Ein Deutscher und ein Österreicher sitzen im selben bosnischen Bus. Fernfahrerpillen und eine Nierenkolik helfen nur bedingt weiter. Eine tragikomische Geschichte.
Balkan Stories is back from its Balkan tour with plenty of stories to tell. One of them is how the trip started in the first place. A photo report about a Balkan road trip.
Balkan Stories ist auf Tour. Endlich. Leider hält es mich ein wenig vom Schreiben ab. Eine kurze Vorschau für die Leserinnen und Leser des Blogs ist drin. Streng genommen ist es eine Vorlese. Um euch einzustimmen, worauf ich ihr euch in nächster Zeit freuen könnt.
Da hat sich Autorin und Schauspielerin Sabina Sidro was vorgenommen. Mit Freundinnen und Freunden will sie in 48 Stunden Crna Gora/Montenegro erkunden und nebenbei Silvester feiern. Was beginnt wie ein verrückter Road Trip wird zu einer lesenswerten Erkundungsfahrt zwischen Party, Reisestress und Balkan-Alltag.
Journalist and writer Robert Rigney explores life in one of the most infamous neighborhoods of Istanbul. And finds it disappearing as the poor are driven out of their homes.
Photo: (c) Luke Michael, reproduced here with the express permission of the photographer. All rights reserved by Luke Michael.
A friend invites Robert Rigney, a US reporter and writer living in Berlin, to the Sandžak, one of the more mysterious regions on the Balkans. For Robert, who has travelled Ex-YU and Turkey extensively, it is a trip to a place full of contradictions and exotic appeal.
In many ways Novi Pazar has a more oriental feel than even Sarajevo. The city of one hundred thousand has been called the Damascus of the West. It has a very distinctive old Turkish bazaar quarter, a very fine Turkish mosque built in the sixteenth century, and some of the most curious modern architecture in the Balkans, a hybrid style, wrought out of a bizarre attempt to blend Socialist Realism with Oriental forms. The result is a strange kind of Thousand And One Nights Oriental Futurism. The Novi Pazar bus station and the Hotel Vrbak (“think UFO meets magic mushrooms, dolled up in nouveau-cement” – Lonely Planet), the biggest hotel in town, are fine examples. Novi Pazar is a marvelous place; an unreal place; and I still can’t quite make it out – the city, though part of Serbia, is more Baghdad than Belgrade.
Title Photograph by „Pray For Serbia“, found on flickr.com under a the license CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
There definitely are worse off places on the Balkans than Zagreb. A few impressions from a short trip I took in late April.
Why does a journalist from Vienna write about the Balkans and the people that live there in his spare time? An attempt to explain.
chrisbaumgarten
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