cha cha cha crash! (last day in Sakartvelo)

I'm in a wine shop in Tbilisi, with a silhouette of Pushkin on the door. There's a speech bubble emanating from his cut-out visage, saying something profound and poetic about the unparalleled joys of the fermented grape. And inside, a friend of the owner is pouring me samples while explaining the business to me.

It's one of those little wine shops that's more the product of passion than of a profit motive, so the story is quite an enjoyable one to hear. But the conversation soon turns to graver themes. See, I'm recovering from the shock of the car accident which I was in today, and my host is recovering from 27 years of total estrangement from his family and every single person he knew during his childhood.

Before I go into that, however, I invite you to go grab a glass of red. 'Cause I need to talk to you about a subject which is uppermost in the mind of everyone who visits this sainted land of Sakartvelo: I need to talk to you about wine.

To set the scene: a few days ago, on the same day I went to the Stalin Museum, I also spent a couple of hours in a place called Uplistikhe, perched above the fast-flowing and correct-pronunciation-defying River Mtkvari.

Uplistikhe is an ancient stone city, ranging up the side of a large hill. These days it's mostly inhabited by lizards, but two or three millennia ago, it offered all the necessary elements of a fabulous night out in the ancient world.

LIZARD IN THE SUN TEMPLE

Uplistikhe, Sakartvelo, 06.04.2015

The contrast to Turkey’s stone cities was fascinating: Cappadocia, for example, has some great cities you can visit, but they were all about hiding from aggressors and (later) building underground churches to piously worship various proselytising Christian folk. Uplistikhe couldn't be more different: the heathen citizens who lived up here left a ruin that clearly illustrates their appreciation for ‘the good life’.

The city’s main centre of worship, a temple to the Sun Goddess, sits near the top of Uplistikhe and features a huge open area large enough to be a dancefloor (which it may well have been), with a pit in the middle for sacrifices. You could start your evening there – or, if that wasn’t your thing, you could take in an early show at the public theatre, carved completely out of rock with a huge Grecian arch over the stage and a mountain view behind it (visible even from the cheap seats).

ANCIENT 'TANDYR' OVEN

Uplistikhe, Sakartvelo, 06.04.2015

After that it would probably be dinner time, so you’d head to one of the outdoor dining areas, where deep, teardrop-shaped tandyrs (those ovens invented in Central Asia, which eventually gave us tandoori chicken and naan bread after the design migrated along the Silk Road to India) were carved into the ground.

You might also stop in at the pharmacy – which has little rock shelves to hold different herbs and other medicines – and grab something to help you through the following morning’s hangover.

Next to the pharmacy is a 2,000-year-old wine press, where you could watch the grapes being trampled and the skins being compressed to make chacha (something like grappa, but stronger). Finally you'd probably head up to the library area and common hall, where stone bookshelves held reading material for you to enjoy while you sipped your wine on comfortable animal skins or relaxed in a warm communal bath – provided, that is, the bath itself wasn’t filled with surplus wine.

I’m not kidding; this place was the luxury resort of ancient stone cities. And, as always in Sakartvelo, the wine was central to the culture. When they say that grapes are sacred here, they mean it.

MAIN HALL AND BATH AREA (library shelves on the right)

Uplistikhe, Sakartvelo, 06.04.2015

Personally, I’ve already enjoyed a glass or two at several of the little Georgian restaurants that are generously dotted around Tbilisi’s Old Town and inner city.

I've also visited Kakheti, the main wine-growing region, where I learned the difference between a Saperavi and a Mukuzani (both made from the potently purple-coloured Saperavi grape, but one fermented with the skins still on and therefore incredibly rich and 'earthy'). There, after staying with a babushka who greeted me with a cake and a glass of 65% proof karaf of homemade chacha, I got horribly drunk over lunch the next day, while listening to local vintners chatting with a visiting British wine critic.

SIGNAGHI'S OLD TOWN AND CAUCASESKakheti Region, Sakartvelo, 08.04.2015

The British guy slooshed the local produce around his mouth thoughtfully before dumping it into a spitoon. I, on the other hand, did no such thing. Every drop of the white, the red and the amber (yes, they have a third colour in Sakartvelo) went down the gullet and into my thankful bloodstream.

But the spectre of road travel in this country had hung over that journey, as it has with every other I've taken this week. The minibus ride to Kakheti had been harrowing, and the return leg was far, far worse. Massive potholes on the highway compounded the threat of a head-on collision, which was already high thanks to drivers' impatience and the almost complete lack of passing lanes. It was a nightmare.

A couple of days later, i.e. early this morning, I found myself sitting in the front passenger seat of a car in central Tbilisi, waiting for the driver to deal with documentation and get us underway.

KAKHETI'S 'AMBER WINES'

Signaghi, Sakartvelo, 08.04.2015

By "us", I mean myself and the two Russian women in the back seat. We were headed for a place called Kazbegi, high in the Caucases mountains, and the driver was to be our Russian-speaking guide.

About ten minutes into the journey, as we were flying along one of Tbilisi's arterial roads, a van suddenly tried to cut us off. The driver didn't notice, and kept his foot on the accelerator. The van consequently side-swiped us, making contact right at the point where I was sitting. Had the impact been much harder, it could've led to a far more serious outcome for me – but luckily, I was fine.

Our driver then used his horn, indicating to the van that it should stop. But the van driver had other ideas: he swerved left, pulling out directly into oncoming traffic and causing cars to scatter around him. One can only guess that this was a ploy to get away from us and avoid insurance payouts – the rationale was probably "Well, that guy isn't going to follow me into a stream of cars coming the other way, now, is he?" But that turned out to be wrong; our guy immediately prepared to join the van on the wrong side of the road.

At this point, myself and the two Russians all yelled at the driver simultaneously. "Get his license number, and just stop!", was the general message.

Fortunately for us, the driver decided to follow this advice. He took a photo of the van's license plate, then pulled down a side street, rolled to a stop, got out and called the tour company.

I decided this was enough for me. Tbilisi's Old Town, with its cafes and bars, cobbled streets, and kooky 19th Century wooden houses (of which I've posted some pics below), is an incredibly chilled-out and pleasant place to puddle around in. Sakartvelo's highways, on the other hand, are a cauldron of terror. So I tried to open my door and get out.

The door decided not to co-operate; it was firmly stuck.

Hmmm.

I climbed over the gear stick, explaining to the Russian ladies that I wasn't keen to continue the excursion, on account of the psychopathic driving in this country. They agreed. "I've never seen such a thing in all my life!", one of them said – and you know when Russians say that, it's time to get off the roads immediately!

So I wished them a fabulous day, gave a similar explanation to the driver, and started in on the 45-minute walk back into the centre.

This may sound like an experience that would sour you a little on the country you're visiting. But in Sakartvelo, you can't feel sour for long. The locals are just too nice.

Long before I'd even arrived at the 'Peace Bridge' – a space-age landmark which announces that you're nearing Old Tbilisi – I'd received a gushingly apologetic phone call from the tour company. "We're SOOOOOO sorry", said the girl on the phone. "You must come in and get your money back!"

THE PEACE BRIDGE

Tbilisi, Sakartvelo, 10.04.2015

She then went on to apologise for the behaviour of every single driver in the whole of Sakartvelo.

When I got to the company's office, the two customer service people there apologised some more and handed me the money. I told them I hadn't expected a refund, since it was my decision not to continue and the accident hadn't been their driver's fault. But they insisted, saying they just hoped I hadn't been left with a negative impression of their country.

I re-assured them that I really liked their country and everything was fine. And leaving aside the roads, this was the truth ... possibly even understated a little :-)

(Note to Turkish Fucking Airlines: THIS is what customer service looks like, you retarded bunch of asshats.)

Anyway ...

Around 12 hours later, in the little wine shop, we'd moved on from an amazing selection of wine (of which I'd committed to buying one bottle) to the chacha. As I mentioned in an earlier entry, the alcohol content of this stuff can range up to 65% – it's the kind of drink about which you'd imagine there are stories in circulation, involving people losing their sight and/or their legs and/or their minds.

