A Soggy Holiday

Three days of rain.  We traveled to Sokobanja from Nis, a choice that was applauded by the couple who ran our hostel.  The wife sucked on her cigarette with a contemplative pull and exhaled the name with pleasure.  Sokobanja.  "It is nice, Sokobanja, very nice," the husband nodded as he rolled his own smoke.  "I will drive you to the bus.  It is raining."  A large, dust-covered framed portrait of Tito was removed from the trunk of their car so that our backpacks could fit.  Little did we know - though the clouds were desperately trying to tell us - that our time in the resort town would mostly be spent in this hotel.

Rain leaked into the lobby and ricocheted off the already full plastic tubs meant to catch it.  A tv buzzed overhead.  The place felt immediately familiar.  These are the sort of hotels that I like to dub a CommuNest.  As functional and inviting as a mall parking garage, they are sprawling, grid-like structures.  With their enormous spaces, high ceiling, dim lighting and little-to-no soft notes, they remind me of high school after school hours.  This institutional feel is only emphasized by the enormous, uniformed staff and the many pieces of rubber-stamped paperwork they produce.  Even our breakfast card was certified.   It harkened back to our time in Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova.  Tito's portrait all of a sudden felt like a premonition.  Then, things took an unexpected turn.  We were not alone.

At least 400 children occupied the hotel - some sort of rained out Summer Camp, I assume.  Everything looked even more enormous and faded as the backdrop to its tiny, energetic clientele.  It was like a Roald Dahl novel about a hotel just for children.   At breakfast, we were offered a choice between hot milk and hot chocolate.  The cleaning lady unlocked our door each morning at 8:30am.  Above the age of 12, it was like we were invisible.  By the second day, my clothes were beginning to smell less like smoke and more like hot dog.  The hair salon spent their days braiding fine, blonde hair into cornrows.  These "vacation hairstyles," that are usually meant to signify a trip to an island somewhere, only made the lack of natural light in the hotel more noticeable.

There were 540 beds, two pools, therapeutic and cosmetic spas, gym facilities, a bowling alley, a nightly magician show, a bar area that strongly resembled those smoker's cubes in airports, a 200+ person conference room, etc etc etc.   The pools are the main draw, filled with thermal water.  The springs are what have brought people to Sokobanja for centuries.  It began with the Romans, who bathed in the warm waters here and breathed in the fresh, mountain air.  By 1837 these things were officially seen as restorative, therapeutic and Prince Miloš Obrenović turned the site into a destination. The Turkish slant on it was, of course, to build hamams, which the Serbians transformed afterwards into wellness centers. 

The hotel swimming pool and complex surrounding it are just the newest incarnation of 'spa town.'  This also means carnival rides and pizza places, a pedestrian boulevard that was lively even as the tiny dug-out canoe on display in the public park filled up with rain water.  It's always amazing to see carnival games when they're not in use.  With no crowds and music and lights, you notice that there are half naked women painted on the side of the "Shut Gun" trailer.  You notice just how rickety that ferris wheel looks.  But you also can't help imagine it turning on, lighting up and spinning itself dry.

The bumper cars got a little use while we were in town, on account of their having a roof.  Whenever the rain stopped, everyone hurried outside.  We scrambled up to the ruins of Sokograd, breathing in fresh air and getting our muscles moving.  It was glorious.  The rain began again shortly after and we trailed mud back into the hotel.  The poor kids had been cooped up all day and now had to exhaust all of their pent up energy at a pajama dance party.  A sea of tiny people, in tiny clothing, dancing around to Shakira - I thought of something I'd read earlier that day.  “Sokobanja, Soko Grad, come here old and leave young."  Maybe they've all just been here too long...?  A Roald Dahl book indeed.

A veritable cityscape of luggage filled reception on our last morning in Sokobanja.  Children ran around the roller-bag skyscrapers.  The elevator door opened and behind it was not the usual bather in white robe, but a cartful of suitcases about to topple.  As we sat with coffee, more bags came from every direction.  It was like that final moment of Tetris, when the blocks just start descending too quickly. Game Over.  Finally, it dawned on us that this wasn't just the baggage of the kids leaving, there were new ones arriving!  Like the thermal pool water the day before, a drain and refill was occurring.

