Once upon a time, a brave knight had to respite in a barren land. Water he desired yet it was nowhere to be found. He searched in vain and hours passed by, until a beautiful maiden caught his eye. He pleaded for water that she did not have but she told him not to despair. 

“Scoop the land before your feet.”  she said.
And water he found in the ground. The knight asked for her hand and promised to raise a city on this blessed land.
She used the verb “zagrebi” and so the city received its name.
With no written account of Zagreb genesis, legends and myths fill the blanks.

Yet rumour has it that the cathedral’s chandeliers are not so sacred as one might thought. Originally made for a Las Vegas casino, they were bought and later donated by a wealthy Croatian business man to the Church. Apparently the church men never intended to exhibit them in the cathedral, they merely hang them on the ceiling to see how they go with the place. This was fifteen years ago.

One urban legend tells the story of a young man who was doing handstands on the Church’s tower one morning. Panicked, one onlooker called the fire department. The whole scene seemed like a suicide attempt so the firemen climbed the tour to talk the man out of it. To their surprise, the man had no such intentions. He was a young man from a nearby city and came to Zagreb to become a fireman but he was rejected because he did not have the skills for the job. So he proved them wrong.

Need a place to stay? Check out SWANY MINT HOSTEL

Croatians pay their respects to the ones forever asleep with a monumental piece of architecture. The work for the Miragoj Cemetery started in the 19th century and it took half of century to finish. Designed by an Austrian architect, Herman Bolle created the City of Dead as a reflection of the 19th century Zagreb downtown.

There is a great feel of respect that transcends one when in Miragoj Cemetery. Its imposing entrance is shielded by climbing ivy that seems to keep time outside. The graves themselves are surrounded with arcades and pavilions and the Chirst the King Chapel majestically stands in the middle of it all.

The photos below were taken in January. Summer is the best moment to admire the ivy in full bloom.4

The main farmers market in Zagreb has a lot of atmosphere to it. Nicknamed by the locals “The Belly of Zagreb” because it feeds the capital, the market is as much a social place as a food provider. It combines a traditional open market with stalls and a shelter market behind it. Fresh food and vegetables are sold by the farmers from the neighbouring villages on the stalls outside while the covered market is the home of butchers, fishmongers and old ladies selling the traditionalcheese and cream.

Lotrščak Tower. Erected in the 13th century the tower canon used to be shot everyday at noon so that the churches can synchronise their clocks. Today, the canon is still shot everyday to keep the tradition alive.

Need a place to stay? Check out Hostel Bureau!

Zagreb also has a museum  unique in the world. After the relationship of two Croatian artists came to an end they joked about opening a museum to store of the left-over objects from their relationship. And so they did. The Museum of Broken Relationships is internationally renown and it holds an extraordinary collection of objects left remained from former lovers along with their stories.

So make sure you give Zagreb a chance before heading to the coast. It’s worth it!

More than a place to spend the night, the hostel you chose influences your experience in the city.  From the facilities that make your life easy, to the travellers whom will be sharing memories with, the hostel The Balkan Backpacker network gathers together the hostels that share the same mentality.

I felt very welcomed at Vila Veselova.
In an elegant villa built more than 100 years ago by the famous architect Ciril Metod Koch, the hostel reflects the love locals have for their city.

On April 2006, Vila Veselova opened its gates to invite backpackers in Ljubljana. One of my friends tricked me into taking over the hostel. said Vandana, the present manager of the place. He told me he had a room where I could teach my yoga courses and invited me to check it out. When I saw the house I was fascinated. I felt like Alice in Wonderland.

Vandana never slept in a hostel before taking over this one, yet she understood how to run a great hostel immediately. In 3-4 month after opening our rating rose from 70 to 90. The best part is that it happened without us noticing it Vandana told me with a smile on her face.

When it comes to managing strategies, Vandana follows a simple motto: I want the guests to feel like I feel in the hostel. This is me.Well kept and tended, you can feel the hostel is run by women.The rooms are big and spacious, with plenty of space to move around and big common rooms to use as you please. Vila Veselova is not trying to sell you a bed, but rather a community of travellers brought together by their curiosity for Ljubljana.

I remember my check-in and the girl at the reception, Ursa, who didn’t stop talking until I had all the information I  need to survive in the city. She explained to me the city map and pointed out the things I should not miss, recommended a few good bars and even checked out the events in the city for my period of staying. That was great! Vandana agrees. I couldn’t do it without my great staff.

When I asked the girls from Vila Veselova what are their favourite spots in Ljubljana, they all agreed on Tivoli Park, Metelkova and Daktari at cool places to be.

Find out what do do in Ljubljana here.

Ljubljana tips from Vila Veselova

• Try the Slovenian wine. Around 70% of Sloveninan wines fulfil the criteria for quality and premium wines so make sure not to miss out.
• Laibach music band. From the 1980 and the former Yugoslavia these guys have been rocking the Slovenian music scene and beyond. Music genres: industrial, martial and neo-classical. Also, the name “Laibach” is the German name of the beloved capital, Ljubljana.
• What something sweet? or savoury? The Slovenian Štruklji are made from a various types of dough and have a wide range of fillings. Traditionally, they were served to celebrate the harvest and at other major holidays yet know you can easily find them everywhere. Most common fillings are: cottage cheese, walnut, apple and poppy seeds and so on.

What others say about the hostel:

“Loved this hostel! It really is a home away from home. The lady who works evenings/nights is absolutely wonderful. I ended up extending my stay. The kitchen makes for a great place to meet people, and the beds are very very comfortable! Don’t miss this place, it was excellent. Highly recommend for solo travellers. PROTIP: Taxi from the train/bus station was less than 3 Euros, no haggling or scams, he used the meter straightaway.”

Canada, Female, 25-30 (September, 2015)

“It was clean and homely. The staff were amazing and super helpful as well. Loved how personal it was in how they treated each of their visitors. They also organised a trip for me down to the coast and a few other places which would have been impossible to cover in a day without a car. Thanks a lot for a wonderful trip!”

