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The Pill’s Fan Stories: That Balkan Route

Salagok crew
Speleolivorno

Text: Marta Lazzaroni
Revision: Elena Casolaro & Giulio Della Croce
Photos: Andrea Cioni Massagli & Emma Galmarini

Someone once told me:

“Nobody is nobody,

Everyone is someone.”

Someone once told me:

“Nobody is nobody,

Everyone is someone.”

I have always been very fascinated by both places and people who have stories to share. It took me about two years and the right newspaper to bring these stories to life, but I think this experience deserves to be told.

Idemo da Vidimo kravu, ”let’s go see the cow”

The Duster borrowed from my mother was overloaded and, crammed into that car, we took turns driving. We drove from Padua to pick up Bruno, who seemed startled by how loaded we were. We were also joined on the way by Andrea and Emma in their car.

With the full team we passed the borders one by one until we arrived in Bosnia-Herzegovina: here we handed our documents to those who looked at us cross-eyed from behind the toll booth. They asked us to open the car, a border guard eyed every dusty corner of it suspiciously, wondering (perhaps) what a group of Italians was doing down there. To their questions about what we were doing with all those backpacks and gear we replied, “Mountaineering”.

We were thus entering northern Bosnia, with another four-hour drive to Srebrenica still ahead of us. As we drove deeper into Bosnia the landscape changed and became more and more rural, it felt like stepping into an old faded photograph from the 1960s. Gasoline abounded and food was cheap too…good to know – we thought.

When we arrived in Srebrenica, we stopped at the home of our man in Bosnia, I., who soon after welcomed us to his house-hostel, the starting point of his guided tours. Giulio and I had met him a year earlier through the Agronomi Senza Frontiere (ASF) association.

ASF had given us the opportunity to go there to learn about the project to repossess the culture and land belonging to locals before the ’92-’94 war. Terrible and unspeakable events that literally gutted the soul and future of these areas. We immediately prepared a good pasta and spent the evening with I. to organize our visits-explorations together.

The basic idea of this journey was to retrace one of the escape routes of the Bosnian fighters during the Bosnian-Serb war that took place in the early 1990s and trace this historical-cultural-mountain route: the freedom route. Ideally, the route would start from Srebrenica and pass over the high hidden banks of the Drina forests, skirting the border to Luka, a place considered safe and demilitarized. All this, trying to locate what they called “caves”: more or less large excavations used as a place of refuge to survive during the civil war, in the cold, trying to hide in as many as 20 to 30 people. The evacuees who ended up there were male people from 14 to 70 years old. We found only a few of them.

The sky-eyed man

E.’s blue eyes watched us as if they were saying less than half of what they had seen. And indeed they did: Emma was trying to translate from Italian into French (the only language we understood to be in common between us) our questions to our new friend, attempting to cross the language barrier that separated us. The pastor was telling us about his experience as a refugee in these caves. He and his grandfather had escaped the roundup and joined a caravan of people headed for the demilitarized territory of Luka: salvation. E. catapulted us into this uncharted land and we came out in love, not sure exactly with what: the place, the people or maybe just his wonderful blue eyes.

We were the main attraction of that bar/shack where word spread that foreigners were visiting. People kept arriving and sitting down to eat or drink with us, staring at us and trying to communicate by asking us to translate to our common friend with the sky-colored eyes. It usually ended with big smiles and toasts. One of them approached and asked Andrea if he could take a photograph of him and bring it to Italy, to find him a wife as beautiful as our friend Susana (who was a great success in Balkan lands). He posed, and Andrea portrayed him all strutting around with a new cigarette in his mouth, pride in his pocket, and his red car in the background.

We are the guests

We had settled with tents in a clearing at the edge of the forest on the great Drina plateau, in an area called Biele vode (white water). There was a dilapidated old building, a summer hunting lodge for regime officials. This hunting ground and the clearing in front of the building were used to lure bears and wild boars with some bait and kill them: an easy way to hunt. Apparently, this area is famous to this day as a hunting and fishing area. Wolves, bears and big fish inhabit around this large river, which is also an imaginary line separating peoples. Borderlands, lands of conflict.

On the second day guards arrived, and they made us understand that we had to leave because the Drina is part of a park and camping was not allowed in that area (all of this by gesture, because the guard knew only Bosnian and we obviously did not). I was already ready to argue, but conscious of my gender and the fact that the group had to sleep somewhere I decided to leave the hot potato to Giulio, who is known to be an excellent conversationalist. Well, the moral of the story is that within 5 minutes he obtained, no one knows how, permission to sleep there another night. According to him by simply naming our “man in Bosnia” I., who was promptly called on the phone and translated the arrangements for us with the guard. In Bosnia men are in charge and make decisions, at least as far as the facade is concerned. The same thing said by a girl carries no weight, said by a boy is considered. We young Europeans are not used to this sexism, but whether I liked it or not, I was the guest in another country and I had to abide by the rules of the place. I must say that after a first impact with this fact I also found it amusing to ask my classmates to report my ideas.