 

The new children were destined to be less cooped up and less stir crazy.  The weather was changing.  The girls smacked around a volleyball and the boys pushed each other on skateboards as they waited for their turn to check-in.  They'd undoubtedly take full advantage of everything this pretty resort town has to offer.  They'll kick soccer balls over tennis nets and miss foul shots on the basketball court.  They'll drink limunada at the cafe tables and buy their moms porcelain teddy bears that say "I <3 Sokobanja"  They'll stow a few pieces of bread and cheese away in a napkin during breakfast and eat it for lunch at a picnic table set up along the hiking trail to Sokograd. At least, I would if I were them.

The Crveni Krst Nazi Camp

Crveni Krst is a misleading name.  In Serbian, it means "Red Cross."  So "Cverni Krst concentration camp" might sound strange.  As our guide explained, this wasn't some collaboration between the Nazis and the humanitarian organization - this bloody transport camp took its ironic name from a nearby railroad station.
A young historian-in-training named Ivan walked us around Crveni Krst on a wet, cold day in Niš, meeting us roughly where the barbed wire started and leaving us at the door of the main block.  He explained how the Nazis had painted the windows so that nobody could see outside.  He pointed out a crib that had been used for a baby born in captivity, showed us the solitary cells where men had to lie down on spiked wires, told us about prisoners who would write messages on the walls in blood - anyone caught with a pen was shot immediately.  Cverni Krst wasn't that bad by Nazi camp standards, but it was still horrific.  It's also a place that the citizens of Niš are strangely attached to.

Nazi camps almost never survived.  They were freighted with too much tragedy and shame to last – often they were destroyed, sometimes they were left to rot, rarely were they preserved.  People didn’t want to remember or accept what had happened in these places.
In Yugoslavia, though, this wasn’t the case.  Crveni Krst was opened to the public all the way back in 1967, and has been a museum (in various ways) ever since.  Why?  Because the vast majority of the prisoners who were processed or killed here weren’t Jews or Roma, they were communists – and the communist government under Tito wanted people to remember.  The camp was (and in a lot of ways, still is) a symbol of the struggle.  Hanging on the wall of a nearby café, shrieking above beer-heavied heads and plates of sausage, an icon of “the party” gives his life, fist raised, body wrapped in barbed wire.  The people who died in town are seen more as heros than victims.

As Ivan walked us around, he spoke in a reverent whisper, his voice sometimes seeming to stray close to tears.  He explained to us how the different buildings worked, which cells housed which groups of prisoners.
Highlighted in the tour was a story about an escape, when about a hundred men made it out of the camp - leaving almost fifty comrades dead on the walls or mowed down by the guards.  Even though most of the escapees were eventually caught, the event seems to capture the hearts of Serbs.  In the imagery of the camp and to the citizens of Niš, it is the men dying as they ran that are important - there is a kind of valor given to them, a legacy of courage and action.  Instead of submitting to their fate, they died helping others go free.  They're given almost as much space as the thousands of other prisoners the Nazis killed in the city and surrounding area.

One of the most astounding things about the holocaust is just how large and far reaching the infrastructure was.  In a few short years, the Nazis set up scores of camps over most of Europe, in regional hubs and along transport routes.  Examples like the one in Niš weren’t extermination camps, per se, but taxonomy isn’t really important – the holocaust didn’t just happen in one or two places, it was an all-encompassing network.  Officially, these peripheral stations were waypoints and gathering places that served to funnel prisoners toward the larger bases in Poland and Germany, or towards work camps in other parts of the world.  Most of the 30,000 prisoners processed through Crveni Krst were sent to Sajmište – the Belgrade camp - before ending up in Auschwitz, Dachau or Buchenwald, but a sizable number were also shipped to labor depots in Norway.  Almost a third, though, never made it anywhere.