Singapore, Male, 18-24 (September, 2015)

“Amazing hostel with an excellent location. Best staff out of any hostel we have stayed at so far. An excellent change from the impatient staff in Venice. I highly recommend staying at this hostel. It was quiet. Had comfortable beds. Breakfast included. Beer in a vending machine. And did I mention the staff? AMAZING!”

Ireland, Couple (September, 2015)

Find out more about Vila Veselova here.
Visit their Facebook page.

With great excitement and limited knowledge of the places I’m going to, I started my Balkan Trip with the capital os Slovenia: Ljubljana. Literally translated “ the beloved one”, it felt like I was entering an enchanted realm shielded from the outside world.

This tiny city charmed me swiftly. First impressions: safe and tended. Contrasting the big capital cities I was used with, Ljubljana lived up to its name; it was made out of love by its people.

Romance and History

The romantic feel prevailing the petite city is due to the devotion of it own community.  Plus, the presence of two substantial personalities, the poet France Prešeren and the architect Jože Plečnik seem embedded in the national culture, shaping the city in verse and style.

Need a place to stay? Check out Vila Veselova Hostel!

France Prešeren was a 19th century Romantic poet considered the greatest Slovene classical author. His statue stands in the homonymous square and faces a building where his dearest Julia Prismic used to live. Caring a deep and unanswered love for her, his statue is immortalised looking towards her portrait. A mythical muse is portrayed next to the artists as a symbol of his artistic genius. The national anthem lyrics are from his poem Zdravljica.

Jože Plečnik is the architect who designed the Ljubljana we know today. In the style of Vienna Secession, he designed the Triple Bridge, the Ljubljana River embarkment, the Ljubljana open market , the cemetery as well as notable buildings, parks and plazas.

A short history timeline always helps me understand better the country I am visiting. Here are a few key dates to put present-day Slovenia into historical context:

Located on a trade route linking the northern Adriatic Sea and the Danube region, the territory known now as Slovenia has been desired and conquered by many.

The Illyrian and Celtic tribes dominated the land before the Roman occupation in the 1st century BC. During the the Roman Empire, important  trade and military routes were constructed throughout its territory. The main route to Italy from the Pannonia plain made it vulnerable to barbaric invasions until the Early Middle Ages, when the Slavs settled and took over control in the area.

The independent principality of Carantania was established by the Slavs in 658. They were incorporated in the Carolingian Empire in 745, and had been ruled by Bavarian authority ever since.

From the 14th century onwards, the House of Habsburg ruled over the Slovenian territory until 1918. The end of the First World War marked the end of the Habsburg reign and the start of a new era in Slovenian history: The Communist Yugoslavia.

The day of 25th June 1991 marks the independence from Yugoslavia and the birth of Republic of Slovenia. June 25th is also the National Day.

It’s tiny size makes strolling through the city delightful. Flowing through the middle of the city, Ljubljanica river is a vital element of the city’s charm. Also known as The River With the Seven Names, it keeps disappearing in underground streams and comes back to surface seven times. In this way, It gained seven names along the way because initially they were unaware the streams are connected and so, each overground stream was believed to be a different river.

Need a place to stay? Check out Hostel Tivoli.

My first stop was at Ljubljana castle, a landmark hard to miss. Resting on the top of the hill, The Ljubljana Castle has been looking over the city for centuries. The present construction dates from the 16th-17th century, yet the earliest evidence of the settlement on the Ljubljana Hill is as old as the 12th century. It has been the home of the local rulers until the 18th century when it becomes army barracks, military hospital and prison until the end of Second World War. Also, it was partially used as flats due to housing shortage in 1905.

Power, courage and greatness are the qualities embodied by the Ljubljana dragon, the totem of the city and, today, one of its most significant landmarks. It guards the bridge which carries it’s name, appears on the city emblem or even just randomly around the city. There are a few legends that tell the origins of the dragon, find out more here.

TIP! Relax and have a few drinks at Daktari ( Address: Krekov trg, 7), my favourite place in town. Walk around the artsy rooms fashioned with old furniture and good music or sit outside facing the Ljubljana Puppet Theatre. From its small clock tower, every hour on the hour (daytime), the folklore hero Martin Krpan comes out to salute the passers-by.

Metelkova and Other Modern Fairytales

On the night of 10th of September 1993 a group of about 200 artists and activists occupied the former Military Barracks at Metelkova mestro in the heart of Ljubljana. As an autonomous zone, the urban squat became the alternative cultural arena.

The barracks originate from the  late 19th century Austro-Hungarian Empire and they have been controlled by Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and the Socialist Yugoslavia.  The barracks were abandoned after the 1991 Independence and the people petitioned the government to use the ground for artistic purposes instead of commercial ones. Refused, they decided to claim it themselves as an autonomous zone.

From non-governmental organisation to art galleries and bars, Metelkova is the place where creativity and free thinking are intensively encouraged.It hosts more than 1,500 events per year which satisfy a wide selection of subcultures. Either if you wander around during the daylight or enjoy a beer in the evening you will not regret stopping by.

Why are shoes hanging over the Ljubljana streets? Apparently, there are more than 18 versions of the story. The one that most agree on: one hangs his pair of old shoes after he completed an important stage in hist life. This can vary from graduating from university, getting married, losing virginity or anything else.

! 2016 is a great year for Ljubljana. Winning the European Green Capital title, Ljubljana can proudly inspire the world with its environmental-friendly measures. Praised for improving the local transport  network, the city centre now belongs to the pedestrians and cyclists.  The green spaces, the water supplies and the waste challenge are some other projects on Ljubljana’s agenda where the city excelled at.

Venture Beyond

I made my way to Ljubljana! Great! Now is time to explore the surroundings. I started with the obvious: Lake Bled and its stunning surroundings. Located 57 km away from Ljubljana, the bus journey takes around 1 hour and 15 minutes and costs around 6 euro one way.  Check here for the bus timetable.

Need a place to stay? Check out Castle Hostel 1004!

The legend says that the young Poliksena casted a bell for the chapel on the island so her departed husband could be remembered forever. Yet an angry storm sunk the ship on its way to the church, and the bell never made it to the chapel. The bell is now resting on the bottom of the lake, from where you can still hear it during clear nights. After the widowed’s death, a bell was casted in her memory and placed it in the chapel. It is said that whoever rings the bell makes an homage to the lady from the lake, who will fulfil your wish.