19th CENTURY WOODEN HOUSE #1

Tbilisi, Sakartvelo, 5.04.2015

As he poured a second shot for each of us, the shop guy (who we'll call 'Mikheil') continued the abbreviated version of his life story. I'd asked him if he was from Tbilisi, and he'd said "No, but I've lived here most of my life". His home town was called Sukhumi, which is the capital of the 'breakaway region' of Abkhazia.

You might remember that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev sent his army down here in 2008, arguing that ethnic Russians living in some parts of Sakartvelo were under threat – the same justification Putin has used in Ukraine. The result was that two slices of the country were hewn off and turned into new republics, named Abkhazia and South Ossetia respectively.

(Side note: I've previously mentioned Abkhazia on this blog, for completely different reasons. Its people, the Abkhaz, have what must be one of the most exotic languages in the world. It's got the world's highest number of consonant sounds – so many that they can't find an alphabet large enough to write it properly! They keep trying augmented versions of Roman and Cyrillic, then throwing them out because they can't capture the fine distinctions of the Abkhaz tongue. Here endeth the Word Nerdage – back to the story.)

So Sukhumi, Abkhazia's capital, was a Black Sea resort town back in the day, and arguably one of the prettiest towns in the entire USSR. The elite Soviet political class used to spend their vacations there, strolling along the crescent moon-shaped beach and taking dips in the deep-blue water of Sukhumi's harbour, as hills and mist-covered mountains loomed atmospherically behind the city.

19th CENTURY WOODEN HOUSE #1

Tbilisi, Sakartvelo, 7.04.2015

Tensions between the people living here and those in present-day Sakartvelo have run high for decades, and Putin and Medvedev are far from being the first political leaders to wade into the conflict. Boris Yeltsin, for example, loudly and relentlessly supported the Georgians throughout his presidency, placing all kinds of restrictions on the Abkhaz which increased their frustration. And running through a list of his predecessors, you find similarly partisan views.

So this is how my new acquaintance Mikheil came to be in Tbilisi: during one of the many periods when tensions seemed ready to boil over, he and one other family member fled Sukhumi and ended up here. Since then, he's been unable to get a visa to go back. Which means that he hasn't seen most of his family for three decades. And you could tell, when he talked about it, that his sense of loss was still imminent.

Of course, 25 years ago, you could meet people like this right in the heart of Europe. But back then, we had potent, highly-visible symbols like the Berlin Wall to help remind us of these people's plights. There's no Berlin Wall here, and nothing that really approximates the Korean DMZ or anything as dramatic; but the effect is pretty much the same.

Despite my sympathy, though, I couldn't stay with Mikheil much longer. Tonight was my last night in Sakartvelo, and also the beginning of Easter. My 'host family' had invited me to attend midnight mass with them, and although I'm not religious, it was something I didn't want to miss. I also needed to get a couple of hours sleep, because my flight back to Istanbul was at 7am.

So I told Mikheil that I had to go, to which he said "Already?". He'd clearly intended to keep pouring me free samples until one or both of us fell on the floor!

I never made it to midnight mass, and neither did my hosts. Instead, I sat with 'host mother' Nana and and her daughters Tatia and Salome, enjoying a delicious end-of-lent supper, accompanied (since this is Sakartvelo) by generous amounts of full-bodied Saperavi wine. Nana and Salome then disappeared, and I sat with Tatia, discussing art, religion, politics and love until it was clear that if I didn't sleep soon, I wouldn't have time to sleep at all.

About three hours later, I leapt out of the shower and finished packing my new wheelie bag – a task made slightly easier by the fact that we'd drunk one of the bottles of wine which I'd intended to squeeze into it! As I wrapped the last bottle, the taxi arrived; perfect timing for the airport, but also a sad moment because it meant "Farewell Tbilisi".

Of course, with so much still to see in Sakartvelo, I'm sure this won't be the final farewell. Next time, though, I'm gonna do my best to stay away from those terrifying roads ... ;-)

Stalin's Telephones

Today I stood in the little one-room house where the 20th Century's greatest mass-murder, Joseph Stalin, was born and lived as a child. It was cold, it was simple, and it was entirely 'ordinary' ... which of course, considering the man who grew up here, makes it a rather chilling place to visit.

It also reminded me of something which has always struck me as one of the weirdest facts of the 20th Century: namely the fact that Stalin, inheritor of the Bolshevik Revolution and progenitor of the Cold War, was not Russian. Not only that, but he was Georgian - in other words, not even close to being Russian.

STALIN'S BOYHOOD HOUSE

Gori, Sakartvelo, 06.04.2015

See, although Georgia was part of the USSR, they didn't join entirely of their own accord. There was quite a bit of state-sanctioned murder and repression here in the 1920s and '30s, to try and get rid of the Georgian intelligentsia and aristocracy. They had to be eliminated, because they weren't at all keen on being a part of the Union of Republics.

Not only were they reluctant: they were also an entirely different people to the Russians who, in reality, mostly ran the show. I mean, by way of contrast, some Ukrainians like to emphasise the differences between themselves and Russians, but in fact the two ethnic groups are inextricably linked and very similar in many ways. So if Stalin had been Ukrainian, that would've been a bit weird, but perhaps not shocking or inexplicable. The same isn't true of Georgians, though; barring some intermarriage, they're 100% culturally and ethnically unrelated. They live near the Russians, true, but to say that makes them similar is like saying that France's proximity to the UK demonstrates that French people are virtually English.

On top of that, the Georgians are a Kavkaz (Caucasian) people, like the Chechens, the Dagestanis and so on. And Russians have always felt a little cagey about these peoples.

So I find it extremely odd that the Russian people even 'let' Stalin rule them in the first place.

Even weirder, from a western perspective, are some of the attitudes towards him today in former Soviet countries. You've got a bunch of people who despise Stalin because of his murderous behaviour, but you've also got many others who point to his achievements - which, let's face it, were considerable. Even the Lonely Planet acknowledges Stalin's immense contribution to the modernisation of Russia, and in the course of doing so, they quote Winston Churchill as saying that Uncle Jo "took the country with the plough, and left it with nuclear power".

Churchill was unquestionably right. But in other people's minds, his credentials as a great moderniser don't even begin to make up for the disastrous Five-Year Plans, and the mass executions, and the gulags, and the sinister Cult of Personality, and all the other things we associate with Comrade Stalin.

I've heard both sides of this argument from various people in different countries and settings, and occasionally even seen proponents of the two viewpoints face off against each other. The occasion that sticks most vividly in my memory happened in a Moscow classroom in 2006, when four or five of my students ganged up on one of their classmates called Alla, after she claimed that Stalin was the greatest leader Russia had ever had and that they needed a man like him today to fix the country's problems.

However, for obvious reasons, this conflict of ideas is at its rawest in Georgia.

Stalin was born in a town called Gori, about 80kms from Tbilisi, and his birthplace is kind of a 'must-see' for tourists in Georgia. The house pictured above is now covered by a monumental structure which somewhat resembles a grand mausoleum, and behind it is the Stalin Museum.

I travelled to Gori with a local driver and two Irishmen, who'd come on holiday here from their respective jobs in Abu Dhabi.

The three of us joined a guided tour, given in English. It was lucky that we did, because the museum was a mass of biographical detail, organised in somewhat mysterious ways. There were photos of Stalin with other world leaders, pics of people I didn't recognise who turned out to be his family members (including a few living ones), lots and lots of newspaper clippings in Russian, and a great profusion of personal belongings and objects of state, like ceremonial sashes and swords and the like.

SULTAN STALIN

Stalin Museum, Gori Sakartvelo, 06.04.2015

There was also a room devoted to the gifts which Stalin received from other Heads of State. Two Polish guys in our tour group were, I think, a little taken aback to see the beautifully-crafted tableware which their government had presented to Uncle Jo back in the day; Stalin was one of the chief military commanders in the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-21, the object of which was to completely absorb Poland into the Bolshevik state. But they weren't alone - there were gifts here from all over the world.

