The Balkans Part I

The Cathedral in Zagreb Croatia

Remains of Diocletian's Palace in Split Croatia

Serbia was the nation in which I spent the least time. We flew in and out of Belgrade, due to cheaper seats, presumably because no one goes to Belgrade. The Serbian capital of the three I visited was undoubtedly the one that most put me ill at ease. Its underbelly seemed to be much more poorly hidden than that in the other nations. It hasn’t attracted the tourism dollars that have been flowing into Croatia, which was recently accepted into the EU, nor does it have the exotic appeal of Bosnia, which is getting infusions of cash from its Muslim brothers, especially Turkey as it turns out. Serbia was Russia’s friend at the end of the Soviet period, and since Russia was as broke as Serbia was, the partnership didn’t work out too well. Evidence of the Ottoman period is practically nonexistent in the center of the old city, and only 1 mosque remains in the capital. Point blank Belgrade isn’t diverse. It’s undeniably Serbian. The infrastructure in Belgrade is tired. Its National Museum is undergoing renovations that started more than 15 years ago. It has a single room of sculptures open to the public and when we visited the museum we were urged by the curator to take our tickets to another museum where they would be accepted and check it out. It was almost as if he were saying “There is nothing worth seeing here. Move on”. And yet Belgrade felt defiant. Serbia is a young nation and the youth refuse to be brought down by their nation’s problems. They walk the pedestrian streets that preserve the last remaining Russian Imperial style architecture in the capital, the few buildings that got past the Communist Period unscathed. The new Cathedral, meant to be the largest Orthodox Church in the world remains unfinished, and yet the hope that it will at some point come to fruition remains strong. It reminds me of the stories I have heard about the Duomo in Florence that was left without a dome for decades, and yet people never lost hope that it would be completed. They trusted that a solution would come along, that economic domination would arrive and times would get better. This defiant optimism was what I felt in Belgrade. People take the status quo but don’t give in to the grimness that they easily could, because after twenty years of independence and the slow disintegration and

international humiliation that the state has been subjected to, they just keep going. They remain proud of their country and its achievements. No one will tell them what to believe or think or hope for. They will decide for themselves. They will enjoy their city, their country and their lives. It is theirs.

               

Harbor outside of Zadar Croatia

Croatia on the other hand, is flush with cash. Tourism has seriously taken off in this nation.  The capital Zagreb is picturesque, as is the rest of the nation. Its ancient heart remains untainted by communism and the Ottomans never quite made it. Instead the city is beautifully medieval, winding streets and stone buildings and the red tile roofs that I will never fail to associate with my family’s hometown in Germany. Its many Catholic churches ring out the hours, one of the sounds that I most miss while I live here in Turkey. Before I started traveling I never thought of missing sounds like you do smells and foods and people. The oldest part of Zagreb stands on a hill above the rest of the town, looking out over a plain and river. We walked outside of town to visit the old cemetery, beautiful in its serenity and peace, full of family graves, many Catholic but others were Jewish or Orthodox. All three nations had a huge café culture and each capital had a central pedestrian zone chock full of beautiful little cafes. Zagreb was picturesque, if I had to choose a single word for it. Croatia struck me more than anything for its beauty.

Sunset on Korcula

 I spent several days working my ways down the Dalmatian coast, opposite Italy, in the towns of Zadar, Split, Dubrovnik as well as the island Korcula. I spent hours watching the sun go down over the harbor of these ancient walled cities, some Roman and some Medieval, or in the case of Dubrovnik, rebuilt since the shelling undergone in the early 1990s. Dubrovnik was perhaps the most striking of these towns. During the day it fills up with tourists and cruise ships and each nationality lives up to its stereotypes. Walking the walls was desperately hot but the views of the blue green sea, the tiny islands ringing the harbor and the fortifications all along the coast made up for the heat. That was not my favorite part of this Jewel of the Adriatic though. This city is truly a jewel but it is in the quiet places where you find it. On the way into town we passed a steep cliff down to the water covered in trees and flowers. However, I spied some people swimming down at the bottom. After discovering that Dubrovnik was chock full of tourists, and that nothing opened up until the height of tourist season, and finally that some of the young people on a tour failed to preserve any type of decorum in the cathedral, taking pictures and shouting despite obvious signs requesting that they didn’t and then pushing me over the edge by leaning onto the altar, we decided to escape the tourist ticky tacky of the old town. Passing back the way we came I decided to explore and we discovered by following a young Croatian man who seemed to know where he was going we discovered Club Boninovo, a set of stairs and a few concrete platforms on the water. We jumped into the water, which was colder than I expected and watched the sun go down yet again. 