Need a place to stay? Check out Ace of Spades Hostel!

Wile you are there pay a visit to the Vintgar Gorge. It is 1.6km long and it’s cares its way trough Hom and Bort hills.  With numerous waterfalls, pools and rapids, the educational trail promises you a mesmerising walk.

An great trip from Ljubljana is the Predjama Castle and the caves near it. 53 km from Ljubljana, the Renaissance castle build high in a stone wall. Home of the legendary knight and robber baron Erazem of Predjama, who rebelled against the Austrian emperor and was besieged in the castle for an year and a day. He survived due to a hidden passageway who exits at the top of the cliff and made the supply of the castle possible.  Tickets for the castle are 11,90 EUR for adults and 9,50 EUR for students. A combined ticket for the castle and the Postojna cave is also available.

COOL FACT!The 2014 Counter- Strike: Global Offensive depicts the castle in an interactive version.

Skocjan cave is a great alternative to the crowded Postojna cave, the most visited tourist attraction in Slovenia. Part of the UNESCO heritage Skocjan is an hour and a half amazing experience. The temperature inside is 12C throughout the entire year and the section available ti visit is around 6 km long. Reka River runs underground trough the cave creating an incredible scenery. Ticket are 16 EUR for adults, 12 EUR for seniors and students and 7,5 EUR for children (The Postojna cave tickets are 23,90 EUR for adults and 19,19 EUR for students). Check out the official website for timetables and more info. Photography is forbidden inside the cave.

I hope you will enjoy Ljubljana as much as I did. For more info and suggestions ask the hostels, they will be happy to help. And remember to pick up a Balkan Backpacker flyer, to get 10% discount at all the hostels in the network + a free bonus at the fifth hostel you visited.

Next Stop: Zagreb

EuroGlass: The Tragic History of a Happy City

1. Nis was violently hot. The moment I stepped off the bus from Uzice, I felt like I was entering an incinerator. It didn’t help that I had only a day to explore Nis (pronounced Neesh), which meant that I’d be spending a lot of time on foot and soaking through at least one t-shirt. I arrived at the Aurora Hostel to get organized and, after a helpful chat with the owner, I set out with a map and a 1.5 liter of water.

The first thing I did was visit the town square for a bite to eat. I’d heard that Nis had some of the best food in Serbia, and it proved true. Like everywhere in Serbia, the primary food groups in Nis were meat, bread, meat, cheese, meat and meat, and I devoured a sudsuk sandwich (a dry sausage derived from Turkish cuisine) in the main square while looking up at the sculpture of King Milan on horseback. Around the monument is a frieze of soldiers shooting and stabbing each other from various World Wars and wars of independence, though it’s hard to know who is Serbian and who is the enemy. It made quite a contrast: the violence of the statue with the liveliness of a sunny Tuesday in Nis. Compared to Belgrade, Nis had a light and colorful touch: a man with a rolled up t-shirt showing off his tattoos rode past me on his bike; groups of girls cut diagonals across the square, twittering like the happy summer teenagers they were.

Then I went to the concentration camp. It was located on the north side by the bus station. I walked all the twenty minutes there, past shabby auto shops and groups of young men standing around and watching the passersby. In front of the concentration camp stood a bronze memorial sculpture for the Red Army soldiers who liberated Nis, which includes an engraving of a machine gun, a helmet and a five-pointed star. Then came the walls, the flat gray menacing walls, broken only by a few openings that looked like air holes but were probably used for guns. You know concentration camp walls when you see them. For an instant I wondered if the gray, blocky, menacing structure outside the walls was also part of the camp, but it had a basketball court out front and graffiti on its walls. A prison?

Inside the walls, the sun unleashed itself, with no shadows to mitigate its fire except for a sliver under the barracks, a triangle by the Wache office and a few patches by the officers’ quarters. A large woman with a beaded necklace came out of the Wache office and apologized but said she’d just set the alarm in the museum, which was in the barracks. She pointed out all the landmarks and told me that the Nazis used the camp to kill Jews, Roma and Serbs (between 300,000 and 500,000 Serbs were murdered by Croatian and German fascists during World War II). It was also the site of the first major camp escape in all of Europe. I asked her about the building that I’d originally thought might be part of the camp and she said it was a school, built during the communist era. “What do the kids think of being so close to a concentration camp?” I asked. “It was a long time ago,” she replied, and in the same breath recommended that I check out the Skull Tower, which stayed open until seven o’clock.

So I went to the Skull Tower. The Ottomans built it with the heads of 952 Serbian soldiers to instill fear into the local population. Rather than knock it down after winning independence, the Serbs reclaimed it as symbol of national courage. A chapel now surrounds it. The 54 skulls that remain smile cartoonishly out of stone cubbyholes, some with still a few molars. The tour guide explained that the heads looked small because most of the soldiers were teenagers. In the guest book, a man from San Francisco wrote in Spring 2015, “Very touched by the bravery and sacrifices of Serbs to protect their lands. This tower was a gruelling (sic) reminder of what a war can do to people and how it brings out the darkest sides. Hope these kinds of events never happen again.”

The tower was constructed in 1809. Never again? Oh, let’s hope!

2. In 1939, over 16,000 Jews lived in Serbia. Now there are about 500. The old Sephardic synagogue of Nis is now a city cultural center. But did the Jewish Cemetery still stand? Though it was indicated on English signs around the city, several locals warned me against visiting it. Or they didn’t so much warn me as suggest that it might be a challenge. The site of the old Jewish cemetery was now occupied by a Roma settlement, and in order to get to what remained of the cemetery, since some of the tombs were literally inside the Roma houses, you had to pinch your way through tiny, packed alleyways. The owner told me that the last few backpackers who’d tried were denied. “Are they likely to hurt me?” I asked. “No,” he said, “maybe just yell at you in a language you don’t understand.” He showed me the pathways on both my city map and on google maps, and I resolved to find it before nightfall.

