BALKAN '18
Dresden -> Greece in 2 months
After Iran, India & Cuba I wanted experience how the travel style of sleeping outside, taking local busses & hitchhiking applies to my home continent of Europe. I decided to somehow go from Dresden to Greece.
With a lucky first hitchhike from Dresden to Brno with a czech police man. After he dropped me I slept in the fields.
In the morning the photography mania of this trip began.
Only afterwards when editing the mass of pictures I realized that the motive of this journey was the deep exploration of natural geometry and colors through the means of photography, and also how human intervention in this process disrupts this geometric flow.
It would take me a few more years to understand that the perceived contrast between humans and nature only comes about when looked on from close.
On the first glance one thinks humans put everything in concrete, in squares and on top pollute the planet and it is all so not in symbiosis with the ecosystem. Which is true.
On the other hand though when viewed from a zoomed out point of view, also humans are a part of this natural flow because we recreate patterns and structures out of which the signature of nature reemerges again.
See, it is all natural. Just like a bacteria that spreads in an organism so much that it kills the organism. By doing this the bacteria also is responsible for the extinction of vast parts of its own population, because their won't be new food if the organism is dead. In this manner populations fluctuate in all corners of biology. Humans are like this bacteria. And being the globalized species that we are we don't kill one organism, we kill the entire planet.
Right now - 2023 - it seems that humans as a collective species are not any smarter about their resource consumption than a population of bacteria in a dying organism. The average individual can't restrain their greed. By this ignorance we create a lot of suffering for people already and much more in near future. Yet the entire process of humans populating, and destroying planet Earth is fully natural. You can't destroy nature anyway. We just change the climate for our own disadvantage. Everything that happens is natural by definition. You can't escape nature.
I met Jake, a nice British-Slovakian lad. He visited his granny and offered me to stay over at his place in Martin.
Can you spot Andromeda Galaxy in the sky of the picture below?
That night I took the photo I could immediately spot on the camera preview that there was something strange going on in the sky but I could not figure what. I zoomed in on the preview and after being startled for a brief moment I realized that there is a galaxy.
Yeah right. That speck of light you see up there in the sky is Andromeda. Long time Mac users might alread know our neighbor galaxy from this default wallpaper of Mac OS X Lion:
While I am already on a spree of sharing andromeda pictures, there is a 1.5 billion pixel sized high-resolution photography of Andromeda by Hubble and it is too sick to zoom into it.
You have to know, when I was a child I was really into astronomy. I’ve seen all the documentaries there were in TV these days and when I got my hands on such books I tended to read through them multiple times. Therefore I am subconsciously branded with a passion for space and the universe. 👨🚀 I can’t think of many moments when I was so baffled of life and the universe like in this very night. It’s those cheesy thoughts “there is so much out there”, “the universe is infinite”, “we are so insignificantly small“ etc. that storm through your mind but on such an occasion these feel incredibly profound.
So here are some numbers for you daily dose of mindfuck:
The galaxy you can see on the picture is 140.000 light years wide and 2.500.000 LY away.
But thats not everything since we only see the bright center. Andromeda is waaaaaaaay bigger:
Imagine a full moon night. Take the disc of the moon times 6 (!!!) in wideness. That’s how majestically huge Andromeda is always lurking in our sky. It’s getting bigger everyday since our galaxy and Andromeda approach at 120km/second.
Means we’ll have the Apple Wallpaper in our night sky in around 2 billion years. Soon after Andromeda and our Milky way will collide and form a new merged galaxy.
Crossing the border to Bosnia hit differently. When I took the bus to Sarajevo I could see the condition of the country that I crossed. I saw the most fucked up cars on the road. Unrefurbished bullet holes in many walls and even cars from the war in the 90s. Beautiful nature. Everything pretty sparsely populated.
Sarajevo is a urban cultural island in this vast Bosnian Land. From my superficial 3 day Bosnia impression it felt like the 21. century does not reach far beyond the borders of the capital.
Currencies also get quite funky down here. They use the Bosnian Marka. It is called Marka because it got pegged 2:1 to the Deutsche Mark. Now since 2002 it is pegged 2:1 to the Euro. Continuing to Montenegro afterwards was even funkier. Montenegro just hijacked the Euro as their currency without asking the European Central Bank for permission. I mean practically it does not matter since they only have 600.000 inhabitants but still, it is quite a move to hijack a currency and step on the EUs toes when you are Montenegro if you ask me... But I am going ahead of myself. Back to Sarajevo...