My personal favourite was Stalin's face on a Turkish carpet. Erdoğan, Turkey's current president and a man who's attempting to cultivate a kind of 'latter-day Sultan' personality cult around himself, may just die of envy if he saw it ;-)

Also rather striking were several portraits, like this one of Stalin visiting his mother 'Keke' shortly before she died. Like the endless photos of Stalin with children, which issued more or less continuously from the Kremlin during his reign, this painting is obviously intended as propaganda. The straightforward 'attentive son' expression on his face here doesn't reflect the complexity of Stalin's and Keke's relationship at all.

THE DUTIFUL SON

Stalin Museum, Gori Sakartvelo, 06.04.15

When Stalin was growing up, he defended his mother many times from his violently abusive father, who beat both of them regularly. And Keke was devoted to her son - who she described as a "sensitive child" - taking several beatings for him. Both she and Stalin himself expected him to enter the priesthood; in fact, he tried to do so before becoming a 'revolutionary' (for which we can actually read 'bank robber and violent criminal who terrorised Tbilisi' - but that's a whole other story). 

After the revolution, though, Stalin installed Keke in one tiny room in a Caucasian palace, and assigned his NKVD Chief Lavrenty Beria to ensure she was cared for. Stalin had very little contact with her, though he sent her occasional letters from Moscow, and apparently these were quite affectionate. But when they met in 1935, two years before she died, Keke is reported to have taken her son to task. She asked him "Do you know who you are now?" - implying that he'd become a monster - and when he replied that he was "sort of like a tsar", she told him that he "would have been better off becoming a priest".

Like Churchill, she was probably right about Stalin too.

By far the most striking thing about this museum, though, is the complete absence of any discussion about Stalin's character as a person or as a leader. The guide simply takes visitors through, explains who's who in all the photos, offers biographical details about various people in Stalin's life ("So-and-so was born in 19-such-and-such, got married in 19-such-and-such, and moved to Moscow soon after that"), and points out documents he signed, gifts he was given and so on. It's strictly factual - no commentary at all.

ONE VICTIM AMONG MILLIONS

Stalin Museum, Gori Sakartvelo, 06.04.15

The only part of the museum that makes any attempt to reflect on Stalin's legacy is a small, recently-opened room on the lower level (well away from the main exhibits), where little triangular pieces of paper are stapled onto a semi-transparent curtain on one wall. On each piece of paper is written the name of someone who died in Stalin's purges in Georgia. Then, around the corner from that, there's a little prison cell, about which the guide matter-of-factly says sth like "This is typical of the kind of prison cell which was used to house political prisoners during Soviet times", before hurriedly moving on.

Long after the tour was over, while myself and the two Irish guys were having dinner in Tbilisi, we discussed possible reasons why the tour guide was so coy. Could the people of Gori be proud of the local boy who, having been born the poor son of a shoe-maker, rose to become possibly the world's most powerful man? Maybe. That's a theory widely advanced, and as I said before, there are plenty of people in the world who choose to turn the focus away from Stalin's cruelty and towards his achievements.

Another possibility is that the subject matter is just too controversial, and the guides don't want to get involved in discussions that are very likely to turn nasty. Perhaps in the early days of the museum's existence, they got stuck in the crossfire as guests with differing views bickered over Stalin's contribution to the 20th Century and to the USSR, and they decided it would be better if those discussions happened elsewhere.

Or thirdly: because this was the English-speaking tour, the guide may have simply felt that the complexities would be too difficult to explain to foreigners with no background knowledge of the different views regarding Stalin which exist in ex-Soviet countries.

Whatever the reason, though, the experience was quite a strange one.

Strangest of all, though, was the replica of Stalin's Kremlin office that had been set up in one room of the museum. They had his original desk, his original stationery well, and most amazingly, his original telephones - one black and one white.

COILED SERPENTS; ALTARS OF DEATH

Stalin Museum, Gori Sakartvelo, 06.04.15

As I stared at these mute objects, resting innocuously on top of Stalin's desk, I thought of the Ted Hughes poem Do Not Pick Up The Telephone, in which the poet likens his phone to (among other things) a coiled serpent ready to spring and an 'altar of death'. And I thought about how many death sentences must have been spoken into these two phones that I was looking at. Obviously it's impossible to put a number on that, but if you could, it would surely be huge.

Later I went back and read the poem. Here are two bits that sprang out at me, the first addressed to the reader and the second directly to Hughes' telephone:

"Do not think your future is yours, it waits upon ... the secret police of the telephone"

And

"you cannot utter
Lies or truth, only the evil one
Makes you tremble with sudden appetite to see somebody undone"

I always found this a powerful and frightening poem. Now, looking at the photo above, it seems doubly so.

I also remembered the Russian journalist Masha Gessen remarking that, when she went to meet Putin in his Kremlin office, she noticed that he had two telephones on his desk. "Just like Stalin did", I thought. In Putin's case, though, one of them was an old-fashioned KGB phone, identifiable by the fact there were no numbers on it.

*shudder*

Creepy.

That night I thought I might be woken up by nightmares of telephones screeching death wishes at me. It didn't happen ... for which I choose to thank the calming properties of Georgian wine, and the knock-you-out-cold properties of the 50-65% proof spirit known here as 'chacha'. More about chacha later ... but for now, suffice it to say that I felt fortunate to get a good night's sleep after staring down two of the deadliest phones that have ever existed.

See you :-)

Anthony.

Crazy-Ass Taxi World

One of these days, I swear I’m going to write a book about taxis. Not the machines themselves, but the experiences one can have in them.

A case in point: tonight I arrived in Tbilisi, capital city of the Republic of Georgia. The actual name of this country is Sakartvelo, and how we got from there to Georgia I have no clue - but then, the radical anglicisation of country names is a phenomenon that often mystifies me. I mean, how did Daehan Minguk mutate into 'South Korea', for example? You see what I mean. 

Personally, I think we should’ve retained the word Sakartvelo in English, because a) it’s a great word, and b) when a person says "I'm going to Georgia", very often there's a subsequent need to clarify that they're not talking about the US state which hosted the Atlanta Olympics.  

But anyway ... Sakartvelo/what-we-bizarrely-call-Georgia is the ninth former Soviet republic that I’ve either visited or lived in or both. And out of all of them, it's the one with by far the best reputation. In fact, it has one of the best reputations of any country I can think of; I’ve never once met a person who’s been here and come away feeling anything less than rapturous about it. 

Given this unbroken record of glowing recommendations, I’ve been meaning to get my ass here for years. So I’m really quite excited to have finally relocated said ass to said republic.

Unfortunately, the holiday didn't kick off in ideal circumstances: the flight in was terrifying. Intense crosswinds forced the pilots to do a go-around (or maybe two, I’m not entirely sure), before finally bringing us in for a wild and rather precarious landing at Tbilisi international airport. A couple of times we went into freefall, losing what I’d judge to be around 100 metres (though when I say “judge”, what I really mean is “guess blindly, bringing exactly zero aeronautical expertise to bear on the matter"). 

The pity of that is, for me, freefall is actually a lot of fun, provided you can remove the PSDE (Possible Sudden Death Element) from it. If I’d been able to see half an hour into the future, so as to know that the landing would turn out ok, I could’ve relaxed up there and enjoyed that whole ‘stepping down off the clouds' sensation. 

Sadly, though, my powers of prognostication are not what they could be.  

On the up side, I had the pleasure of spending what I thought may have been my last moments on Earth with a very friendly and smiley Georgian woman called Nino, named (I congratulated myself on knowing) after the saint who brought Christianity here from the cave churches of Cappadocia some time around the 4th Century CE. 

I don’t know what the original Nino was like - probably quite dour and preachy, I’d imagine - but this Nino was quite a beauty, with a face that reminded me of a young Deborah Harry, only slightly more eastern-looking, if you can picture that. Despite the woolly pink top she was wearing, her naturally black, shoulder-length hair and her blood red lipstick - which she kept nervously re-applying as our Turkish Airlines 737-800 veered around the sky like a bee after its sixth gin & tonic - added a mildly gothic touch to her appearance. 