It was shocking how fast the city changed after I crossed the train tracks into the Roma quarter. In a way, it reminded me of crossing 96th Street in New York and transitioning from luxury to working class. One of the first things I saw was a man on a wooden cart pulled by a horse. There were broken windows and ripped up façades, shirtless kids in clumps, and a dumpster filled with black woman’s shoes, some inside, some splayed on the asphalt. Yet several people talked on cell phones, and every so often a sedan would splash through the streets that, despite the sun, still had patches of mud and puddles. I walked with my Cubs hat in my hand and my map in my pocket, trying not to look down the gap-toothed alleyways hung with laundry, old men staring from concrete slabs (tombstones?). But in my turquoise t-shirt and navy blue shorts, a Jewish tourist from New York trying to find a cemetery in what was now someone’s neighborhood, I felt ridiculous.

I walked the length of the street until I reached a corner store and a dead-end, then retraced my steps to the train tracks, imagining potential excuses for my failure (“It didn’t look safe,” etc…). Then remembering my goal, I turned and re-retraced my steps, determined at least to attempt cutting through the alleyways to the Jewish Cemetery.

Now, walking past the same clumps of kids and the same old men, I must have looked not only foreign but suspicious. A young girl in a pink dress with sores on her leg slowed her bike to my walking pace and stared at me; I looked away, and when I glanced back she was still staring at me, staring who knows why, riding at my pace and staring. At a muddy patch, a short man in a plaid shirt waved to me, but when I waved back and approached him with the map, he flinched away like a child. Then with a child-like smile he waved to the next passerby, his hand to his heart. He wasn’t all there. I continued on with my map out, and soon a huge old woman on a chair called to me. She was clearly the queen of her house. She asked me a question in Serbian (or their Serbian-Romani dialect) and I answered in English that I didn’t speak Serbian but did she know where to find the cemetery. She said, “Sprechen sie deutsche?” Cemetery, graveyard, bones, dead, deadsleep, mortality, I tried, hoping for a cognate. What was the German word for death? I showed her the map and she poured over it, and soon she was firing questions at me in Serbian-Romani, and others in her house including an attractive young woman with a black ponytail who I assumed was her daughter started looking at the map, confused but trying to help and also firing questions at me in Serbian-Romani. I took out my phone and showed them a picture of a cemetery and then indicated the map of Nis. They poured over my map and the old woman fired questions at me in German. We weren’t getting anywhere. I thanked them and went onward into the twilight, everything a little hazier, a little more knotted.

More frustration. I finally worked up the courage to cut through an alleyway, but it was the wrong one, and I ended up at a normal-looking street with shops and businesses. I re-re-retraced my steps. At the dead-end corner store I bought a bag of pretzels to use as a negotiation tool, while the store clerk poured over my map, confused but trying to help, and pointed me in the general direction of the alleyways. No one knew where to find the cemetery or they weren’t saying. But a change had come over me: I was no longer nervous about standing out, just obsessed with finding the Jewish Cemetery. I didn’t really care about seeing it. But I had to find it. So I hurried down an alleyway terminating at a ramshackle house where three men sat with beers; they were on some stone steps, near what looked like a wall. I said the word “cemetery” in English and a bald man shook his finger and said, “Not here.” There was no arguing. I retreated to the main street, ready to admit defeat. I opened the bag of pretzels and put one in my mouth, spat it out. The expiration date was August 2014.

Then a strange thing happened. On my way back to the train tracks, the old woman and her family stopped me and wanted to know if I’d found what I was looking for. Now there was a bigger group that included the young woman with the black ponytail and a shirtless man with a crazy tattoo. The tattoo depicted a mermaid praying in front of a demonic face of fire. But this man, too, seemed to want to help. In fact, more and more townspeople gathered around us, looking at the picture of the cemetery on my phone (which I held tightly in my palm) and arguing with each other. A toddler waddled up to me; perhaps he thought he was supposed to beg for money because the young woman laughed and pulled him away; the toddler started crying and the young woman boxed his ears. Was it her son? Soon the shirtless man with the demon tattoo called over a young guy in faded jeans and a backwards cap—was this his son?—and dispatched him on a mission. The young guy didn’t seem happy, but he motioned for me to follow him. And I followed.

Where was he taking me? In contrast to what the local Serbs claimed, the Romani seemed so helpful, but then again, “they seemed so helpful” is what most tourists say after they get robbed. I remembered all the worst stereotypes about Romani and criticized myself for remembering those stereotypes. It was too dark to see faces.

Before long, the young guy, who walked fast and looked straight ahead, led me to the same normal-looking street that I’d come to earlier in the evening, but now he approached a man outside the Chinese department store—could it get any stranger?—who pointed us to the back lot of Princ Restaurant. It was, I noticed with a jolt of optimism, close to an official sign for the Jewish Cemetery. In the lot, a man told us conclusively that we couldn’t enter. He kept repeating two words for me: “sutra” and “deche,” which I understood to be “tomorrow” and “ten.” Tomorrow at ten. I’d done it. I was going to see the Jewish Cemetery of Nis, all thanks to a friendly group of Romani. I bought the young guy a Coca Cola and we waved goodbye at the train tracks.

4. As I walked back to the hostel, I developed a counter-narrative about the Romani settlement and the Jewish Cemetery, in which far from obstructing the path to the cemetery, they actually wanted to help out. Perhaps it was the city that prevented access, not them at all.

If only it was that simple. Online, I read about the multi-year struggle of Nis’ small Jewish community to preserve the cemetery. The first article, from 2003, showed the cemetery filled with garbage from the Romani settlement, an 18^th century tomb with three round pieces of horse dung where there might have been stone gravemarkers. In one case, the deceased’s bones were uprooted and scattered around the grave. Articles from more recent years tracked the communities struggle with the Romani and with private businesses that had encroached on the cemetery from the other direction. The articles mentioned a Chinese department store and Princ Restaurant, as well as a company next door called EuroGlass, all three of which had built illegal walls, blocked access to the Jewish community, and now operated on parts of the old burial ground.