According to Ivan, “not many” of the prisoners at Crveni Krst were killed on site.  Several hundred people were shot or beaten to death at the camp, but in terms of scale the numbers are almost insignificant.
Almost 10,000 people were killed nearby, shot on a deserted hilltop called Bubanj.  They were chosen at random – in the grim mechanization of the holocaust, people became numbers to be added, subtracted or grouped into shipping orders.
One cell of the camp is plastered with children's pictures showing various scenes of violence - figures hanging lifeless on barbed wire, families lying on the ground, men being beaten.  The work was very good in a lot of cases - when we complimented their skill, Ivan said that the children were mostly ten years old, as if that automatically made them better artists.
It was fascinating to see the works and to think of the local children drawing them - it's interesting because the town seems to really own the camp, in a way that other holocaust towns don't.

The sad, often ignored fact of genocide is that the groups that are targeted aren't usually around afterwards to remember.  In places like Germany or Poland, the people who remained had the stain of guilt - where Nazi camps survive, they exist as badges of shame.  In Niš, though, the persecuted became the population.  Soon after their occupiers left, Yugoslavia became communist and the victims of Crveni Krst became a part of the local identity.  To them, it's a painful memory but not one they feel responsible for.

Crveni Krst is an eery place to walk around, and the stories are horrific, but we felt ready for the experience in a way.  This is our fourth Nazi compound of the trip (after Auschwitz, Dachau and a smaller one in Leipzig that we never wrote about), and the stories and spaces have become more familiar.  A better way to say it, maybe, is that we've become better able to steel ourselves for what we'll find.
But still, the experience is somewhat unique.  It serves as a reminder of how far-reaching the holocaust was.  Just because other peripheral camps have been destroyed or aren't open to the public doesn't mean that they didn't once exist.  It's hard to remember that, almost everywhere you go in western, central or eastern Europe there were concentration camps.  Traveling here is to always follow in the footsteps of Nazis, which is a chilling thought.

Repurposing Turkish Leftovers

Welcome to Skull Tower.  This is not a ride at Six Flags Great Adventure, it is a very important Serbian monument located in the city of Niš.  Its name gives it a spooky, Halloween feel - its actual presence is a lot more unsettling.  Around 50 decaying skulls, implanted in the remains of a tower.  The tower used to be bigger, the skulls used to number 952.  The structure used to stand in the open air and poems recount the sound of the wind whistling through the cavities, the bones shining under the moon like marble.  In 1809, at the Battle of Čegar Hill, Stevan Sinđelić ignited his gun powder stock, killing himself, his remaining troops and 10,000 Turks that were about to defeat them.  The Serbians honored him as a hero for not raising the white flag.  The Turks, still in power, collected the Serbian skulls from the battlefield and raised this. 

There are heroes and villains throughout history, with the roles often reversing depending on which side is telling you the tale.  For Serbs, Skull Tower is not just a perfect, engrossing tribute to fallen heroes, it is also so strangely gruesome that the other side seems downright sadistic.  Nowadays, the directions to Skull Tower (Ćele Kula) are pretty specific - walk out of town this way, turn here, go over a small walking bridge, find a simple white chapel, go inside.  The street that passes in front, though, used to run from Istanbul to Belgrade to Sofia.  You were going to see this thing whether you wanted to or not. The message of the tower: Don't try to oppose the Ottoman Empire.  At night, families of the fallen soldiers would come to remove the skulls for proper burial.  It was probably pretty successful at spooking and scaring people traveling through Niš, but the locals embraced it as a monument - a tribute.  Which is why it still stands today.

Skull Tower isn't the only leftover from Turkish rule in Niš that's been redefined as a celebration of Serbian history and culture.  Niš Fortress, large and restored, sits on the river Nišava.  We could see through the arched Istanbul Gate, that it wasn't your average historical monument inside.  All the tell-tale signs of summer weekend fun could be spotted.  Umbrellas sporting ice cream brand logos were propped up over popcorn carts.  Kids held balloons affixed to thin, plastic sticks and couples canoodled in fancy leisure wear.  A man told us repeatedly not to take a picture of him and his pony-for-hire.  We'd exhibited no interest in doing so.