In Sarajevo I straight up stepped into the heart of the refugee crisis. Down here it actually is a crisis.
Between the main bus station and the railway station near Avaz Twist Tower there were hundreds of refugees. Flocking around chaotically. The local Cevapcici-Restaurant generously served meat to refugees for an extremely discounted price. That probably caused them to gather in this area.
Amidst the refugee crowd there were commuters and people catching their public transport. Police here and there with machine guns of course. Here and there there were small flocks of injured refugees. They gathered around helpers of Amnesty International. Some injuries looked really bad. I noticed that - next to head injuries - an unusual high ratio of the injuries would be infested feet. I asked a girl from Amnesty what the fuck is going on that these people are so injured. She told me the full story:
Basically these refugees are trapped in Bosnia. They want to proceed to Central Europe. They can not go back because they are broke and because during their refuge they lost or purposefully destroyed their ID Cards etc because they thought that this might prove helpful to not be sent back.
Now when they try to proceed to Europe they have to cross Croatia in the north in order to reach Hungary or Slovenia to proceed further to Germany. But Croatia is paid by FRONTEX or the EU to have their borders especially guarded. For that Croatia uses war veterans most of which have PTSD. Hence they don't just catch the refugees but act unnecessarily violent and beat the shit out them. Most refugees told stories about how the Croatian border police took their shoes away and then let them walk for 10km in the dark in the forest. During that time some injure their feet, but then they have to walk on with the injured feet because otherwise they get beaten up by the police. At that moment looking at the giant blisters of these people I decided to do my best to never pay taxes in Europe.
The beating does not help anyway. All the refugees there were determined to go up to the border again as soon as possible and try it again. It was a normal circulation to go up, maybe get beaten up, get sent back down, go up again,... Madness.
I took many photos to document this but at one point a Bosnian police man came up to me took my camera and deleted all my photos from that day.
Later I went to the Cevapcici-Restaurant. Cevapcici for 1.5€ hell yeah. It was full with nothing but refugees. I sat down on a crowded table to talk to the refugees. Pakistanis, Afghanis, mostly Syrians, Tunesians...
Most of them were well mannered. Some not. Suddenly while I was waiting for my Cevapcici I realized that my bag pack had moved. I looked into it and realized that I was robbed. Power bank, Field Recorder and Sunglasses were gone. I got up and ran outside. I knew who did it. There was that one suspicious guy who ironically told me not to trust anyone around here. I saw him ran after him shouting. Of course he ran away. A police man saw the scene and approached me. I told him: Let's go this guy robbed me. The police told me not to run after him and immediately made a call on his phone. I was not fast enough anyways with my rucksack. So I stopped. But doubting the capabilities of the Bosnian Police I thought my items had gone for good.
Somehow the call of the police man worked. After 5 minutes a few refugees (not the guy who robbed me) came back with all my items, restoring my faith in humanity. 1 month later when I checked the files on my field recorder I found this funky recording. The robber or someone must have pressed the record button. If someone can transcript this in English I'd be super grateful 😂
For the night I went up the hill to the ruins of the Bobsleigh run of the 1984 winter olympics which took place there. Might be one of the coolest lost places that I've ever seen.
Only 7 years after, this would be a strategic hill for the Serb forces during the siege of Sarajevo 1992-1996. As the siege was static for so long, the Serbs built many military buildings alongside the hill that are now abandoned. It is possible to find mortar shells and other metal objects all over the place, which are artefacts of the siege. It is quite curious how the people do not properly clean up the place of all the war equipment. It seems like they don't want to forget.
Unimaginable that mere 30 years ago soldiers were standing on these hills, sieging the place for 1425 days. At night the burning center probably was shining like the lights in the streets today...
LALALALALALAAA
Albania... that country in Europe that is more like the middle east than Europe.
When going from Albania to Greece (back in the EU) I had to cross the most secured land border that I have ever seen. Another artefact of the refugee influx.
In Greece I only had 3 days until a plane would take me from Thessaloniki back to Germany. I took a bus to Thessaloniki and went on a two day city hike from the bus stop in the west of the city to the airport in the west.
Here I soaked up my last warm sun rays before the greyness of Germany in October brought me back to Prussian work ethic.