That night I made a friend at the hostel and strolled around the pedestrian street, consuming a delicious slice of ham pizza without any guilt. Everyone was young, everyone was eating popcorn and drinking and talking and meeting up and kissing and walking and laughing, and I was exhaustedly brainlessly satisfied, and for a moment I toyed with thoughts about the pointlessness of the past. “It was a long time ago,” the lady at the concentration camp had said, and was she wrong? Did it really matter that an extinct Serbian species no longer had its cemetery? Should we burden these happy summer teenagers with another memory of pain and erasure? The crimes in Nis, like the crimes of the Balkans, were almost too numerous to name. How many Skull Towers would they have to build?

But then…

5. The next morning at ten-thirty, even hotter than yesterday, I arrived at the lot. No one was there with a key. Maybe I was late, but I don’t think so. Two workmen hosed down the sidewalk while another unloaded crates from a truck. I showed one of them a photo of the Jewish Cemetery sign and he said, “Closed.” He didn’t stop me from wandering around, but it didn’t matter. I looked without hope at the flat gray menacing wall over fifteen feet high and at the locked metal door. Between the wall and the restaurant stood two rows of stone pillars that could have passed for an ugly communist-era war monument. Then, in a little divot in the wall, where it changed from stone to brick, I found a gap. A peephole. I couldn’t believe it. My heart pounding, I climbed onto a stack of square stones and tried to look. My view wasn’t good, so I stuck in my iPhone, angled it and clicked. This is what my camera saw:

I wasn’t done yet. I walked next door to Euroglass, separated from Princ Restaurant by big bushes that cast hooded shadows on the asphalt driveway. No one told me to stop. No one was there to tell me to stop. EuroGlass was silent. In the back I came upon another flat gray menacing wall, but this lot, overgrown with weeds, was used as a dump. There were green water bottles and foam insulation, plastic shopping bags, dirt piles, soap bottles, wood, a tire, a frame, the corners of packages, a newspaper, a hose, gray dandelions, the broken stems of yellow dandelions, fleas, bricks, pipes, a wheel axel, a black tube, the sound of a car starting, a yogurt carton, a gas can and a trash bag. But mostly there was broken glass. I couldn’t have invented an irony so cosmically crushing apt. All over. Shattered panels leaning against each other’s bodies. Jagged fragments thrown out like stacks of discarded limbs. Glass slashed in the center, glass that was dirty. Glass in piles and glass in bits. Bluish and grayish and whitish glass that caught glints but not reflections. Wasted glass. Ruined glass. Dead glass. This, too, a kind of monument. I documented the glass on my camera and, with nothing else to do, retraced my steps down the asphalt driveway, past the hooded shadows.

Dan Grossman – Architecture and the Past in Uzice and Skopje

1. There is no forgetting the past in Uzice, Serbia. Not in textbooks and not on street corners. In 1941, Josip Broz Tito’s Partisan resistance movement liberated Uzice from the Nazis and made it the center of an independent socialist state. Though the Republic of Uzice lasted only a few months, Tito remembered Uzice and, after becoming ruler of Yugoslavia, he poured in money for construction and industry. For decades Tito’s 4.5 meter statue stood at the top of Partisan Square in the city center. Not anymore. In 1991 the statue was moved to the backyard of the city museum, not because of the fall of socialism but because Tito was Croatian, and Serbia was at war with Croatia.

Other figments of the past can’t be stashed behind a city museum. At the bottom of Partisan Square, obscuring a lovely view of hills and trees, looms the gargantuan Zlatibor Hotel, built in the early 1960s as part of the central government project to transform and develop Uzice. The hotel is quite possibly the ugliest building I have seen in my life. It looks like a rocket that will never take off. It looks like the statue of Tito in industrial form. The locals even have a nickname for it that, apparently, translates to “The Gray Bullshit.” Marko, the owner of Eco Hostel Republik (where I stayed for a week), studied it for a hotel organization class, and the desk clerks couldn’t even tell him how many beds it contained, with guesses that ranged from 170 to 220. After the fall of socialism, the Zlatibor Hotel was auctioned off a private owner and it fell into disrepair. Rarely are more than three windows lit up in the evening. One night, while drinking beers at a café along the Detinja River and looking out at The Gray Bullshit, I asked Marko if they’d ever knock it down, and he said, “You could drop a nuke on that thing and maybe the glass would break. There’s so much concrete.”

Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly), Tito’s reputation has not followed the hotel’s. Despite centrally planned disasters like Hotel Zlatibor and an undemocratic rule that left the country with few free institutions after his death, Tito is quite popular in Serbia, with a pervasive sense that the economy was better, life more peaceful and the region more powerful. “To our parents Tito wasn’t a dictator,” Marko said that night at the bar, “he was a god.” During Tito’s rule from 1953-1980, Yugoslavia never aligned with the USA or with the USSR, and in Tito’s strange, greenhouse-style, god-like mausoleum in Belgrade there are pictures of world leaders paying respect at his funeral. There’s even a guestbook where visitors praise and mourn the dead leader as if they knew him personally. When I went to the Uzice city museum to look at the statue, in which it looks like Tito is wearing a thousand-pound cloak, yellow flowers rested on his boots.

What do you do with such history? What sorts of creative energy flow through a city with The Gray Bullshit at its center and a statue of a beloved autocrat in its backyard? The hostel that Marko owns, Eco Hostel Republik, adopts a curious midway, a socialist chic. Stylish, comfortable and nostalgic. The bedframes are recycled euro pallets formerly used for railway transport. The drinking cups are metal. The trash bags are stored in Yugoslav ammo cases. There’s a mural of the World War II partisans on the wall, and the wifi password is Tito1941. On my first night, as I sat at a plywood table in the large common room, Marko invited me to admire his latest innovation: a lamp on the Area Info board with the hostel’s symbol on the back—the red star of the Republic of Uzice. It was past midnight and everyone else was asleep in the dorms, but Marko still had energy to make and gloat over an improvement. And that’s the hostel’s great irony: it’s a nostalgic recreation of a short-lived socialist state, now run by an ambitious entrepreneur.