Most strikingly, though, Nino had a voice woven from pure silk; the kind of voice that makes you want to engage a person in conversation purely for the joy of hearing them speak. At one point, the thought actually flickered through my mind that if the plane started to plummet and it became obvious that we weren’t gonna make the runway, I should just lean in and kiss her.  

*ahem*

Sorry ... huge tangent there. 

(And btw, I almost certainly wouldn’t have done that. Even when looking directly into the face of death, I’m far too much of a ‘gentleman’ for my own good. Stupid me!)

So finally the pilots get us on the ground, and Nino and I part company at the baggage carousel. She goes off to stay with her family in some rural and no doubt picturesque region of Sakartvelo, where at least one vineyard-covered hillside is always within view, and where flush-cheeked women burst into polyphonic song as they climb the mountain slopes to milk their goats above the treeline. 

(If you’re wondering why I mentioned the polyphonic song there, have a look at this wonderful video, recorded by three-and-a-half Georgian women on their smartphone a couple of years back. It went viral at the time, and rightly so - regardless of your tastes, there's a pretty good chance it will blow you away and maybe even move you a little:

So about two minutes post-Nino, a familiar-looking wheelie bag goes past me on the carousel, but when I inspect it more closely, I realise it can’t be mine. Four hours earlier in Istanbul, I’d put my bag on the check-in conveyor in near-perfect condition. This one, though it’s definitely the same brand and the same model, looks like it’s survived a mortar attack.

Another few minutes drag by, and all the passengers have left. The beaten, torn and apparently-slightly-melted wheelie bag comes around again on the carousel, and I think “Holy crap - it IS mine! What the hell have they done to it?!?” 

I take my poor bag off the carousel and try to stand it up. It falls over and lies prone on the white concrete tiles of the baggage reclaim area, looking feeble and dejected. I try to open it, but the zipper has been mashed. So I lift the wretched creature up by its handle and carry it to the Lost & Found desk. After a long wait, they advise me to take my enquiry to the on-site office of TFA (Turkish Fucking Airlines). 

(Note: that expletive is now an official part of their company name. Ok, not really - but it should be.) 

I think “Ok, fine, but I’m going to smoke first.”.

I go outside into the freezing, whipping wind. Immediately, I’m accosted by taxi drivers. The first one seems drunk. The second one is more alert, but perhaps a bit too alert - he borders on pushy and annoying.

Hoping to shake him off, I explain that I’ve got stuff to do before leaving the airport, and I’ll come back out when I’m done. But he has a better idea: he follows me back inside the arrivals hall (neatly side-stepping the security check - guess they recognise him there), to help me out. Of course, this is a time-honoured taxi drivers' trick: make yourself useful to your prospective passenger, so that they feel they ‘owe’ you, and then re-open negotiations in a far stronger position. 

Back inside, nothing goes especially well. The TFA office is closed, the ATM won’t take my main card (but it takes another card - phew!), and the information people advise me that I can probably speak to a TFA representative if I hang around until 1am.

Yeah, right.  

After almost two years ‘in country’, I've had time to acquaint myself with the nature of Turkish customer service. Your typical customer service rep is a rigorously-trained smiling machine. They smile, and they smile; their smiles appear to be looped like hold music, until the appropriate moment in your sob story arrives and they effortlessly switch to looking concerned and empathetic and absolutely determined to assist in any way they can. And yet, in spite of all that, it’s quite clear that the person who coined the expression “Like getting blood from a stone” had never asked a Turkish customer service representative to change a faulty item. If he had, he would’ve known that making a lump of rock bleed is child’s play by comparison.

Plus it's 11pm, I've been travelling all day, and this is the first day of my holiday, damn it!

So at this point, I basically give up on TFA. The taxi driver is still there, and he’s helped me with some translations, so I give up on shaking him off as well. It’s obvious that he’s gonna be my ride into town tonight, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

We walk around to the back of the airport building, and he points to his car, a black Mercedes. It’s as black inside as it is out - all vinyl seats and shiny black buttons with mystifying hieroglyphs on them, supposedly indicating their functions. But the car smells of smoke and sweat and disrepair, and one of the rear-view mirrors has been completely destroyed - and I mean completely. There’s nothing but a tangle of wires and electrical tape sticking out of the driver’s side of the car, like the stump that might protrude from a robot’s shoulder if you ripped its arm off.  

He puts the key into the ignition, and says in Russian “What the hell?” Then to me, in English, “All the passwords changed”. For a moment nothing happens, and it seems like the ride is over. But somehow, he manages to override whatever system it is that’s preventing the car from starting (it seems to be related to a message on the dashboard display, saying the car is 7,800kms overdue for a service), and we proceed to the toll booth at the entrance to the airport car park.

The woman inside the booth asks the driver for 5 Georgian Lari (about $2), and the driver - who by now has introduced himself as “George” - winds down the window and remonstrates with her. Amazingly, she relents and lets us go. But then we’ve got a problem: the window won’t wind back up!

George instructs me to hold down one of the hieroglyphically-marked buttons, and as I do so, he puts one foot outside the car and a hand on either side of the glass pane. He shoves the window back into place by force - an action which, apparently, is somehow facilitated by my button-pressing.

And then we take off into the city ... at a million frikkin’ miles an hour.

George steers with his knees, using both hands to retrieve his tablet from the back seat. His brother has just called him, and he decides that answering the call is more important than retaining firm control over the steering wheel. 

“Yep”, I think, “No doubt about it. I’m definitely back in the Soviet space!”

I ask George what I should see while I’m in Tbilisi, and he starts talking but falters because of the language barrier. He then apologises for his English, and says “I can explain in Russian, but in English, I don’t know the words”. I tell him that I understand a little Russian, but I emphasise the  "a little” part, because I haven't had much practice in recent times.  

George says “If you only have a little, you probably won’t follow me” (which makes me warm to him a little, because too many Russian-speakers - just like their English-speaking counterparts - hear you speak three words of their language and immediately assume that they can communicate to you like they would to a native speaker). 

Then he starts talking - and I understand almost every word he says. He’s a clear, cogent speaker - his style is direct and simple, which, when you’re a foreigner in the Russosphere, makes him worth his weight in gold.  

A little while later, he apologises for his English again. I say (in Russian) “George, I used to live in Kazakhstan and I learned Russian there, but these days ...”

“Ah, you have no practice?”

“Yeah, no practice. So it’s great for me to have this chance to hear Russian. But I’ve forgotten lots of words, so be patient.”

Feeling encouraged by my desire to listen, George proceeds to give me a potted history of Sakartvelo in about two thousand words. We talk about Nino (the original one, not the cute one on the plane) and Cappadocia, the King who founded Tbilisi, how the city got its name (it’s a myth involving said king, along with a pheasant brought back from the dead by the magical healing powers of the warm springs in the area), the architecture, the influence of the Russians and the Persians and the Azeris, and a whole bunch of other stuff you’d normally have to pay a tour guide for. It was awesome.

Meanwhile, his driving hadn’t got any less scary.

So, after speeding down three-lane highways for about 20 minutes, using all the lanes available, and swerving suddenly down a couple of exit roads, George stops the car across the road from a late-night currency exchange place. “Give me your money”, he says.

If this was my first visit to an ex-Sov, I’d probably assume I was being robbed at this point. But I know from past experience what’s happening here.

At the risk of embarking on yet another hopeless tangent, I want to say something about this phrase “ex-Sov” - shorthand for “former Soviet Republic”. In many ways, it’s a wholly inadequate term. The territories it refers to comprise about one sixth of the world’s landmass - and so, as you might expect, we’re talking about an incredible degree of cultural, geographical, ethnic and religious diversity here that an umbrella term will almost inevitably fail to capture. And yet, there are at least a few little details that somehow manage to traverse that vast space, cropping up everywhere you go in the former USSR. One of them is that nobody ever seems to have any change.

