traveling to the Balkans to pursue documentary work on post-conflict transformation, I was confronted with a reality that I had gone blind to for so long.
Albania. Bosnia. Kosovo. Macedonia.
The familiarity lies in the name alone.
When I made the decision to travel to Kosovo for the summer, I made the decision to immerse myself in a culture that I had spent my first 20-years neglecting.
The history is striking. The timing is ironic.
I was born in Pennsylvania in the fall of 1995. Just 3 months earlier in Srebrenica, 8,000 Bosnians were slain by Serbs in what stands as Europe’s greatest genocide since World War II.
Today, a graveyard for the victims acts as a memorial. Tombstones line the fields in which innocent blood was shed – for nothing.
Hasan Hasanovic is a survivor, and he welcomes us to the memorial.
He is strong and tranquil in semblance, but his eyes have seen sickening things.
Hasan survived by walking 63 km through a wooded area to the neighboring Muslim territory of Tuzla. Both his father and twin brother were lost at Srebrenica. He was just 19 at the time of the massacre.
“Everyday, I wonder where I got that strength. When you’re in that kind of situation, where every step is a matter of life and death, your mind just works differently. The experience has stayed with me since then. It follows me everyday; from the moment I get up, to the moment I go to sleep. I just can’t get rid of it. The worst thing is the anguish that comes with thinking about Husein and my father — wondering how they were killed, whether they were tortured or not, and how long it took them to die. That pain is almost unbearable.”
https://www.srebrenica.org.uk/survivor-stories/hasan-hasanovic/
Bosnia and Herzegovina continues to face ethnic conflict and division today. Many Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs hope for unity in the future, but events of the past linger. There is much more healing to be done and accountability to be held before the possibility of a concrete reconciliation.
June 24th
Belgrade is the New York of the Balkans.
It’s the biggest city in the region, and the most modernized that I’ve seen.
Again, we have meetings, beginning in a coffee shop with an inside/outside construction. The warmth of the sun is nice. The shade is nicer.
Coffee is the universal language of the Balkans, and I have found myself in many conversations over the lively drink.
So we sit around the table, and at the center is a politician – a Serbian presidential candidate. He is meant to be the most liberal in Serbia. When prompted to comment on the state of Kosovo, he doesn’t – instead redirecting the conversation back to his agenda.
We leave for our next meeting. Brittainy’s purse stays, but she recovers it within the hour, entirely unscathed.
The second meeting of the day is my personal favorite. It is with CRTA (Center for Research Transparency and Accountability). This meeting aligns most closely with my own journalistic interests, and I’m ecstatic to have the opportunity to ask questions about their access to open data… they’re efforts to clean data and use it as a tool to navigate political corruption… they’re roles as both activists and journalists.
I take a business card. I’ll be in touch.