Following our introduction to Belgium in Baarle-Hertog, the town known for its notoriously complex hotchpotch of borders with The Netherlands, we skipped across Northern Belgium past the port behemoth that is Antwerp and arrived in the more picturesque Bruges.
After a week spent acclimatising and familiarising ourselves with the Dutch way of life, which involved a lot of vertical smock windmills and vegan soused herring, we decided to dive into the beating heart and capital of the country: Amsterdam. I say dive, we parked about as far away from the centre as was still practically commutable in order to avoid unwittingly navigating into a canal or getting stranded in the Red-Light District with no method of extraction, for that would be a disaster.
September 16th, 2023. So commenced our third Autumnal European escapade in as many years as we began our next adventure sipping thimbles of Tesco value Sauvignon Blanc on the speedy LeShuttle deep underneath the English Channel, as has become a tradition.
The final chapter of our tour of the Western Balkans started in one of the ten Serbian enclaves of Kosovo, never thought I’d be writing that. As touched upon in my previous post, Kosovo and neighbouring Serbia have a complex and fraught relationship that only becomes more complex and fraught inside a majority Serb area, such as where I was stood in Gračanica.
Undoubtedly Europe’s most controversial nation, not through any fault of her own, Kosovo has long polarised opinion with absolutely no sign of any contention slowing down. A slim majority of countries around the world (52.3% to be exact) recognize her sovereignty including the UK, USA, and most of the EU although notable exceptions include Spain (concerned it would bolster separatist movements in the Basque and Catalonia regions) and, most vociferously, big brother Serbia.
From the shores of North Macedonia’s largest lake, we made the bumpy three-hour drive northeast to its largest city, and capital, Skopje. Pronounced Skop-yay, this city of half a million may not appear to be the most geographically significant municipality when looking at its landlocked location on a map however, you’d be partially wrong.
The newest nation on earth, at least by name, lay just across from our next Balkan border interrogation: North Macedonia. Caught up in a decades-long dispute with neighbouring Greece over where the ancient region of Macedonia actually is, and allowing the victor to lay the best claim to the birthplace of Alexander the Great (very important in these parts), the addition of the modifier ‘North’ to their nation’s name satisfied the Greeks enough to remove any objections they had to the Macedonians potentially joining the EU.
With just days to the start of a new year, we decided that Shkodër might not be the most happening place in the world to ring it in and so we made the short journey southwards along the exceedingly bumpy E762 highway to the capital: Tirana. Brought under communist rule after the Second World War before decades of brutal governance under Albanian Voldemort Enver Hoxha, older Tiranas have witnessed more change in their municipality than most.
If there is one nation that is keener than any other to remind people that it is not a former member of the erstwhile country of Yugoslavia or, indeed, that it is not Slavic in any way, shape, or form then it is Albania. Proclaimed independent from the Ottoman Empire way back in 1912, the Albanian people are certainly proud of their rich and distinct history, separate from Europe for so long in their own Balkan bubble.