The oldest Turkish building in the city is right inside.  Predictably, it's a hamam, which has been turned into a traditional Serbian restaurant.  Even more predictably, the restaurant's name is Hamam.  We never got a good look at the inside, but all traces of the bath - which dates back to the 15th century - have been washed away.  I can see why people would be saddened by the loss of the historic interior, but I can also see why preserving a symbol of Turkish culture may not be on the top of Serbian Niš's priority list.  As we ate, a quartet of waiters began to play instruments and sing.  They talked to each other as much as they sang, seeming to improvise most of what they were playing.  A nervous teenage couple came in for a date, loosening up only when they both began to laugh at a recorder-playing drunk outside the patio entrance.

Niš was finally liberated from Ottoman rule sixty-eight years after that Battle of Čegar Hill.  In 1878, it was officially part of a Serbian state once more - after about 400 years under the Turks.  The city's history after that was no less bloody or turbulent.  It's a little difficult to visit these landmarks that tell the tale of a time when Serbs were the little guy, the oppressed, and not have thoughts of much more recent history.  In a lot of ways, Skull Tower is the perfect tourist attraction for this vibrant, pleasant city in this polarizing country: historic, dramatic, violent, important.  

Rottweilers And Serbs in Niš

I first saw “f--k Serbia” written on a bathroom wall at a Brooklyn gas station.  It struck me, then, as an odd thing to write, but in Europe it’s a pretty popular bit of scrawl.  I’ve seen it a lot lately, in Croatia and Slovenia and on walls in Macedonia and Albania.  The point is, Serbia isn’t well liked by its neighbors.
In the gathering darkness of a warm evening in Niš we came across a strange, violent dog competition.  Men and women sat in lawn chairs, smoking and talking.  We spent some time marveling at the strange things we happen across.  Traveling – at its best – brings you completely unexpected rituals and cultural spectacles - like this circle in the trees, where people calmly watched Rottweilers attack a man over and over and over.

We aren't in Serbia to judge or rehash history, but 1992 wasn't that long ago.  It's difficult to come to a place like this without questions.  What are Serbs really like?  In general, they've been either incredibly friendly or quite brusque.  They aren't especially crazy about America.  People our age have been wonderfully open and friendly.  In general, they're a lot like most Slavic people.
The dog show was a ritualized display.  One could sense the anticipation of tensed muscles, the quickened panting before the leap, the sharp whines imploring the trainer to loosen the leash.  Attack dogs are strange things, and it takes a particular type of person to want to train them - someone who wants to both control and commit violence.

A young, thin man stood behind a kind of blind with a baton in one hand and a protective tube over the other arm.  When he jumped out and began looking threatening, a dog was supposed to run up to him, bite the arm tube and shake it while being beaten by the baton.  Sometimes, the dogs weren’t quite sure they wanted to attack.  Sometimes they were over-eager, and wouldn’t stop mauling the tube when they were supposed to.  It was frightening the first few times, but we got used to the gnashing teeth and brutish behavior.

Even to uninformed watchers like us, it was obvious which animals were better trained.  They were generally the calmest, and the quickest to loosen their bite when told to.  All of the dogs, though, were admirably non-threatening and well-behaved when they weren't about to attack.  There weren't any fights between the animals, and there was almost no barking.  We felt very safe wandering amongst the wagging tails and lolling tongues.
We feel safe wandering around Serbia, too.  Serbs are good people.  I wish, more than anything, that I wasn't suspicious of them. They don't deserve it.

Apparently, Niš is a Rottweiler hotspot.  Some ten kennels in town are devoted to the breed, and their owners wore t-shirts advertising their services.  Affection between Serbs and Germans hasn’t historically been strong, but the breeders and trainers have names like “Vom Haus Engle” and “Vom Hasen Haus.”  (Also, the hilarious “Rott-Angels from IceBerg.”)  The Deutch bent seemed strange, but there was a clear militaristic, close-cropped-hair aesthetic that isn’t exactly German but emulates a popular idea about Germany. We wondered, watching the show, if some Serbs feel a connection between their country and other old antagonists - a wounded pride, maybe.  Perhaps a desire to be understood for what they are today, rather than what they were.

