The Golf rattled along from Khalkidhiki through Thessaloniki toward Macedonia. Scant months before my seniors had been released from school by the Greek Ministry of Education to join in a demonstration protesting any claim that Macedonia was not part of Greece. The sword rattling had come close to all out war in Skopje, and Albanians smuggled themselves into Greece just in case. But our trip had been planned and we were intent on camping our way from Athens to Trieste to meet friends in Italy.
At dawn a feral dog had joined us in breaking up the camp, relishing scraps of the dinner from the night before and the fresh leavings of our breakfast. Several hours down the road we took lunch in Thessaloniki at a restaurant that had previously been a hammam with circular stained glass windows set deeply in the domed roof casting an eerie glow. As we left this more Oriental than Occidental Greek city, drowsiness overtook me and I only smartened up when we were stopped at the Albanian border. The conundrum was the fact that the number plate on the front of the car was white and on the back was yellow. The British license plates did not match and were suspect, not to mention the steering wheel being on the wrong side.
An explanation was not what was really required and after about fifteen minutes of attempts to reason with the convinced border police, we understood that baksheesh was the real solution to the mismatched license plate problem. We were soon on our way toward Lake Ohrid, which borders Macedonia, Albania and would be our first stop on the road to Yugoslavia. It was l989 and all the promise of destruction to come was still only an undercurrent in the deep calm lake where young boys leapt from a medieval castle wall over the cliff to plunge into one of Europe’s oldest and deepest lakes. The water of Lake Ohrid is exceptionally clear, with visibility up to twenty-two meters in places; it is cool and the currents move in a counter clockwise direction.
We arrived in the campsite just in time to pitch our two-man tent in the late afternoon light. The dense reed beds that surrounded the lake were quiet; all the migrating birds that favored wintering in this lush setting had left. Only here and there a man stood with a long pole hoping to catch a fish for the grill. The Ohrid trout were fat and shiny and sweet. The endemic bottom plants were important spawning grounds for the trout and the unspoiled lake was an ideal nursery. Until recently the offspring of the European eel, that spawns in the Sargasso Sea, would return to this lake; but now the hydropower dam on the Black Drin River in Macedonia has blocked the eel migration.
Few fellow campers shared our languages of English, Greek or Italian, but communication is always possible in like minds. Soon we were invited to share a grilled fish dinner with a neighbor and we managed communication with the help of a bottle of local white wine as the sliver of moon rose over the lake.
We departed Lake Ohrid early the next day and passed quickly through Skopje into Kosovo. Along the way we moved slowly behind horse drawn wagons loaded with a mountains of hay, defying the laws of gravity as the narrow roads wound through the farmlands. In the small villages, which were merely a block of stone houses, an official office and a well, we stopped in small grocery stores to find the shelves empty save for ancient small tins of questionable meat product and packages of dry toast. Even the weevils found it hard to exist in the small dustings of crumbs left in the empty bread bins.
Pritzren itself was a bustling town with myriad storefront garages for engine repairs. The few cars or trucks on the roads were relics from Tito’s regime; but the greasy bustle of the workers in the dim warehouse repair shops spoke of farm and road repair machinery. The whole color and smell of the place was of thick, black oily grease. Pritzren was the only tri-lingual city of the Balkans, which made for plenty of conflict when things fell apart. There were virtually no women visible on the streets and most of the men wore Muslim headgear of the crocheted skullcap or a loose turban. On the smaller side streets the walls were plastered with death notices. Like hands piled in the center of a pact, one notice was glued over the previous notice sometimes layered five deep – black bordered Christian deaths and green edged notices of a Muslim. The striking aspect was the ages on the notices; all were young men and not the usual announcements of the 84-year-old grandfather who had died in his bed surrounded by family. It hinted at the start of revenge killings as tribal differences bubbled up from the deep ground of a once united territory breaking into old boundaries and hatreds.
Pristina, the largest and mostly Serbian city, heaved with the same bustle of activity and suffered from the same lack of provisions. Shops were stacked with retreaded tractor tires, huge coils of thick rope, stacks of burlap sacks for grain, and displays of old wrenches and tools that had been derusted with steel wool and elbow grease to a dull sheen. Old jeeps were being rebuilt or pillaged for parts. Dust rose from the unpaved main street and curb gutters swelled with drab refuse and unrecognizable organic rot. For our breakfast, street vendors sold us grilled skewers of a few cubes of gristly meat with neighboring singed vegetables nestled on oil-soaked flat bread, washed down with strong sweet mint tea.
We headed due west to Dubrovnik on the coast of Croatia. The walled city had been demilitarized under communist rule to promote tourism, which saved the heritage site from heavy destruction later. Still, the borders of Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina and Montenegro isolated Dubrovnik and turned it into a bargaining chip in land allocations after the war which resulted in several hundred civilian casualties and significant damage to the medieval buildings. Nestled in a mountainous region and located on the Adriatic Sea, the ancient walled city had been a favorite Venetian trading port and had been impregnable up until modern missiles and mortars were lobbed from battleships in l991.
This prewar day found us sitting at a table in a seafront restaurant with plates of deep fried barbounia or red mullet, followed by grilled gilthead. The sun was blinding, reflected off the pristine tablecloth and glinting on the silverware and crystal wine glasses. It seemed centuries from the noise and smells of Pristina’s industrialized main street. We sat in the shadow of a five-star hotel and took advantage of their beach chairs to sleep off our lunch before heading further up the coast to a camp in Croatia.
A young man was selling his art along the beachfront and a painting done in the reverse on glass captivated us. The framed work would be difficult to transport without shattering; the rustic scene of this Eastern-European-American-Gothic showed the farmer and his wife rollicking in front of their hearth, wearing primary colors, expressed vitality. Their forms were swollen and prosperous and the artist claimed his parents had been his models.
We carefully nestled the painting between sleeping bags in boot of the Golf, where it safely passed into Italy and for years hung on a wall in Athens and later Rome to remind us of our journey through a land destined for horror and destruction. A land full of industry, natural beauty and tolerance that disintegrated into the tragedy symbolized in Sarajevo and Kosovo and still percolating from mass graves uncovered decades later.