Everyone in Skopje has an opinion of Skopje 2014. Government officials claim that the project has increased tourism and livened up the city, and it’s true that when I visited the main square, families milled about and couples snapped pictures with Alexander the Great in the background. Years ago, supporters say, the main square resembled a parking lot, now at least there’s something. They also argue that Macedonia is a new nation, and asserting its cultural identity is a national priority, especially since many of the neighboring countries don’t accept—or accept in practice but not in principle—its right to exist. Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia ruled it at various times, and have made claims on it. Greece, which has its own region called Central Macedonia, even refused to allow the Republic of Macedonia to enter the UN with that name, forcing it to be called The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM).

But many other Macedonians, especially the younger generation, think Skopje 2014 is a monumental waste of money and energy. During my short visit to Skopje, I met up with Kate, a local college student, who took me on what she called her Angry Walking Tour of Skopje. Within two-minutes of shaking hands and setting off, she was ranting eloquently about the statues that are already falling apart, at the corruption that she thinks brought the buildings into existence and at the waste of water. Her favorite spot is the Old Town, one of the few areas to survive the earthquake, and we sat and drank Fanta at a cozy bar in the narrow streets, among the young and old, with the Muslim call to prayer competing with pop music from restaurant speakers.

Church Going in Mokra Gora

The dominant emotions of my first two hours in Mokra Gora—a town in Western Serbia famous for its narrow-gauge heritage railway, with an old train ride that loops and curls through mountains, and is also famous for its proximity to the ethno-village that Serbian director Emir Kusturica built as a set for his award-winning movie, Life Is a Miracle—were rage and loneliness.

First, the car broke down. I was on a shared taxi from Uzice, and after dropping a customer off at a random town in the mountains, the car ran out of gas or just stopped working. It was a very hot day, and the driver, a woman, her teenager son and I sat in the shadows cast by the town’s few shops, and waited, and sweated. The driver went on his phone and made several calls, and I imagined staying in the tiny town for hours, dying of heat exhaustion. At last a silver car pulled up, driven by a very old lipless man, and all of us packed into the new taxi, though for all I know he wasn’t a taxi driver but a friend, or a father, or a ghost. No one spoke English or noted my presence. I was the ghost.

Despite the delay, I was still early for the train ride. The plan was to drop me off at the end of the line and then ride it back to Mokra Gora, where I’d be picked up in four hours. Without tourists the station seemed haunted. In front of the shop a worker in a white dress shirt sat and stared out at nothing, and in the shade another worker took a nap. I walked across the train tracks toward a hut-like wooden church on a plot of grass. Three Serbian Orthodox crosses ascended on three cones of increasing height. The body of the church displayed bare wood, but the roof contained overlapping wooden triangles that were gray and greenish, almost metallically shiny, like fish scales. On the stone porch, held up by wooden pillars, I tried the front door. It was locked, but the sunshine pulled out the smell of wood, and for a second I felt indoors, cooled.

The lady behind the counter dismissed me the moment she heard English, while the map on the information booth was in Cyrillic. I wandered downhill and got lost. (It’s worth noting that everyone else I talked to found the ethno-village with no trouble.) The problem was that everything looked like a movie set and everything was wooden and everything was village-y. And why did I even want to find it? Life Is A Miracle was a movie I had never seen, whose optimistic title I instinctively distrusted. And the idea of spending two and a half more hours walking around in 90 degree weather by myself and not even finding a place that I didn’t even want to see, angered me, and I let me anger radiate out, like ripples on the surface of a pond, to encompass all of Mokra Gora, Western Serbia, Serbia, the Balkans, Europe, the West and Planet Earth. Fuck the universe, too, while we’re at it: there were probably obnoxious, smartphone-wielding aliens on Andromeda, and crowds on Canis Major.

Then I found my second church. It was a part of a well-groomed complex with a wooden church, a central fountain, a dormitory, a small rose garden, and a tower. There was someone inside the wooden church. Maybe he would welcome me. I approached hesitantly, and peered through the open door. It was Jesus Christ. I mean it was a painting of Jesus Christ. He held a book. In fact, many Jesus Christs stared down at me from the walls: as a baby (twice), as a preacher, with his book, on the cross (twice). When I pulled out my iPhone to photograph the Last Supper, a yellow box appeared on the faces of Jesus and Judas, as if they were my friends, going to check out the photo afterwards when I posted it online. Up on the altar, the paintings became more modern, the faces geometric and oddly green. It struck me as odd, too, to include different eras of paintings of the same divinity in the same church. Shouldn’t they at least pretend that they captured his likeness? What’s in a face? Yet I liked all the paintings, wouldn’t have subtracted one Jesus Christ from the company of saints holding flaming swords and archangels also holding flaming swords.

I still wanted to find the movie set village, but crossing the street I ended up at another church. This one was black, with big wooden slates on the roof, and behind it sprawled a poorly maintained graveyard. I love graveyards. All these tombs were Serbian Orthodox, black in color, and every 20^th century tomb contained a small photograph of the deceased. It’s an interesting custom that leads to interesting questions. What photo would you put on your grave, if you only got one? As a kid or as an adult? With your spouse or separate? Their answers varied. Some wore Western business attire; others wore traditional Serbian outfits. Most were in black and white, but some were in color, looking like high school yearbook photos (the 1980s). In one black-and-white photo, the young man stood in his military uniform and the young woman with a shawl over her head, he solemn, she grinning out the corners of her lips. A more modern tomb depicted a young man who died at twenty-six, his face was etched like a hologram into the tomb, and atop the headstone, where you might expect a crucifix, was a soccer ball; below the headstone, where you might expect flowers, were three cans of beer. On another tomb, only the husband had died, though the wife’s photo waited for her. When I took out my iPhone to photograph the photographs, two yellow boxes re-appeared on the images of a man who is now dead and on a widow who is still alive. Was I moved? Was I spooked? I felt less like I was less in a graveyard than in a photo album. Or rather, I less experienced “death” than I experienced all these people experiencing “death,” and the photos were less moving than the idea of choosing to summarize one’s life in an eternal profile picture. But despite the strangeness, I felt at home: the dead, like paintings on a church wall, are always good company.