This kind of dog show happens in other countries, of course.  It's not a specifically Serbian thing, but it resonated with us here in a way that it may not have elsewhere.  It brought to the foreground something that we'd been thinking without wanting to, a question that doesn't quite seem fair - not "who are Serbs?" but "are Serbs the same people that they used to be?"  Rottweilers are very friendly dogs, generally - but they can also be frighteningly vicious.  

Shredded, Chopped, Delivered, They're Yours

We sat down to our very first lunch in Macedonia, on the waterfront in Ohrid, and ordered a "Macedonia salad."  It arrived bright red with specs of yellow, like an abstract tribute to the Macedonian flag.  Crisp bell pepper mixed with ripe tomato, throughout was sprinkled diced onion, garlic, parsley and the yellow pepper seeds that had been dislodged and set free to roam.  It was wonderful.  We never saw this salad again.  According to the googlepedia, "Macedonia salad" is diced fruit salad popular in Spain, France and Romania.  Good thing that didn't show up (though, pepper and tomato are botanic fruits).

If any salad earns the title of "Macedonia," it is without a doubt the shopska salata.  Definitely the national salad, as far as I can tell it is the most ordered and served dish in the country.  By itself, next to plates of grilled meat, it was right there alongside the salt and pepper shakers atop every table.  When I sounded the name out (written as Шопска салата) I figured it meant "chopped salad," but the name actually comes from the Shopi people who originate from the region in which Serbia, Macedonia and Bulgaria meet.  It starts of chopped - tomato, cucumber, sometimes pepper and onion - and is then covered, smothered, buried by grated sirene cheese.  Vegetables in disguise, it is usually topped with a single olive.  The first time I saw one, I thought it was a sundae. It's amazing that the cheese is so finely grated, it's basically feta.  I can't call it that, though.  While Greece may not be able to stop people from using the name "Macedonia," they certainly have legal claim to the term "Feta."

Shopska salata is sort of like a Greek salad recipe that's been fed through a paper shredder and Macedonian ordever salads are like Turkish meze that took a long soak in the Mediterranean. The term 'meze' is also used for these dips and spreads.  This pinwheel platter had all the usual suspects: clotted cream with diced pepper (kajmak), pindzur, ajvar, yogurt, white beans and herbed olives.  Yogurt, pepper, tomato, eggplant, garlic, parsley, cucumber, cheese and olives - you'd be amazed at how many combinations, uncooked, cooked, slow-cooked, can develop over centuries in a country with good taste.

The beginning and end of all ordevers is ajvar - the ritualistically made red pepper paste that Milka made "too much" of.  Its younger, fresher, relishy sibling is pindzur and taratur is its complement.  The recipe for taratur, like the other spreads, is different from place to place and kitchen to kitchen.  Traditionally, it's made with "soured milk," but we had sour cream and yogurt varieties.  With cucumber, garlic, lemon and herbs, it's almost a dead ringer for Greece's tzatziki - but the crushed walnuts on top brings in the earthier Ottoman influence.

The green markets in Macedonia have every fruit and vegetable imaginable (within the limitations of climate, of course) but every market goer leaves with the same three shapes weighing down their green plastic bag.  Cucumber. Tomato. Onion.  It's something we're getting very used to in this part of the world.  Refreshingly, in Macedonia, restaurants stray from the formula a bit. Mešana salata or 'mixed salad' quickly became our ruffage of choice.  Ironically, the mix was always served unmixed - a circle of colorful wedges like an edible Simon device.  Cabbage, cucumber, carrot, beet and tomato, served shredded, raw and sweet.

Traveling to Eastern Macedonia, the mixed salad went a little crazy.  There was more of an everything but the (plant next to the) kitchen sink, approach.  Here, a thick slice of sirene cheese would be thrown in, some small boiled potatoes, a few slivers of fried zucchini, a hard boiled egg.  Ordering a mešana salata went from a foolproof plan to surprise-surprise.  At the end of two weeks in any country, a change-up is welcome.  Macedonia just pulled one more trick out of its bag at the last moment to make sure we remembered its salads lovingly.  And we will.

