Dear refugees,
I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart!
With your help, it has become very easy over the past few weeks to tell who of my friends, acquaintances, colleagues and relatives are xenophobes, racists and inhumane assholes. Without your help, it would have taken me years to discover that with some of them, and a few might even have slipped the net undetected.
It’s just sad that so many of you had to die for this.
“Cabin crew, prepare for landing,” the command came through the public-address system, filling the silent cabin of the early-morning flight from Belgrade to Podgorica. “Landing where??” I wondered, for I had only seen dramatic mountains, partially covered in snow, and some lakes.
The short flight from Serbia’s to Montenegro’s capital was more of a scenic flight than a means of transport. The sun broke through the clouds only intermittently, putting the mountains in a dark, eerie light. Whenever the sun had prevailed, it didn’t take long for the mountains to forcefully pull back their cloudy cover, asking for another thirty minutes of sleep. Now I understood where the name came from: Montenegro, the black mountains.
Even the little airport had the feeling of a mountain resort to it. In a country like this, it must have been easy to decide on the location of the airport. You pick the only flat part of land that you can find and expropriate the farmer who owns it. The airport code TGD is a reminder of the Yugoslav past: Titograd.
Unfortunately for you, I like to check in all my luggage, including my camera, because I prefer boarding the plane with nothing more than a book, so I could only take a photo after leaving the airport. Needless to say, I regretted my decision.
On the return flight from Tivat to Belgrade I took the camera on board, but on that day it was too cloudy.
Any walk in Belgrade will sooner or later end up at Kalemegdan Park, the seat of the fortress.
The guy on top of the column is Pobednik, the Victor, and he calls himself that because he just won World War I against the Ottoman Empire and Austria (with some help from the Allied Powers).
When it’s not cloudy, you can watch the sunset behind the confluence of the rivers Sava and Danube.
You know that a country is going through an economic crisis when your friends from Brazil don’t begin their days by posting photos of their morning coffee, but by commenting on the exchange rate between the Brazilian real and the US dollar. When more people know the exchange rate of their country’s currency than the league position of EC Bahia, it’s a sure sign that the currency is tanking (although both of them are doing equally bad).
And indeed: Since I so cleverly made the decision to move to Brazil half a year ago, the Brazilian real has continued its downward trend. Compared to a year ago, it lost almost half its value.
I am currently using the Lonely Planet South America guidebook to plan my upcoming move to Brazil, and it lists the exchange rate as 1 euro = 2.69 reals. That was in August 2013. Now, one euro buys 4.6 reals. What euro crisis, I wonder?
For someone like me, who earns in EUR and USD, this means that Brazil is becoming more affordable. Granted, some of these gains are eaten up by inflation, but as long as inflation is lower than the loss of the currency’s value, I will be fine. I won’t need to purchase any imported goods, so I won’t be hit by the reduced international purchasing power of the real either.
Maybe, just maybe, I might even be able to rent an apartment and won’t need to sleep in parks and train stations. What a luxurious thought, thanks to Brazil’s economic policy!
When you invite your friends to a birthday party and nobody shows up.
Photographed at the Kalemegdan fortress in Belgrade, Serbia.
Romanians are really crazy about their flag. The blue-yellow-red banner hangs from every lamppost, in front of every building, in bakeries, doctor’s practices and in liquor stores. Because that is not enough, there is even a public holiday to celebrate the flag.
With all this pomp, I should have guessed that the real purpose is to hide something else, something bigger, something sinister. In the typical convoluted Romanian way of thinking, the constant display of oversized flags is supposed to prevent people from wondering about the origin of the flag. Because the sad truth is that the Romanian flag was stolen.
In the late 19th century, the King of Romania kept being reminded by his British and German royal and imperial cousins, friends and girlfriends that his kingdom was the only one in Europe without colonies. “Even tiny Holland has colonies,” Emperor Wilhelm used to tease King Carol, who was a rather mild-mannered man and wasn’t really interested in conquering other countries. Also, “Bessarabia” sounded exotic enough, so what did he need places like Sumatra or Madagascar for?
There was no need to go after resources either. Romania had gold, silver and salt mines. It had enough timber that even the Austrians came across the border to cut down the forests illegally in order to supply wood to the Schweighofer piano factory in Vienna. (Back then it was easy for Austrians to cross the border because the fence-building nation of Hungary was still an Austrian colony, although the Austrians in an untypically canny move made the Hungarians believe that they had their own country.)