After forty-five minutes, I decided the time had come to find the famous ethno-village from Life Is a Miracle. It would be ridiculous to spend four hours in Mokra Gora and not go. With zero idea where to find it, I took a random path leading up the hill, and quickly sensed that it was the wrong random path. I knew it was a bad idea, and I very much needed to pee, but I kept going. I passed three goats on a sloping hill. I passed signs in Serbian that might indicate danger but probably not. I passed a farmhouse with chickens and flowerpots and a patio, and for a split-second I mistook a flapping plastic bag for a beautiful young woman. I was tired. I was lost. I was sweating. My hatred was ready to start radiating out, until I stopped, and it stopped. Then I did something simple but inspired: I went a few feet off the path, poorly concealed, and unzipped my fly. As relief flooded through me, I looked out at the mountains. They were more than scenic. They came alive, or were restored the dignity of the dead. Suddenly the day made sense, and a secret theme emerged, linking my initial loneliness to the shiny-roofed church to the bark-colored butterfly to the primary colors in The Last Supper to the black-and-white grin to this trickle into lush green shrubs. Ahhhh. Life is a miracle.

Beds, Bacon and Bikers: A Night in Zlatibor

On July 3^rd, when I finished writing the piece about my strange and interesting trip to Zlatibor, I figured that I’d probably never see it again. Marko had taken me on a tour there, and it was fun, but new and equally exciting trips awaited my next few days at Hostel Republika. Zlatibor would remain a pleasant but distant memory.

All throughout Western Serbia, Marko (aka the Prince of Uzice) is known for his careful and brilliant organization skills, especially when it comes to making sure that all his volunteers have a bed to sleep on. So when twenty-four Serbian schoolteachers stopped in Uzice for a day, we were one bed short, and I was the odd man out. It was then that Marko informed me that I’d be spending the night in Zlatibor. He said that some of his friends had a place. Since Marko is a famous practical joker, I assumed that he was kidding. He was not kidding. When I asked who were the friends, he said that I’d already met them: Peter, Bojan and Nikola. Again, I thought he was kidding. The old ghost cottage? In the middle of a random meadow? With the old Yugoslavian appliances and the sweaty bikers? Yes, yes, that was the one.

And so, after driving out to Zlatibor (mountains, ear pressure, etc…), meeting the bikers on the ski slope, and taking a run on the bobsled ride, we went to the red-roofed cottage on the sloping meadow and walked past the four bouncing chickens, past the Yugo and the woodstack and the Serbian flag, to the cottage with the biking banner hung over the black plaque of the dead Serbian woman. Marko joked that she returned every night to haunt the cottage. “Say hello to her for me,” he said, smiling, but maybe a little worried that I wasn’t kidding when I said all this was going on TripAdvisor.

The main room of the house, the bedroom-kitchen-dining room-living room, looked less peculiar the second time around. The microwave wasn’t “fridge-sized,” as I wrote, and if you saw everything from a real estate-broker’s eyes, it was truthfully kind of cozy. Atop the cabinet there was even a wooden miniature of—what else?—a red-roofed cottage. Lunch was bread, kaymak (a rich, cream cheese-type specialty of the region) and meat. Lots of meat. Salami, soft strips of bacon and prosciutto. Also sheep jerky and some kind of sausage. I couldn’t tell if my hosts, who it must be noted spoke almost zero English, wanted me to eat more and more or were offering me more and more with the expectation that I would show some restraint and stop eating. Hungry, I decided on the former, and was still munching on a piece of sheep jerky when we drove back to the ski resort to work on the biking course.

Or—they worked. I lazed. There were only four tools, and I had no idea what the guys were doing, so I lay down in some wildgrass and stared up at the slightly swaying pine trees. It was sunny, and the stripped tree-trunks made endless gold pillars in the dense woods. The ski lift was out of commission, and the wide black chairs were silent and silhouetted against the blue sky. It was very peaceful. Suddenly I was glad that Marko had exiled me to Zlatibor.

Eventually I got off my ass and went to help, though “help” is maybe not the right word. The guys worked in three groups. At the base of the path, Sergio smoothened out the dirt with a rake. Bojan and Nikola carried fallen tree trunks to make a boundary and, with my mild help, secured them with rocks. During a break me and Bojan, who seemed like the group prankster, lobbed rocks at the ski lift chairs, trying to get them to stay. Meanwhile, Peter had turned a shovel sideways and was hacking at the ground with incredible strength, clearing out rocks and turning up new soil to be packed into the boundaries. He seemed to be splitting the rocks in half. Five minutes of repeated vigorous motion without a break, sometimes ten or fifteen minutes. And all of this from someone who four weeks ago had fallen off his mountain bike, broken several bones and now had metal in his arm.

During dinner it occurred to me that my presence in the house was less strange than the group’s presence in Zlatibor. They were all from Novi Sad, a big city five hours to the north, and they were down in rural Zlatibor for only the month, to prepare the biking course and then compete in the race. Their suitcases were open on the floor: they were also travelers. They woke up early and practiced on the trails that they fixed up in the afternoon. First and foremost, they were serious athletes, and they didn’t mind if they had to pack into an old cottage with no drinking water to make it happen. I admired their devotion, and though I still couldn’t understand what they said, they no longer felt so distant. Their words were unknowable but their voices made sense: Peter’s gruff but benevolently parental voice, Bojan’s giggling, Nikola’s brainy seriousness (he was the photographer), Sergio’s quiet attentiveness (he was in town for just a few days). For a moment only the radio, playing “Hey Ya” and “Rolling in the Deep,” seemed out of place.

Peter came outside and my presence in the dark startled him. He went to hang clothes on the line by the shed, working intensely, and I remembered that Marko told me he’d been afraid I’d be bored at the cottage. After finishing with the clothes, he walked over and joined me in looking up at the sky. I explained to him that stars were something I missed in New York, and at the last moment I remembered the Italian word for stars: “Stella.” He asked what I thought of Serbia and I said that the people were very friendly. I thanked him for his hospitality and he said, “Nothing, nothing.” Then we saw a shooting star. I have never seen a shooting star but there it was. I knew it. We sort of looked at each other. The shooting star was red and arcing. Bojan and Nikola came to the gate door with their bike and camera and Peter asked if they saw that thing in the sky. They hadn’t. But we had.