Me on the walls of Dubrovnik

I think my favorite place in Croatia though was Plitvice Lakes National Parks, about halfway between Zagreb and Zadar. The parks are a series of snow fed lakes and waterfalls, green in color and rather fantastic flora. I walked on wooden boarding following winding trails that made me think I was walking through a set for Rivendale. Yet for all its beauty Croatia seemed like it was simply trying to deny its past. Nothing in Dubrovnik mentions the fact that the city was shelled, or that live mines still ring the town. At Plitvice Parks on the way out I saw a small structure and upon arriving it was a monument to young Special Forces who died liberating the area from Serbian nationalists, that the monuments called terrorists, but I suspect were paramilitary forces. Yet the monument was placed in such a way so that tourists would never see it. Croatia is trying to forget that the war happened, and convince its visitors that it didn’t either. I felt the whole time in Croatia like it was saying to me “Oh yes the war, yes that…oh look, beaches!”. I can’t blame Croatia for wanting to forget, I’ve tried to do the same myself, but in the course of my life I’ve discovered that there is a clear difference between moving on and forgetting. Trying to forget means that you simply bury the event and can never truly work through them. 

Plitvice Lakes National Park

Return from the Abyss

Plitvice National Parks in Croatia

Well friends, I must apologize. I am a terrible blogger. My only excuse is that I have been out trying to have interesting adventures to write to you all about. While I find people who say such things incredibly annoying, I have to do it. I have been living the dream. In the past two and a half weeks I haven’t spent more than 2 nights in one place, instead becoming a college-age nomad, seeing doing and generally having a pretty awesome time of it around this fascinating world of ours. To catch you up on my adventures: this blog went pretty blank a few weeks ago first of all because I had spring break from Bogazici University. Myself and my friend Sarah embarked for parts unknown, on this occasion Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia. After 10 days touring these magnificent countries I came back to Turkey to resume my studies. However, since we had Labor Day on the Wednesday after I got back, I decided to take advantage of the whole never-having-school situation and got on a flight to Tel Aviv Tuesday night, returning this Monday morning. I won’t be attempting to talk about all of these adventures in this single post, but simply give you a preview of the upcoming stories to be had.

An Orthodox Cathedral in Belgrade Serbia

Now, the Balkans. As desperately geeky as it sounds, I have been wanting to see these nations for years. One of the first things that I decided after accepting my study abroad program in Turkey was that I would spend spring break in the Balkans. First of all, Istanbul and Western Turkey have often been described to me as “Balkan”. Seeing as I thought they were just Western Turkish I wanted to know what they were being compared to. Also, the Balkans were under Ottoman rule for centuries so I wanted to see what this influence had been.  Surely, these nations would show Osmanli roots as well as the more recent scars of Communist rule. This is the part of the world that an entire movement, Balkanization, is named after. Why is it that these small nations are so demanding for their independence and singularization? And finally, there is of course the war. When I mentioned to my mother that I was going to Bosnia, she wasn’t entirely pleased with the suggestion. I find this war to be an interesting case of dividing where one generation ends and another begins, the difference between history and reality. For me, the Balkan War is the last instance of a historical war. Afghanistan is reality, it is now and I remember its beginning clearly. The Balkans are something that you read about in a history book. I was 3 when the war in former Yugoslavia was brought to an end with the Dayton Peace Accords. I don’t remember news reports about the violence and crimes as they were happening. The Balkan Wars are like the Vietnam War. It happened and we were involved as a nation and terrible things occurred. But it is past and over and is the subject of books, movies, articles, and research projects, not memory. For my parents though, it is a reality. It happened. Hence my mother’s response.

Stari Most in Mostar Bosnia

I did do a research project about the war though, during my first year of High School and was slightly overwhelmed by the interweaving conflicts and the mixture of who fought who and why. I had trouble following the timelines, probably because the whole thing was exceptionally complex with both professional armies and huge numbers of paramilitaries and guerrillas splitting towns, slicing them in half and turning main roads into front lines. Croats, Serbs, Bosnians all fought one another in various regions, each trying to stake their claim on land to be their own. No clear front lines were drawn and enclaves, exclaves, autonomous republics and all the rest abounded.  I will not try to give anything like an authoritative account because I am not an authority. The conflict was also deemed to be the first instance of genocide in Europe since World War II with forces on all sides being accused of massacring civilians and an entire tribunal being set up at the Hague to prosecute war crimes since prosecutions were not going to happen in home countries. War criminals are still on the loose in the region, since this was a war where most every man fought and defended his homeland, and charges were leveled against the town butcher baker and candlestick maker. Some of the biggest names have been arrested and are facing trial, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, two leading Serbs, were uncovered in the past 5 years. I wasn’t sure what to expect from a region that had been torn apart from unity to half a dozen separate nation states within my lifetime but I was determined to learn.