George is no exception, and what's more, he knows that the ATM at the airport only dispenses 100 Lari notes. The ride costs 50. So he takes my crisp 100 to the exchange window, where the woman unceremoniously tells him to go away. She doesn’t have change either.

“Suka!” he says as he gets back into the car.

(This is literally Russian for “Bitch!”, but it’s a much stronger insult.) We take off again, hoping that my hotel will be able to break a hundred.

Then suddenly we’re in the city centre, and first impressions are flooding in through the window. They're quite overwhelming! There’s a 5th Century fortress floodlit on a hill, overlooking medieval walls. There are 19th Century merchant houses and gigantic Stalin-era brutalist hulks; there’s beauty, there’s decay (plenty of it!), there are wide expansive boulevards and poky, ancient lanes, and there’s an overriding feeling of exoticism about the whole place.

Whizzing through it as we are, I feel my heart in my throat again - but this time it’s all good. I’m gonna have so much fun getting to grips with this city!

I’m sure anyone who’s travelled widely has experienced this at least once: the 'first blush’ of seeing a new and mysterious place through the window of a taxi, and knowing that the days to come are going to reveal some fabulous secrets. Filtering those initial moments through the lens of a mad taxi driver - who seems likely to either a) kill you, b) ensure that your first hour remains among the most memorable you spend here, or c) possibly both - can be truly exhilarating.

And that’s why I’m going to write a book about taxis.

It’s going to be a compilation, though. So start thinking about your chapter now.

Back on The Cusp (prelude to flying saucer III)

So ... getting to where I am now has involved several highs, but also a number of fairly intense lows. 

As I write this, my overriding thought is basically “I’ve put everything into this flying saucer thing – DAMN, it better be good!” 

That probably isn't the best frame of mind to be in when you're going into an 'adventure'. It's how I feel, though. Shit has gone down. Some of it has been great - like detouring to visit Span, Jits and their family in lovely Antwerp, on my way back to Bulgaria - but some of it has been ... well, not so great.

I think my mistake was leaving my summer camp in Finland early. If there was an “and it all went wrong from there” moment, that was almost certainly it. 

Picture the scene, though: I’m having an after-lunch cigarette at the college where I work in Anjalankoski, in idyllic regional Finland, and the head administrator Alexei is there in our little 'smoking pagoda' with his lady friend. 

He says to me “Entoni, would you like to go to Sweden?”. I ask “When?”, and he replies “At about three o’clock”. He’s paying for the ferry ticket, which ordinarily would set me back about 120 Euros.

It’s the last day of this particular camp (they go in two-week cycles, which is to say that every two weeks one group of students leaves and another turns up on buses that come from Russia), and that means today we're having performances. These involve teachers and students working together on a little stage production for maybe the last 2-3 days of the camp, and then presenting it on the final afternoon.

I obviously don’t want to miss seeing my class perform (especially after being so inspired by my 14-year-old 'music supervisor' Anja, who pretty much pulled the whole thing out of the fire single-handedly), so I bargain: 

“Is there another ferry that goes a bit later?”

Alexei thinks. “I’ll go and check”, he says. 

We agree that I’ll sail from Turku (three hours away by car) at 9pm, and that Alexei will drive me. So I get to watch my guys perform, then I hug them and let them write stuff on me with board markers, and then I leave.  

And there you have it: the decision which set the “everything went wrong” ball rolling. 

The essential problem here is that when another person suddenly suggests out of the blue that I go to another country which I hadn’t planned on visiting, and says “Let's do it today!”, I simply can’t resist. 

And I must say, the journey itself was really enjoyable, in a weird sort of way. We sailed out through the Turku Archipelago, which I’ve mentioned before in these pages as a place that really inspires me. It’s a vast slick of about 2,000 islands off Finland's south-western coast, and some of these islands are for sale. A few are quite large, with whole villages/towns occupying them. Others are mere islets with just one or two houses, or with no human habitation at all.

ISLAND-SPOTTING AT DUSK

Turku Archipelago, off the coast of Finland, 31.07.14

I flew over the archipelago a few years ago, but seeing it from ground level was perhaps even more exciting, because I got a stronger sense of what it would be like if I ever did decide to pursue that whole ‘live on your own island’ dream.

I also got to enjoy some live entertainment on the ferry, because there’s a bar on deck 10 (near the top) where an acoustic live show happens. I hadn't planned to watch the show, but there was a bizarre moment when I was walking past the entrance to the bar, on my way outside for a cigarette, and I heard the following coming from the stage:

“So, what about Australia? Has anyone been there?”

This came at the end of the singer’s rendition of Sweet Home Alabama, so I'm guessing he must have preceded that song with a question about whether any of his audience had visited the US state in the song title, and that he was going to play an Australian song next. But it was just so weird to hear such a remark while making my way around a Nordic cruise ship, on which I was possibly the only Australian passenger. 

(It was  greeted, btw, with total silence).

I froze for a second, not knowing what to do. Should I speak up? In the end, I decided not to. I just headed outside and continued inspecting islands, considering which one I was going to buy. 

As I closed the door, though, I heard the singer start playing the song which his question had referred to. And believe me, until you’ve heard Land Down Under* sung in a Swedish accent on a ferry off the coast of Finland after not having set foot in the country of your birth for seven years, there's a level of weird cultural displacement that you've yet to experience. 

So that was fun. Or at least, it was a pleasantly intriguing mild headfuck. 

Between the overnight voyage to Stockholm and this present moment, essentially four main things have happened:

The first was the camp in Sweden, which I didn't really enjoy. It was, quite frankly, just a bit dull. Unlike the Finnish camps, there are only two teachers in the Swedish one. The other teacher was a charming, soft-spoken American woman called Kelli ... but see, Kelli lives in Stockholm, so after lessons she goes back to the city to get on with her normal life. 

That leaves me pretty much stuck in the camp venue alone – and the venue in question is Sweden’s National Sports Training Complex. 

On the up side that means free gym, and meeting a few interesting people who come to the camp as part of United Nations development projects and the like. On the downside, those people are in the minority. Most of your fellow campers are the Swedish equivalent of folks you’d expect to find at the Australian Institute of Sport, or at a similar facility in any other country. They’re loud, they’re in great enough shape to constantly remind you of your own physical disrepair, and on top of that, many of them are just plain annoying.

A particular source of irritation was the Swedish female gymnastics team, and I mention this because I actually found it quite amusing that I was so annoyed by them. 

On the day they arrived, I remember them swanning past me in single file while I was eating lunch in the dining area. A few hours later, a Hungarian guy who I’d made friends with passed a comment along the lines of “Whoooooaa ... check out that Swedish Gymnastics team, eh?” He’d also been having lunch when they made their grand entrance, and he’d been quite impressed.

At the time when he made this remark, I was still quite poorly acquainted with the team members and I was able to genuinely agree with my Hungarian friend that they were indeed quite attractive to look at.  

Two days after that, I’d pledged to shove a live eel down the shirt of the next Swedish gymnast who I heard giggling for no apparent reason – and for an impossibly long period – while I was trying to concentrate and/or think and/or not go completely insane courtesy of their girly racket.

Moving on ... the second thing was that, at the end of the Swedish camp, I either lost my salary or had it stolen. I think I’d actually slightly prefer the second option, because if the loss of half my summer pay was entirely my own fault, then that makes me kind of a colossal idiot.

LOVE THOSE WINDOWS!

Antwerp, Belgium, 13.08.14

Thing the Third was visiting Span and Jits (two old and dear friends) in Belgium, which was awesome. Antwerp turns out to be a really beautiful and cool city - a fact which I never would’ve suspected had I not gone there. And of course, time spent with these two fabulous human beings (and their kids, and also Span’s mum as it turned out) is always time well spent.

