I don’t think it’s over in the Balkans

I returned last week from a short break in the Balkans; travelling by train in Serbia, walking from village to village over the mountains of northern Albania, an evening in a big Albanian town, a couple of journeys in Montenegro and a very short time in Croatia… so only a taste; nothing that makes me a Balkan expert; just a sniff of how things are. On that flimsy evidence, here’s a guess. I don’t think it’s over in the Balkans. Things don’t feel settled, don’t feel real.

There’s an amazing railway from the Serbian capital of Belgrade to Podgorica, formerly Titograd and now the capital of Montenegro. In nearly 12 hours you pass through wildly beautiful country: lush farmland, little towns, high hills and forests, and finally magnificent mountains. This railway was one of Marshal Tito’s great unifying works of national infrastructure, passing through Serbia and a corner of what is now Bosnia on its way to the Montenegrin coast: a statement in steel, welding together (as he hoped) his ultimately doomed concept of what was once Yugoslavia.