This post stands in for a Macedonian Food post or a Things Macedonian People Like post.  For more about the cuisine, check out our Macedonian Home Cooking post and, while you're at it, here's something they really like.

Worshiping Nature

We've spoken with a lot of people here in Macedonia.  It's rare that we pass a day or even an afternoon without pleasantries that turn into drinks or an invitation for future drinks with a local.  In this time, we've been asked what religion we are and - just yesterday - "do you believe in god?"  Taken aback by both questions, we didn't have ready, assured answers.  What we did know - and were happy to report - was that we'd visited a lot of places of worship in their wonderful country.  What had brought us to most of them, however, was a different kind of worship.

Sometimes, you just need a destination to define your journey.  Macedonia is a beautiful, wonderful place to hike.  You'll stumble upon any number of things in a short period of time.  There are over 50 lakes here and 16 mountains over 6500 feet.  But what you'll stumble upon most often, are churches.  The tourist information available for the country focuses on its monasteries and churches.  And why not?  They are plentiful and old, picturesque and historic.  For us, a forest chapel is like a waterfall - except that you can't hear it from a ways away.  It's that place to arrive at which defines your last hour or two or three as a journey to a remote place.

Arriving there, right then, you feel a part of a living history.  You think about how the hike you just took as a nature joyride was a commute born out of necessity for the small chapel's congregation.  It being placed that far outside of the main village was just a part of its beauty and purpose.  When I reach churches like this one, in Brajcino, I feel like there's no way it wasn't placed here in order to give every single worshiper this magnificent lookout point.  To worship nature on the way to mass - I like to think, as a part of mass.

Inside one of the remote churches in Brajcino, we found candles recently blown out and the matches used to light them.  There were unused ones in a box for the use of any visitor.  This was not shuttered or forgotten, it was clearly still in use.  People all over the country tell us about how their town used to have multiple churches, "one for each family."  In Prilep, Hristijian remarked that he had never been to his friend's church before - just two blocks away from his.  In Macedonia, it is not only your faith that is personal and held dear, it is also the physical place of your worship.

Macedonia became its own country in 1991.  For many, an important step to national and cultural independence was the archbishopric of Ohrid's break away from the Serbian Orthodox Church in 1958.  The churches of Ohrid are steeped in history.  Above, the interior of the Church of St. Sophia, built sometime between 800 and 1000 AD.  It was one of the first houses of worship constructed after the official switchover to Christianity.  Of course, it was turned into a mosque for a while during Ottoman rule.  All the churches were.  We visited the 'cross mosque,' which is literally a mosque with a cross on top.  "The only one in the world!"  (They've never been to Eger, Hungary).  For us, all of these houses of worship were wonderful trail markings on a path around the lake.   Exquisite blazes.  

In Prilep, the mosque has seen better days.  It is ruined and unlit at night.  The inside appears to be a favorite peeing spot according to our noses.  The clock tower nearby is topped with a cross.  Ruined churches and mosques have a sadder feeling to them when within a town or city.  Out amongst grass and old stone walls, their decay feels natural.  It feels less like neglect and more like the sign of times gone by.

There are countries that have felt more religious than Macedonia feels.  In some, women wore headscarves, in others, roadside shrines dotted the Is and crossed the Ts of the countryside.  Here, it's just a part of landscape.  A church pops up in a field the same way god pops up in conversation.  We will leave here with memories of long sweaty hikes and the cool stone churches at the end of them.  And at least half a dozen prayer cards in our backpack.

The Bitola-Skopje Train

All provincial train stations have a weary countenance built up over years of waiting.  The station master’s shirt is starched and blue.  The ticket men are disheveled and nimble-fingered. All stations have the same stretched, narrow shape along the tracks, the same graffiti scratched into old plaster. The waiting rooms are dark, the benches are slatted wood, the platforms have a windswept loneliness.  There are precise, square-edged clocks.  These aren’t the terminuses, the bustling hubs of the cities - these are buildings put up to give small towns a hold on the tracks. Train stations are meant to be passed by and left behind.
On our way from Prelip up to Skopje, we left from one of these engine-buffeted buildings, passed dozens more and met some very interesting people.  This is why we love traveling by train.