Beauty, Butterflies and Bikes: An Afternoon in Zlatibor

The landscape changed as fast a dream. Within a minute of driving outside the city center of Uzice, we were in the mountains. Within ten minutes, I felt pressure in my eardrum from the ascent up to Zlatibor. I was heading there with Marko, the owner of Hostel Uzice, and Marko’s friend, Milan. On July 25^th and 26^th, a bike race called Open Downhill Tornik 2015 will be held on the Zlatibor ski resort, and race director Marko wanted to check up on the course. I was unsure what to expect—Marko had told me simply, “We’re going to Zlatibor—come”—but I was charmed by the red-roofed cottages on sloping meadows and by the group of horses that approached our car and licked Milan’s outstretched hand. We arrived at the sky resort and met up with four of Marko’s friends, Peter, Bojan, Nikola and Jovan, three of whom brought their bikes to test out the course. The six friends began to joke around in Serbian, and though I had no idea what they were saying, their banter could more or less be translated in any language.

Up on the ski lift, Milan explained to me that Zlatibor gets its name from Zlati (golden) and bor (pine). These pines, special to Western Serbia, have stripped bark that looks gold in the sunshine. Today there were big cumulous clouds in the sky, but the slopes were no less stunning for their lack of gold: it was lush green pines to the right and lush green pines to the left. The air was almost drinkably pure. At the top of the mountain, we walked down a ski run, turning off into a side path cutting through the pines. Compared to my hectic neighborhood in New York, this was Eden. There was no one else around, no sound except for the chirping birds, our voices and footsteps. There were more butterflies than fleas. What more could you ask for? Just as I was drifting off into this Serbian pastoral fantasy, someone shouted what must translate to “Watch out!” and I jumped out of the path as two of the mountain bikers rushed by, hopping over a fallen tree trunk and skirting a clump of rocks. Serbian lesson #32: Never drift off. The bikers stopped to debate whether the obstacle was manageable or too tricky, and then the process repeated. The next time I didn’t drift off.

At a clearing, we stopped to throw around Marko’s nerf football while the bikers rode down to the ski lift for another run. My old baseball pitcher skills impressed Milan and he called me “Tomahawk.” I didn’t understand the nickname until he explained that, when I threw it hard, the nerf football whistled like the Tomahawk missiles that the USA dropped during the 1999 bombing campaign. I wasn’t sure how to take this, but I decided it was a compliment. We pitched each other pinecones and swung at them with a club-sized branch. I never thought I’d find myself playing baseball on a ski slope in the Balkans, but Serbian Lesson #58: Expect the unexpected.

Soon the bikers zoomed into the clearing and, after a short break, they cycled and we hiked down the slope to where a dozen cows were grazing. I thought the day was over, but at base of the ski resort, we decided to get some speed for ourselves and took a ride on the new bobsled roller coaster ride. The ride pulls you about halfway up the mountain, and then flings you around tree trunks and under the arms of pines. Putting my faith in Serbian engineering, I pretended I was a mountain biker and hung on. My faith was rewarded. The ride was whooshingly good fun.

As we drove away from the ski resort, I again thought the day was over, but to my happy surprise we drove off the main road toward the red-roofed cottages on sloping meadows that I’d admired earlier in the day. We got out and walked past a farmhouse with broken windows, past four bobbling chickens and a rusting Yugo sedan and through a wooden fence with a Serbian flag to a cottage that Peter and four other bikers were renting for the month. Next to the cottage door hung a black plaque that the former tenant had put up, showing her stern oval gray photograph and her lifespan (1925—) alongside the inscription: “I am making a tombstone for myself while I am alive.” Now she was gone, and Peter had covered the plaque with a gaudy banner for Full Control Biking. Inside, it was more like the gray photograph. There were furniture and appliances from the Yugoslav era, preserved in all their awkward, box-like glory. Amongst the kitchen table, the four wooden chairs, the fridge-sized microwave, the two beds, the cluttered counter, the cabinet with decanters and teacups, and the very, very old stove, we managed to find places to sit. There was no drinkable tapwater in the house, but that was no problem, as Peter brought out a two-liter of Jelen beer and a bottle of rakia with a branch of kleka (juniper) floating inside it. Amid alcohol and pretzels, the gentlemen began to discuss, debate or argue about the upcoming bike race. I have no idea what they said, but I did make out such words as “kilometer,” “sponsor,” and “Red Bull.” After several minutes of trying to follow the discussion-debate-argument, I began to zone out, sip my beer and look around. The Serbian pastoral fantasy returned. A bent square of light through the open door lengthened almost to the kitchen; the slow drip from the hose outside that caught the sunlight was matched by a needle of juniper falling to the base of the golden rakia. The window offered a view of meadows, hills and sun. The guys continued to discuss-debate-argue. Peter refilled my beer. Somewhere between fifteen and forty minutes passed. It was 1965 in Yugoslavia, and life was box-like and simple, and I was getting a little drunk.

Finally, the discussion-debate-argument petered out, and I again mistakenly thought we were heading home. Luckily, Marko wanted me to tour the rest of Zlatibor, both the traditional part where we saw a girl picking wild strawberries, four kids sitting on a bank next to a stream, and a sign on the shuttered-up grocery store that said, “This is the 21^st century, we need a market”—and then on to the new Zlatibor, with big brick hotels and villas sprouting up from money in Belgrade and Montenegro. The longest cable car in Europe is supposedly getting built from there to the ski resort. It was 2015 in Western Serbia, and the new buildings were, honestly, kind of ugly.

But as we drove home from Zlabitor—this time for real—the sun was out, and the landscape lived up to its name by glowing with faint gold. It was beautiful, but I was tired, and still a little drunk, and no amount of beauty or loud radio or Milan’s extreme sport driving could keep me from falling asleep. When I awoke, we were back in Uzice.

Travel blogger and freelance writer, Jenna here. I’ve just recently completed my exciting trip to Uzice, Serbia and have so much to share with you. It is not surprising that I say food and drink tends to be my favorite part of any travel experience. So if you’re planning a trip to Serbia soon, don’t leave until you’ve tried these 6 things.