SERIOUS LESSON FROM A BEER EXPERT

Antwerp, Belgium, 14.08.14

Among other things, Span took me to a couple of great little bars and introduced me to the endless diversity of Belgian beer. Probably the best of said bars was this one next to the cathedral, into which the publican has crammed around 1,100 religious statues. Collecting Marys, Apostles and so on is not something that ever would've occurred to me as a good way to decorate a bar, but somehow it really works.  

(Btw, subsequent to a conversation I had with one of the Russian camp leaders in Finland, I also used being in Antwerp as an excuse to do a few little experiments in 'reflective photography'. Don't think I'm in danger of winning any prizes, but it was fun.)

MY LITTLE EXPERIMENT IN 'REFLECTIVE PHOTOGRAPHY'

Antwerp, Belgium, 13.08.14

And here are some examples of people who really know what they're doing, which inspired me to try the technique. You should definitely follow this link, because the page contains some incredible images:

Reflective Photography - 25 Beautiful Examples

Finally, there was my attempt to get out of Belgium and back to Bulgaria. 

That was a total nightmare involving missed flights, being trapped inside airports for hours at a time, public holiday crowds in Brussels that threatened to crush me as I tried to get my wheelie bag through them, weird, overpriced and unpleasant hotels in the middle of nowhere, and a bunch of other stuff which, when added together, seriously made me question why I travel at all.

Yeah, I know ... when I’m questioning that, things are pretty much at rock bottom! 

In fact, when I woke up this morning in Brussels, I’d more or less  decided that this would be my last holiday for a long, long while. Things had just spiralled out of control, financially and psychologically. Courtesy of the various screw-ups - coupled with the fact that both mine and Yuliya’s computers chose this summer to die, within weeks of each other - I was looking at paying back this holiday for a good portion of the next academic year. “And for what?”, I asked myself about 273 times.

So that’s the headpsace I was in as I dove into August 16th. It’s now technically finished - these being the wee hours of the 17th. But after about 15 hours of solid travelling, I’m well over 2,000 kms from where I started.  

I’m also back in Kazanlak, about 20kms from Buzludzha and the Communist Flying Saucer. And there are three other people in this hotel who are going there with me tomorrow. I haven’t actually seen them here yet, because I arrived at 1am. In fact, there’s one who I haven’t even met. But they’re here. I’ll see them at breakfast.

Also, they’re all Bulgarian, which is perhaps as it should be. After all, Buzludzha is their national monument, not mine :-)

At least one of the people with whom I’m going up the mountain tomorrow thinks I’m mad for being here now, and told me so while I was in Brussels. I was talking to her online yesterday, sitting in a cosy cafe and sipping white wine (which is about the only affordable thing in Belgium), while explaining all the difficulties I’d had. The actual word she used was “stubborn”, but then I prompted her a bit and she revised upwards to “insane”. 

She went on to suggest that maybe the cosmos didn’t want me to see the inside of Buzludzha right at the moment, even going so far as to advise that I consult the I Ching. 

Obviously, that only increased my determination to get here.

And so, at 12:30am I found myself winding towards Kazanlak in a taxi with a Serb driver called Todor, who offered me a cigarette en route and asked if I'd like to hear some Serbian narodna muzika (folk music) to help us on our way. 

Great clouds of steam were rising from the highway, the result of earlier rains combined with summer temperatures and high humidity. As well as producing a weird ‘alt world’ atmosphere, they were making it quite difficult to see, and thankfully Todor kept slowing down to compensate for the poor visibility. 

There were moments when no sign of human existence was visible anywhere - no houses, no distant lights from a town, no oncoming traffic. Just us, the steam, the narodna muzika and the darkness. 

Perfect.

So ... for all of the reasons above, along with several others, I'm overwhelmingly glad to be back in Bulgaria :-) 

Now off to sleep, to the melodic sounds of Bulgarian crickets. Obviously I’ll let you know how it goes tomorrow. 

Good night!


(*An iconic Australian song from the 1980s.)

Ten Reasons Not to Miss ...

Location: Oslo's Gardermoen airport.
Time: just after 1am.

I landed here an hour ago. My connecting flight to Helsinki leaves tomorrow morning at half past ten, and the cheapest, most basic hotel nearby costs about 80 Euros. Its reviews on booking.com are strikingly vitriolic, and getting there on the airport shuttle will set me back another 15 Euros.

Naturally, I'm not going to pay that. So I'm bedding down on the airport floor.

The particular spot I've chosen is a kids' playground, surfaced with something like astro-turf which is marginally more comfortable than the cold, hard tiles that predominate elsewhere.

I've taken up position directly beneath a piece of play equipment shaped like an aeroplane, designed for small folk to crawl through. At the moment, there's an adult asleep inside it, arms folded over his chest like a movie vampire in a movie vampire's coffin. There are about half a dozen others around me, shifting and starting in their sleep.

The website 'sleepinginairports.com' places Gardermoen at number five on the list of best airports in the world for a good night's rest. Personally I'd have to disagree ... though admittedly, I haven't tried all the others.

Aside from the discomfort, the task of falling asleep is further complicated by a whirl of thoughts. Tomorrow I start summer camp, and the first day of camp is always intense ... so that's on my mind of course. Also, I'll be back in fabulous Finland, which means that "Mmmm, Finland" feeling has begun creeping up on me ...

Even more than that, though, my brain is replaying things I've seen and heard over the past few days. It's been an extraordinary time, with lots of new information to cram in, 'cause this week I finally did one of those things I've been planning to do for years and years ... I went to Sarajevo!

*cue cheers, streamers etc*

I often find that, when a particular city really inspires and excites me, it's quite difficult to write about afterwards. I end up sounding like I'm advertising the city, which is really not the point of Ranting Manor. So I re-wrote this entry several times, trying to make it not sound like a travelogue.

Then I thought: "Screw it! Embrace your inner travel brochure-writing hack! Ride that wild cliche-o-coaster right to the bitter end!" And, you know, other thoughts like that.

So ... here are approximately ten reasons why you should absolutely, positively, and without further ado, visit the heck out of Sarajevo.

REASON #1: THE JOURNEY   

You can fly to Sarajevo from several European capitals (said the flight magazine writer to his audience of nervous flyers, trying desperately to distract themselves from the reality of being 35,000 feet above Earth inside something that weighs more than a house). But you shouldn't.

Why? Well, because you can also arrive by bus, which generally entails travelling through about half of Bosnia-Herzegovina. And that's a super-worthwhile experience ... assuming you're one who's partial to a bit of a road trip, of course :-)

  'MINI-FJORDS' AT DUSK

Near Zvornik, Bosnia-Herzegivona, 15.07.14 

Looking at the distance on Google maps, you'd estimate maybe a four-hour ride from Belgrade, depending on border formalities. But you'd be wrong. Because of the terrain, the bus takes more than seven hours.

You spend most of that time winding past 'mini-fjords' and fjells, sleepy villages where the houses are a tiny bit reminiscent of Swiss chalets (only without the obsessive-compulsive neatness), heavily sedimented rivers and streams, and impressive peaks towering skyward, close enough to the road that you frequently pass signs warning of falling rocks. And since there are basically no passing lanes, you end up snail-pacing along behind trucks loaded with timber for extended periods, as the forests glide past you in slow motion. It feels like the opposite of time-lapse photography.

So yeah ... a frikkin' long journey, to be sure, but a memorable one :-)


REASON #2: THE WELCOME 

On the evening when I arrived, I'd set out from Belgrade at around four in the afternoon. By the time we pulled into Sarajevo's barely-lit and somewhat creepy bus station, it was after eleven.

I was concerned that my small, family-run hotel might not have anyone on night duty. I needn’t have worried, though; the owner and his friends were sitting in the lobby bar, where they seemed to remain almost permanently for the next three days. Before lugging my wheelie bag up two flights of stairs, the owner gave me a warm, sympathetic smile, and handed me a complimentary shot of rakia (slightly sweetened plum brandy – a classic Balkan drink with a 40% kick), to ease the pain of the journey.