The day before we went we walked to find the station, which was difficult.  Prelip stretches, like many big plains towns, in a disorganized, flat sprawl.  When we asked a man for directions, he insisted on driving us.  “But,” he said, “why are you taking the train?  The bus is the same price and faster.”  When we told him that we like trains, he looked amused.  “In Macedonia,” he said, “the trains aren’t good.  They are like from last century.”
The journey began in the heat of early afternoon.   The waiting room was full of older people and their little bags.  One man carried a few spools of wire.  A pair of swallows swooped in from time to time, perched and then flew back out.

It’s amazing to think of powerful, momentous movement after this quiet.  The mood in the station was subdued, everyone was hot and an hour passed slowly.  When the train came, it seemed like a surprise, even though we’d all been thinking about it.
It’s a short route, traveling from Bitola – the cosmopolitan hub of the south – up to the capital, stopping along the way to pay grudging, hurried respects to the places in between.  There are four trains a day.  The track isn’t used for much else.

On this train, there were no rows of seats – the cars were broken up into compartments.  This meant that, when we boarded, everyone began rushing up and down the aisles, peeking through doors and looking for a cabin with both a place to sit and occupants willing to give up the spare place.  After some looking, two young men nodded us into their cabin – which is how we met Victor and his wordless (non-English speaking) friend.
They were university students, nineteen years old, and returning from Bitola to their hometown of Veles.  Victor had a jokey, cocksure nature that came from being young and from long years of work and near self-sufficiency (he’d been working since he was eleven, and had spent some years alone, laboring in Bulgaria).  The early current of conversation took us by a litany of common hard-luck stories – Macedonia is difficult, he has no money, there is no future in the Balkans – but then turned to the scenery and the beauty of the country.  It is beautiful, especially seen blurred by the dreamlike lens of a train window.

The journey from Prilep to Skopje takes about two and a half hours.  The country changes as the train goes north – the ground gets dryer and scrubbier, there’s more red soil showing between blades of grass – but the topography mostly stays the same.  There are mountains, but they’re mostly low and smooth edged, nothing like the jagged peaks around the perimeter of the country.  Much is farmland, but the prevailing green is in the hue of forests rather than fields.
Victor like to smoke (“if I had money, I wouldn’t smoke,” he said.  “But you can’t do anything in Macedonia for forty dinar except buy cigarettes”) and he had his friend keep watch for the conductor while he puffed out the window.  A young law-student named Jasmina joined us at a small station – she was headed back to Skopje to her job at a notary’s office.  We all looked out at the passing countryside.  The other three had seen it many times before, but they took a fresh interest because of us.

Every few miles, the train would stop at a platform.  Sometimes, there would be a station house, sometimes only a concrete step on the edge of a forest.  There were always a few people waiting, but they wouldn’t always get on.  Often, a package would be handed down and a few words of greeting would be shared.
Victor didn’t seem to like the train much more than the man in Prelip.  “If you have to be in Skopje at four, you must take the bus.  This train is from the old times.  It might take three hours, it might take nine.  And then you are sitting there in the dark, and you can’t get to Skopje.”  Our experience, though, was nothing like that.  The train seemed to get to every stop on time, and was waved on officially and easily by the blue-uniformed station master.  Each yellow-painted station was unique - but nothing more than a minute of the journey, still a part of the forward motion.

Victor and his friend put their sunglasses on and stepped off the train in Veles, some half hour before we got to our destination.  Before they left us, Victor gave us a mostly-full plastic bottle of homemade rakija liquor.  There was more than a liter in the bottle, and we tried to tell him that it was too much, but he insisted we take it.  It grated on the throat but he was proud and we told him it was good.  He said that he would be staying with his father, and that his father’s rakija was much stronger.  “He says that he likes to drink Rakija, not water!”