View from the walls of Dubrovnik Croatia

The Johnnies and the Mehmets

View from "The Neck", one center of the Gallipoli engagement

Battlefields shouldn’t be beautiful. At least this is how I feel. Battlefields should be cold and gray and melancholy. You shouldn’t look out and think “man, what a great beach”, or “wow, what a fantastic view”. Human beings refuse to fight over the truly ugly parts of the world though and so we are constantly forced to face beautiful battlefields, looking at a breathtaking vista and looking down to find graves at your feet, men of 19 and 20 whose lives ended with that view. My brain always short circuits at this point as it tries to rectify how the ugliness of man made destruction could coexist with the natural splendor of the place. I’m never going to win though and so I just consume the paradox and move on.

The cemetery at the first ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Auxiliary Corps) landing site Ari Burnu

I tried to imagine the fields a sea of dirt and dust, bodies and blood, but I cannot. I see the green pines and shrubs and remember the swaths of electric yellow that surrounded the motorway on either side of the road to Eceabat. My mind cannot comprehend the horror of trench warfare. And I don’t think I want it to. Many of the graves that exist today are “presumed to be buried here”. No one knows. Many names do not even get a headstone, just a line carved into a stone monument, standing mute, each one identical to the other on spots throughout the landscape. Tiny scraps of land that men fought viciously over, pouring hot metal and fire into a football field’s worth of no man’s land before launching themselves towards a goal that they knew the first attackers could not possibly reach. Many of these maneuvers were ‘diversionary’, meant only to distract attention. Men dying for an optical illusion, a sleight of hand, while other men fought just as hard and died just as quickly for the ‘real’ objective, another slice of land in the Aegean, wafer thin ridges on a skinny peninsula for a vein of maritime property that would bring the allies to Russian waters. 

Brighton Beach, where the ANZACs were meant to land on 25 April 1915

There’s a quote by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk about the Battle of Gallipolli that I find incredibly poetic. He wrote it 20 years after the fighting, and nearly 80 years ago and it still strikes me as one of the most chivalrous, courageous and simply heart wrenching things I have ever heard.  I leave you with it.

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives; – You are now living in the soil of a friendly country, – therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours. You, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries – wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom, – and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.

Americans are friendly

No really, we are. I never really thought about it before. But I am that Mid-Western girl who loves to strike up a conversation and chat with people. I’ll give directions to anybody, answer most any non-vulgar greeting, and of course share a glass of cay. I met a lot of new people this weekend in Eceabat and Canakkale and each encounter turned out to be a pretty fun little story. I’ll share them if you’re up for it. 

The pier in Canakkale

 Eceabat is essentially a village with a ferry dock and a couple of cheap hotels, a backpacker’s paradise. I wanted to do a little exploring and quickly discovered that your exploring options are pretty limited, because with a population of about 5000 your run out of Eceabat to explore pretty quickly. After meandering down the under-construction waterfront and cutting through a pathway past some very chill dogs, some back gardens with chickens and cows and a drainage ditch, I crossed the highway and took a dirt lane up towards the ridges that crisscross the peninsula. I walked past the plot the first time, seeing a man milking a cow by hand and the little goats munching on some shrubbery as I passed, but feeling like it wasn’t right to take a snapshot if he didn’t know I was. I walked further along, looking out over the Dardanelles and its aqua-blue waters, hillside orchards and a clump of well-tended beehives before turning back. When I came back the goats were still munching away but the little black one was watching me with inquisitive eyes, so I watched back. It slowly advanced towards me but I stayed put, knowing that patience was the best way to encourage it to come closer. Our spell was broken by the farmer coming up from behind his ancient truck, apparently having finished with the cow because he carried a raki (liquor) bottle full of milk with a teat on it. He proceeded to feed the two kids and we struck up a conversation. I started by asking if the goats were babies. I’m full of great opening lines. We ended up chatting about the animals and he asked me what I was doing in Eceabat (translation: what is a city girl like you doing trying to pet the billy goat who is obviously trying to prove his superiority over you but butting you in the back of the knees). I met the farmer’s dog, named Tomas and fed his animals some of the stale bread he had brought along for them. He went about his work, pouring the rest of the milk from the cow into a 10 liter plastic water container and loading it into his truck, bringing the calf over to the cow and walking them over to a field over the dirt track and staking the adult to graze for the day. Tomas barked at me when I stopped paying attention to him for long enough and a barnyard cat (sans barn) eyed me warily. The solitary rooster kicked up a stink. I left feeling like I had left a petting zoo. I don’t know what the farmer thought of the whole thing, but I hope he found it as enjoyable as I did.