Unique among European nations, Romania even had slavery. Perhaps out of ingenuity, perhaps out of lack of sea-faring skills, Romania hadn’t gone to other continents to enslave Africans or Indios, but had simply used part of its own population.
All in all, there was really no economic need for colonialism. Yet, the constant prodding finally convinced the king to give in and to dispatch a small military contingent of 120 soldiers deep into the heart of Africa. It took the troops a few months to get to Africa because due to lack of funds, Romanians only travel by hitch-hiking (examples in defense against possible allegations of stereotyping are Dumitru Dan and Timotei Rad). The problem (and the allure) of hitch-hiking is that you sometimes end up where you didn’t want to go, and the Romanian soldiers found themselves in Chad.
Tasked with taking whatever they could find, the colonial force began to look around, but found only sand (hard to carry back home) and camps full of Sudanese refugees. Less in a conquering and more in a humanitarian mood, the Romanians asked the Sudanese if they wanted to come to Romania with them. “Romania? No, no, no!” the refugees exclaimed in horror. (The Sudanese had a feeling that Romania would not enter the Schengen zone anytime soon and were hoping to be colonized by Germany, not having heard of the Hereros’ fate.)
So, things dragged on, the Romanians got drunk, they got into fights with the Chadians (about women, of course), and, as always happens in these stories, one day one of the Romanian officers killed the son of the Chadian Prime Minister. At that time, Africans were used to a lot of mistreatment by Europeans, but that murder was the straw which broke the camel’s back (this figure of speech may only be used legitimately in stories set in Africa). The government of Chad gave the Romanian force an ultimatum to leave the country by sunset the next day.
Suddenly in big haste, the soldiers remembered their king’s orders to “bring home as many exotic and colorful items as you can carry”. They grabbed a hapless elephant for the zoo in Târgu Mureș, but because it was grey, they still had to find something colorful. So they ran up and down the main boulevard and removed all the flags from the buildings. The flag of Chad is blue-yellow-red.
And that’s how Romania got its national symbol. The next time you walk past the tri-colored flag, you won’t just ignore it, but you will remember your country’s history, from slavery to almost-in-Schengen and everything in between. Or at least you will remember this story. And if you ever make it to Chad, please return one of the many flags to them.
“We won’t even put up real flags anymore. We are afraid the Romanians will steal them.”
I have this talent to find traces of war wherever I go, but in Belgrade the task is made really easy.
First of all, the city’s fortress in Kalemegdan Park houses a military museum.
In addition to the permanent display of military hardware, on my last visit to Belgrade in October 2014 there was an exhibition commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation at the end of World War II.
Sadly, almost nobody stopped to read the texts and look at the historic photos. I did, and suddenly realized that my German grandfather had spent a few years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Yugoslavia. I don’t know if he was fighting in Yugoslavia or captured somewhere else and taken there after his capture. (I really need to investigate this one day. If you know something about POW camps in Yugoslavia or know of relevant archives, please contact me!) Like everywhere else in Europe, it was wonderful to be able to stand there, only two generations later, with war between our two countries unthinkable, and Serbia on the path to EU membership.
More visible are the reminders of the NATO bombing in 1999. The bombed-out buildings of the Serbian (former Yugoslav) Ministry of Defense were left like this, in the middle of Belgrade.
Either there is no money to repair the ministry or someone thought that this would make a great memorial. In my mind, it’s rather a great testimony to the precision of cruise missiles. And because the rest of the building is still large enough to continue to house the Ministry of Defense, it also shows that countries can do quite well with a much reduced military.
The Rialto Bridge, built in 1524 but preceded by wooden bridges and before that by pontoons, was the only bridge to cross the Grand Canal until 1854. The covered ramps carry small shops on either side of the bridge.
The graffiti are more recent, I believe.
In the past 150 years, a few more bridges crossing the Grand Canal have been built, but you still have to walk quite a while to get to the next one: Accademia Bridge.
But there are more of the little bridges in each of the quarters, leading you on labyrinthine paths which always seem to lead deeper into the city, and never out of it.
The Bridge of Sighs (Ponte dei Sospiri) is not called like that for romantic reasons, but because it is the last bridge that convicts pass(ed) on the way to prison.
“Don’t open. Danger of death!” the scribbling warns, but putting a smiley face on the skull and crossbones makes it look much less threatening.
(Photographed at the Monastery of the Three Hierarchs in Iași, Romania. You can read more about this monastery in my article about Iași.)