Arriving in Skopje, we noticed that our train, which we had come to think of as quaint, suddenly felt like a creature of the city.  In those hours inside, with the verdant afternoon slipping by, we hadn’t seen the graffiti on the outside of the cars or the angular nose of the diesel engine. This was a creature that blasted through the pastoral outside, arriving at home in its metropolis to pant and rest for a while before heading back to Bitola.
We were asked again, in town, why we’d taken the train instead of the bus.  Macedonians aren’t proud of their railway (I’m not sure why, really).  It’s hard to explain to them, but a train is something different to an American than it is to a European.  Punctuality and luxury aren’t that important.  It’s wonderful to be able to stand up and lean out an open window as goats and barns and waving children rush by.  Conversations begin and end, a few new faces become familiar.  Traveling this way, one doesn’t see the roads or the fronts of buildings – just the backcountry.  The rhythm of the starts and stops is a pleasure all its own.  For us, it’s something foreign in itself.

Fikjo, The Cutest Macedonian

I was taking pictures of a white Zastava 750 on a hot day in Prelip when the owner came out on his porch.  “Zastava,” I said, pointing at the car and feeling silly.  “Take it,” he said, making a shooing motion with his hand.  “Please, I don’t want it.  Take it away.”
The car’s seats were broken and threadbare, rusted cracks fanned out around the headlights, it was missing its front fender. But it was still endearing.  This is one of the cutest and most memorable cars of the trip, a pipsqueak with personality.  It’s also uniquely Yugoslavian, a kind of makeshift symbol of the Balkans – Macedonians lovingly nickname it “Fikjo,” but this is a machine with many monikers.

Italians might sneeringly proclaim the Fikjo nothing but a Fiat 600 with a different emblem on the nose.  Americans would be confused by the name Zastava – we knew the company as “Yugo.”  But we Yankees would be surprised to find such a capable and winning car made by the company that gave us this, and the Italians aren’t quite correct.  It’s true that the 750 is based on the Fiat 600, but there are some differences.  The Fikjo is a little longer than its Italian cousin, and it was scaled down a little inside to make it more economical.

They’re ramabout, wheezy-voiced, easily dented or fixed.  Fikjo, the name, is a Macedonian derivation of “Фићa” (“Fića”), a Serbian newspaper comicstrip.  It’s fitting, a kind of plucky, amusing identity.  It’s the kind of car that we Americans find romantic because we don’t have them anymore and Europeans find unappealing because they need to live with them.

We’ve seen dozens of Fikjos in Macedonia.  At first, it was difficult to tell exactly what they were because so many of them are missing their faux-chrome emblems. But we were attracted to the bright colors and tiny bodies.
It’s testament to their durability that there are still so many examples tooling around the streets of the country.  Their 24 horsepower engines emit a laughably impotent drone, something like that of a mo-ped carrying too much weight.  Zastava’s own estimate (I’m using that word to mean “hopeful guess”) proclaims that the car could accelerate from zero to sixty miles per hour in 51 seconds.  It would take someone brave to get this little tin box going that fast, though, and probably a long downhill stretch.

The Zastava 750 was immensely popular in Yugoslavia. Capable, affordable and government made, the car brought about the dawn of the automotive age in this part of the world, playing the part that the Model T did in America, or the Citroën Deaux-Chevaux did in France.  The factory in Kragujevac (in modern day Serbia), produced some 930,000 of these little things between 1955 and 1984, almost all of them sold within the Balkans. 

In recent years, a few Fikjo driver clubs have been created and the model has begun to see an upswing in popularity.  Parked near the oil wrestling in Çalıklı, we saw a shiny 750 with racing stripes and a rear spoiler.  There are fan groups in the UK and France as well as here.  The car has suddenly become a piece of nostalgia.

Zastava fell on hard times after the wars of the 1990’s, and eventually was completely subsumed by Fiat, which had a major stake in the company for years.  The old assembly plant is being retrofitted to begin producing modern Fiat cars, but the process is slow and the future seems uncertain.

In most cases, the old communist underpinnings in these countries have been covered up and plowed under.  But there are beloved reminders of those days, too, that transcend hardship.  For someone born towards the end of Tito's reign, it's easy to love the Fikjo.  It's one of the few bits of history left, roaming the streets, coughing at red lights, clanging with life.