I could tell I was going to like this place ;-)


REASON #3: THE TOUR 

I'm not always a fan of the City Tour. Having said that, though, there are some cities in which it really does seem appropriate to join a tour, just to get your bearings and decide which bits you want to explore later at your leisure. Sarajevo definitely falls into that category. There's so much going on just within the architectural fabric of the city, you really need a bit of orientation to help you make sense of it all.

So I signed up for the tour on my first day, and I'm glad I did. Staring around and gazing up in awe, I could fade in and out as needed. Sometimes I'd be focused on the tour guide's nuggets of information; other times he'd be a distant buzz as I lost myself in the details of the street. It dragged a bit towards the end, but it was a necessary intro to a city that's as layered as the outfit of an Australian tourist on an Arctic dog-sledding expedition.

  HAPSBURG ARCHITECTURE ON TITO STREET 

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 16.07.2014 

Btw, the tour I took begins on the elegant Ulica Marshala Tita – Tito Street. This is actually a great starting point, because it entails a discussion of the man more associated with the word "Yugoslavia" than any other, and whose death led to its break-up (directly or indirectly, depending on which account you read).

Walking down a 'Tito street' anywhere in the former Yugoslavia is quite a lot like walking down any street in the former USSR that has a statue of Lenin at its main intersection (and there are a ton of those!). It makes you think about the convolutions of history, and about how we 20th/21st century folk manage to take these in our stride, getting on with our little lives while the world around us goes through serial upheaval.

Pretty damn intense, in other words :-)


REASON #4: TWO 'OLD TOWNS' FOR THE PRICE OF ONE

Ulica Marshala Tita is actually the main drag in the Hapsburg part of town, and as my little walking tour progressed, I became more acquainted with that district. Interestingly, though, it's just one of two 'Old Towns' here.

To explain this, I need to delve into a bit of history.

Let's begin with a war. This is Europe, after all – historical home of the "How about we go next door and confirm our Divine Right to rule by killing our neighbours?" approach to international relations.

So ... a couple of entries back, I mentioned the Russo-Turkish war of the 1870s. Not a hugely well-known conflict in the world at large, but Balkans-wise it turns out to be über-significant. It set the stage for a lot of what came later, and in a sense, its outcome still reverberates through the region today.

For example, after the war there was something called 'The Treaty of Berlin', by which Sarajevo was signed over from the Ottoman Turks to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It remained part of their territory until after World War I, at which point a rather intriguing new country called Yugoslavia (which means "land of the southern Slavs") party-popped into existence.

In the intervening 40 years, Austro-Hungary – ruled at that time by the house of Hapsburg – put a fair amount of effort into persuading reluctant Sarajevans that they were living under worthy, responsible rulers. They introduced electricity, tram lines and a bunch of other stuff designed to coax the population out of their tiny alleys filled with fragrant shisha smoke, and into the modern European world.

LOOK - WE'RE IN BUDAPEST!

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 16.07.14

They also vastly extended the city – but very sensitively for the time, they didn't flatten existing buildings and construct new ones over the top of them. Instead, they left the Ottoman centre completely intact, and started construction where the old part ended, extending its main street to the west.

This decision is one that I think almost every visitor to Sarajevo must appreciate and marvel at. In the 19thC, Sarajevo had already long been known as a 'meeting point between east and west', but the new centre dramatically accentuated that idea. Now when you go there, you can stand at the confluence of the Ottoman town and the Hapsburg town, where east literally meets west – at least from an architectural point of view. Someone has even helpfully painted a compass on the ground, to mark the spot.

NO WAIT ... WE'RE IN TURKEY!

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 16.07.14

The Ottoman town, meanwhile, is beautiful. Along the main streets are elegant mosques and medrassahs, a karavanserai and a bezistan (ancient trading place, currently being restored).

Radiating out from the main thoroughfares are poky little laneways, some barely wide enough to squeeze through. If you peer down to the end of them, you find that some lead into hidden courtyards, while others offer a view of the green hills that surround the city. Sometimes the low awnings of the two-storey buildings almost touch in the middle, so you have the impression of walking through a covered maze.

PURIFICATION FONT OUTSIDE THE CENTRAL MOSQUE

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 16.07.14

Granted, you do have to share all of this with a fair number of tourists, but still, it's a pretty magical kinda place.


REASON #5: THE 20thC STARTED HERE

When I was at high school, Modern History was my favourite subject by a long, long way. I just couldn't get enough of it, and I even took an extra unit in which people who knew stuff tried to cram the complexities of revolutionary theory into my 17-year-old brain. It was mind-bending at the time. In fact, it still is.

Of course, the two World Wars were pretty huge on the syllabus, and so we talked a lot about why they happened – both in terms of underlying causes, and of the 'sparks' which ignited each conflict.

In the case of WWI, the spark (as I'm sure most of you know) was the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a jittery young lad named Gavrilo Princip, who was part of an organisation called The Black Hand. And that assassination took place in Sarajevo.

To be more specific, it took place on this street corner here:

FRANZ FERDINAND ASSASSINATION MUSEUM

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzigovina, 16.07.14

The story is worth recounting, because there's definitely more than just a whiff of wtf? about it.

See, the Archduke had already had a bomb thrown at him on that day in June 1914. And it had happened on the very same street – on the very same block, in fact. He'd been on his way to an official engagement with his wife Sophie, and the boulevard was lined with spectators. A few of them were members of the Black Hand (who nowadays we'd probably label a 'terrorist organisation', without analysing what that actually means beyond the fact that they were shooting at people and they didn't have a permission note from the government).

Most of the Black Hand guys were armed, but for various reasons, they were unable to do anything at the crucial moment. Several of them, it seems, were just catastrophically disorganised – if you were going to make a comedy movie out of an assassination plot, this would probably be the one to choose. But the third guy in line had a bomb, and he threw it at Franz and Sophie's car.

In a display of ineptitude that appears to have been the Black Hand's unintentional trademark, he missed Franz and Sophie, and blew up the car next to theirs. He then swallowed poison and leapt into the nearby river, but the poison didn't work and he couldn't manage to drown himself, so he was fished out and arrested. Several of his cohorts, who'd been standing along the street concealing their various weapons, were collared too. Most of them died in prison, but one went on to become a history professor.

At this point, one has to wonder what could've motivated the Archduke to attempt another 'pass the crowds and wave regally' stunt on this street, where he'd nearly been blown up just hours before – especially when he was in an open car with his wife sitting next to him. But there you go; never underestimate the idiocy of a European aristocrat, or the disaster that may result from it.

So anyway, after his meeting, off went Archie Dukie down the boulevard once more. Gavrilo Princip was sitting in a tea house, no doubt wondering to himself whether there were any other violent anti-government groups in Bosnia who weren't totally useless, and whether they'd accept him as a member. He saw the Duke's car approaching, and – probably unable to believe his luck – he stood up, went outside and shot Franz Ferdinand dead. Then, you know, political squabbles, Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia, Germany declares war on Russia, and a bunch of other European countries all jump in, like baseball players leaping on top of their fighting teammates to form a big pile of flailing guys in numerically-coded pyjamas.

THE 'KENNEDY MOMENT'

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 16.07.14

Btw, just for its curiosity value, here's the car that Franz and Sophie were in when he took the hit. (That's her parasol on the back seat.) Their romance was apparently a favourite topic of newspaper columnists, because the princely Franz Ferdinand had come under huge pressure to marry an actual, pre-selected princess, but he'd refused; he was just too head-over-heels for his Sophie. And although she was actually from a wealthy aristocratic family, the European press painted her as the 'ordinary girl' who had captured the Archduke's heart, and the public's hearts as well. So they were the Charles and Di of their time, I guess you could say.

Looking at this from street level made me think that the incident in 1914 must have been, in a sense, almost Europe's 'Kennedy moment'. But it also re-kindled memories of Year 11 Modern History lessons, in which the masterful Brother Sean (probably my favourite teacher ever, and certainly one of the people responsible for igniting my interest in the past) had brought these events to life so brilliantly and evocatively.