The Dardanelles at sunset

 There’s a military museum in Çanakkale staffed by young sailors doing their national service, which is required of all men in Turkey and is typically 2 years long. To the people who run the museum admission policy: don’t put young men in charge. During the off season the museum is supposed to close at 5pm. I got there at about 5:45. I noticed the fortress from the ferry and decided that I wanted a closer look. I walked up and a pair of young men in sailor’s uniforms told me that yes, it was open, but that I needed a ticket. Retracing my steps to the ticket office, another young sailor that the museum was closed and I couldn’t buy a ticket. Not one to take no for an answer I returned to the entrance, put on my best oh-no-what-am-I-possibly-going-to-do face and voice and the sailor looked at me for about 3 seconds and let me in. I looked around for a bit, got caught in the midst of a school tour group and went to the second floor in time to catch my free-entrance-giving sailor giving a performance based upon the experiences of Turkish soldiers at stationed at Gallipoli during the battle. He was doing a pretty good job I had to admit. On the way out, I checked out the rest of the exhibits, and the sailors if I’m brutally honest, leading one to make an exclamation on the lines of “Eyvallah”. Essentially, he was flattered and a little surprised that the American girl was giving him the once over. Also, I think he might have been teasing/flirting back. I chatted with my sailor on the way out, complimenting his acting technique and he told me he had never done any before coming to this post. He was getting out of the navy in four months. I congratulated him and we parted. And that is how you get into the Çanakkale Military Museum for free after it has closed. Discretionary wardrobe recommended. 

The little black goat

 I had my dinner with Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow looking over the black water. It was quiet the whole time I ate but as I was contemplating whether I would get desert on not two Turkish tour groups rolled up and swamped the place. Seeing as I was sitting by myself and a four person table a middle aged Turkish woman came up and asked if the seat across from me was free. I said of course and she called her friends over, but they were too many for the places available. I told her I was finished and on my way out anyway, so they could have my seat as well. She looked down at me with that tilt to the head that indicates that something doesn’t commute and asked me if I was foreign. I told her I was an American and the usual questions of “What are you doing here?” “Where are you studying?” and most crucially “Where did you learn Turkish?” rolled out. At the end of the question and answer portion of our program she reached down and pinched my cheek in an aunt-type fashion as if to say “You’re such a good foreigner, learning our language”. Then she proceeded to tell all of her friends about what I good foreigner I was, learning Turkish. I wasn’t even annoyed that she had invaded my personal space, I found it rather endearing. 

Eceabat

 Sitting on the pier in Eceabat working on my graduate school personal statement (yeah, I do that, don’t judge) I was approached by three young girls. They wanted to know which football team I supported. I told them I didn’t really have one yet, since I hadn’t been here very long. They decided that I was worthy of more conversation and ended up sitting next to me and chatting about what I was studying, where I was from. Then they asked me a terrifying question, could I sing a song for them? I tried to wriggle my way out telling them that I didn’t know any songs and that I can’t sing to save my life. They were persistent though and eventually I gave in and ended up serenading them to the tune of “Jingle Bells” followed by “Feliz Navidad” and “San Fermin”. I would like to give a big shout out to my high school Spanish teacher Mr. Donnelly at this juncture and thank him for making us sing every single day of class because I can still remember the words to those songs thanks to him. The girls found this delightful and rewarded me with offerings of their own, mostly songs that they learned at school, but their final number took me completely by surprise. It was the opening line to Gangnam Style. Sometimes the strangest things happen in this country. 

Eceabat

 I’ve got plenty more where that came from (being the only young female on a battlefield tour tends to attract questioning) but I’ll leave you with those for now. I really am the stereotypical friendly American. Not an adventure seeker or dare-devil but I don’t feel like I need to be. Just by saying hello and learning Turkish I get to have encounters like these, the everyday conversations that you remember, and look back at and laugh about.  Friendly seems to be working out just fine.