After we were “evicted” we wrote to ask advice on where to sleep to another guy, M., whom we were going to visit a few days later according to our schedule. M. immediately came to us and told us to meet at the lake on the Drina: here we spent a night sleeping on his acquaintance’s raft-bar. With M. communication was much easier because he spoke English, which is common among young people. In ’93-94 these (then) children were displaced from the rural area of Srebrenica and sent to Sarajevo by relatives, or further north or to neighboring countries, such as Italy or Slovenia, thanks to some UN programs. The next day we were hosted in the village of Osmače where M.’s family lived, so we took the opportunity to visit.

We found them butchering and roasting a large goat in the garage. They said he had broken his leg and would not have a chance to survive, but we knew they had killed it for us. It was partying all night again. The Bosnians love company and especially having guests; you quickly make yourself at home. There is usually an initial distrust, which is immediately broken down, and a strong curiosity pops up about “why did you come to Bosnia”? I would have liked to tell them about this feeling-movement that brought me all the way down here, explain that it was something visceral, similar to the migratory motion of birds. But I kept it to myself, almost ashamed.

What some called Luka others called “salvation”.

As. looked at us from behind his deep black eyes, insisted that we come up to his house and offered us coffee and cigarettes. We told him about our project to tell the story of those places by mapping the paths and spots experienced by the combatants and evacuees: those thousands of souls looking for a place to call “home” again. We talked for hours and hours sipping every drink and tasting the local specialties prepared by his mother and grandmother especially for us. Between a cigarette and a glass of rakja the day slipped from our hands and it was night, so As. invited us to stay over at his house and offered to have someone meet us the next day.

The next day, at breakfast, a middle-aged gentleman showed up, dressed to the nines in an ironed leopard shirt and shiny black pants, bathed in a cloud of perfume. The man was carrying a one-liter bottle as a canteen, filled with rakja, which he sipped from time to time as we walked. He had taken an infatuation with our friend Susi and kept offering her a drink, without much success. This mysterious character was a wartime survivor and would be our guide for a hike in the woods in search of the dugouts and places where fugitives were hiding.

As. patiently translated all the man’s stories and soon we were in the woods, walking up steep slopes. After about a couple of hours we found ourselves in a rocky clearing very close to a ravine where there were indeed traces of living: medicine wrappers, a stove, old jars. The place was very small, and they explained to us that in spaces like that they also lived in 20 huddled together, trying to keep warm during the harsh winter months. We kept looking around in disbelief, thinking how it was possible to live in such a small burrow in so many people and how awful it must have been to be so close to the demilitarized village of Luka, in fact the portal to freedom.

As. completely opened up to us and told us a lot about his life, his studies, and the wartime period he experienced as a child. In particular, one of his stories made the hairs on our arms prick up: during the war, his home had been taken by guerrillas and one night he and his brothers were forced by the drunken occupants to play a cruel game for their amusement. A game that led him to smash his face against a wall. What surprised us most was that he told us about it with total serenity, almost laughing. That is one of the great strengths of this people: moving on. When I asked him how he could talk about it so calmly, he tilted his head to the side, smiled at me, and looking me straight in the eye said: “Hey, I’m telling you!”

Viewpoints

The Bosnian experience opened our eyes to a piece of history that is about as old as we are. Almost a parallel between our existence in Italy as lucky children and that of a hypothetical boy our age, who already at a few years of age had to struggle with things he could not even understand and flee because of religious or ethnic issues.

Perhaps to you reading this will seem like trivialities, but touching the remains of the escape of others, dating back to a time not so long ago, made a deep impression on us, as did the Potocari memorial in Srebrenica.

Our being all “European” there serves no purpose. Supranational institutions, which have looked the other way during massacres and ethnic massacres, are of no use. Those we are accustomed to calling “the good guys” have been in all this history spectators bordering on complicity.
And we ourselves arrived in Bosnia presumptuously, thinking that our project could bring ”innovation,” ”opportunities in rural areas.” But the truth is that there is no need for tourism or new colonialism. What is needed is a real environmental policy and protection of local ethnic groups, freedom of expression and gender. And it is true that between “us” and “them” there are 300 kilometers as the crow flies, but there is also a world of distance in terms of ways of thinking, of living one’s territory, of possibilities.
What brings us closer, however, is the love for that wild and raw borderland that is Bosnia.