So yeah: an essential street corner if you're a Modern History nerd ... like, say, me :-)

REASON #6: THE FOOD

Balkan cuisine is vastly under-rated. I mean, if you asked your friends to make a list of countries they'd visit on a 'world food tour', how many of them would name a Balkan nation? My guess would be approximately none ... whereas personally, I think there's every reason why they should.

For a start, if you like white cheese (which I do), stop reading and get on a plane right now. I actually don't think I had any idea how good cheese could be until I first visited Bulgaria. Then this month, I found out it's a region-wide thing; you can just as easily find yourself doing the white cheese-swoon in any Balkan country. And I do.

BALKAN DELICACIES

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 17.07.14

Then there are the meatballs, and the super-fresh organic salads, and the little fried mushrooms, and things wrapped in grape leaves and cabbage leaves, and so on ad infinitum.

In Sarajevo, you also get the added twist of the Ottoman influence (although to be fair, it's noticeable in the eastern parts of Bulgaria too). And the results are definitely Food Tour-worthy!

REASON #7: THE SHEER IMMANENCE OF THINGS

At the start I mentioned that I was having trouble sleeping on the airport floor, and that things I'd seen and heard in recent days were adding to the difficulty. Here's an example of something that's been on replay:

“You see those houses just there?”

Five heads turn away from a mildly pretty Jewish cemetery, to regard two unremarkable two-storey semis, each with a windowless, white-washed wall on one side.

"Mm-hmm".

“I was in this one, and the Serbs, they were in that one. Sometimes in the evenings, we could hear them talking and playing cards, probably drunk. And then the next morning, they would try to take our house and we would try to take theirs ... you know?”

"No", I thought, "I don't know. But you clearly do, and that blows my mind."

That little vignette occurred yesterday afternoon, as I was standing on a hilltop overlooking Sarajevo's old centre, half-way through another tour (this one called 'The Siege Tour'). The guy doing most of the talking was a wiry, middle-aged Bosnian man, who drove us around to a series of locations in the hills and near the airport, showing us various 'hot spots' and tearing through half a pack of cigarettes in the process.

In most European cities, the tour guides really know their history. They learn it, they memorise it, and they repeat it every day. But in Sarajevo, some of the guides simply have no use for all that study; I mean, why would you need to study historical events that you were actually a part of?

More arresting still is the fact that this guy's first-hand experiences of being besieged in his own city are far from unique. They're not even unusual. Nearly every Sarajevan over the age of about 25 has at least one ‘siege story’ to tell ... which is perhaps not overly surprising, when you consider that the Siege of Sarajevo (from Feb 1992 to the end of 1995) was the longest of the 20th Century – even longer than the Battle of Stalingrad or the Leningrad Blockade. To find a comparable one in Europe, you have to go back to Gibraltar in the 1780s. And the Sarajevo Siege is in living memory of, say, at least half the people you see there in the street.

A 'SARAJEVO ROSE'

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 16.07.14

As I said: mind thoroughly blown.

You sense this immanence of history everywhere as you walk around. Sometimes it's overt – the museums will put on exhibitions with names like 'Srebrenica 20 years on', and things like that – but elsewhere it's more subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) woven into the architectural fabric. You look up, and you see a whole mess of plaster marks which show you where bullet holes have been repaired. Or you look down and see a 'Sarajevo Rose' – a splotch of red paint marking the spot where a citizen was killed by a shell or rocket impact.

Notice, btw, that behind the 'rose' pictured here you can see the bottom of a wall. That wall belongs to one of the city's cathedrals, and the honeycombing that starts about 20cm off the ground is the result of shrapnel. Chilling.

Sometimes it's even in what you don't see.

During the siege, foreign journalists covering the story took refuge in the Sarajevo Holiday Inn, which suddenly became the world's most recognisable ugly mid-range hotel. Although both sides had agreed not to fire on it, the building took any number of indirect hits, and I remember seeing footage of it looking decidedly embattled, with smoke pouring from windows and so on.

HOLIDAY INN

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 16.07.14

Today the wounds are gone, and the building has been completely restored to its original hideous yellow-and-orange self. It stands fairly near the old centre, surrounded by a small, neat garden. But although it's on a main street, its environs are strangely quiet and unpopulated. This near-silent calm, and the utter lack of anything that betrays the hotel's recent past, are more than a little creepy.


REASON #8: THE NIGHT LIFE

When I travel alone I rarely regret it, but Sarajevo was an exception to this, just because the night life is so great.

As I mentioned earlier, I'd come here from Belgrade, where after about 10pm it's all about the 'splats'. These are old boats moored on the banks of the river Sava and converted into pretentious night clubs for beautiful people. They're probably fun if you're under 25 and so hip that it hurts; but as I'm neither of those things, it left me cold and mildly nauseous.

A few scattered clubs in the Hapsburg parts of Sarajevo offer something vaguely similar to that, but the bulk of the night spots are outdoors, in alleyways and small hidden squares. At around the same time a battery of second-rate DJs commence their mediocre noodlings in Belgrade, these little Sarajevan nooks fill with people, drinking coffee and wine, smoking nargile (tobacco pipes) and sitting on tiny plastic chairs under the low-hanging eaves. It's one of the most intimate nightlife settings I've seen anywhere ... and apparently it goes on well into the a.m. hours, every night of the week.

Hence my slight regret that I wasn't there with friends. It would've been great :-)


REASON #9: THE UNEXPECTED

You see things in Sarajevo that tend to undercut your expectations and presumptions about the world.

QUR'AN-READING BABUSHKA

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 16.07.14

A small example: two nights ago I was on the tram into town, sitting behind a woman who for all intents and purposes looked like your archetypal eastern European babushka (granny). Then I glanced over her shoulder, and noticed that the book she was perusing was actually the Qur'an, and she was reading it in the original Arabic. This is not something you'd be likely to see in other parts of southern or Eastern Europe ... but in Sarajevo, it makes a localised kind of sense.

I couldn't bring myself to photograph the babushka directly – it just seemed like too much of an intrusion – so instead I took a shot of her reflection in the tram window.

Likewise yesterday when we were on the Siege Tour, there were some truly unexpected moments. Besides seeing wild horses on a mountaintop, and the burned out ruins of a fabulous late Soviet-era luxury hotel (looking suitably angular and science fiction-esque), we were also set loose by our guide at the top of a disused bob-sled run.

ENTER THE BOB SLED!

Hills around Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 17.07.14

This was built for the 1984 Winter Olympics, which were held in Sarajevo, but it fell into complete decline afterwards. Nature has since moved in to cover the whole thing with a forest canopy, while graffiti artists have plastered the concrete with a rainbow of colour. Walking the length of it, suspended in mid-air, you get a sense of lightness, even as your mind os casting back to try and work out what it must have been like to be here when it was operational. Coupled with that, you also feel a tiny bit intrepid for allowing yourself to enter an overgrown passage on a secluded mountainside in a landmine-infested country ... but it's so beautiful up there, you just kind of go with it. And so the bob-sled becomes another of Sarajevo's unexpected little wonders :-)


REASON #10: YOU'LL MAKE ME JEALOUS!

I have this weird thing where, when people go to places I'd love to visit myself, I feel an idiotic sense of jealously. I said right at the start that Sarajevo has been in my sights for years, and in fact I've applied several times for jobs there. So every time I met someone who'd just recently been, I burned with envy.

The thing is, with some places, once I've been there the envy goes away. But with others, it intensifies. I suspect Sarajevo may turn out to be of the latter kind. When I left last night, it was with a sense of regret, and in the knowledge that there was so much more to see than I'd managed to cram into three days. Of course I had the "Never mind, I'll be back here" thought, but I know that a desire to return doesn't always translate into a future opportunity to actually do so.

So ... go on, then! Go to Sarajevo and make me jealous. You know you want to :-)

See you!



* What is the plural of "metropolis" anyway? I experimented with 'metropoles' (pronouncing the last bit 'eez') and 'metropolises' before settling on 'metropoli', but I think they all sound ok.