BackPacking in the Balkans

Lucy Long Geography, 2012 and Alice Willcox Geography, 2011

over the summer we ventured from Albania to the Czech Republic with support from Mansfield’s Henty Travel Fund, which encourages ‘ambitious and unusual’ travel by undergraduate geographers.

Initially, we were drawn to the area through a student-run charity called Oxford Aid to the Balkans (OXAB), which linked us up with a Swedish NGO called TAMAM. This runs an annual summer camp for children in the village of Marqinet (just outside Albania’s capital, Tirana), where we arrived, along with over 20 other volunteers from places such as Sweden, Denmark and the USA. Following a series of explosions in an ammunitions base near the village in 2008, TAMAM has done a great deal in helping with post-traumatic stress and improving the general well-being of young people in the village, sending out volunteer teachers throughout the year. In addition to teaching English, we also led classes in art and sport, running an intensive ten days of activities and excursions for around 60 children. Despite our reservations before the camp, concerning our lack of teaching experience and the language barrier, this turned out to be a very rewarding experience – not only because of our work with the children, but through the cultural exchange from working with volunteers from around the world.

After our time at the camp, we experienced Albania as tourists, exploring the capital Tirana and catching furgons (small, battered mini buses, which serve as Albania’s main form of public transport) to more remote and historic locations such as Berat and Shkodra. Highlights included a trip to the Bogove waterfalls, which we finally reached after a two-hour furgon ride out of Berat, then a treacherous walk clambering over rocks and edging along shale embankments. To say we were ‘off the beaten path’ wouldn’t suffice, given that no path existed, and we were the only people around for miles. This made it even more special when we finally reached the icy falls in the heat of the day.

Albania’s capital was a completely different story. Everything about Tirana was chaotic: from the haphazard fusion of eastern and western cultures, to the former communist tower blocks that had been painted-over in sometimes garish pastel colours. We soon became adept at weaving in and out of traffic (pedestrian crossings being seemingly absent), and politely saying ‘jo faleminderit’ (‘no thank you’) to the numerous street vendors selling piles of dodgy looking mobile phones and fake branded goods laid out on plastic sheets on the ground. The country was isolated for over 40 years under a very repressive communist regime, and you get the impression that change here has had to happen at an accelerated rate. The immense amount of disorganised (yet positive) activity suggests that things are continuing to advance quickly, and for the better.

Inspired by reading and lectures in our first-year geography course on states and borders in post-communist Europe, we also travelled to some of the countries that made up former Yugoslavia, including Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. A large proportion of this area is still a raw wound as far as state formation is concerned, with significant tensions still present and complex national affinities due to the heterogeneous ethnic mix. This came across most strongly in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which following the break-up of Tito’s Yugoslavia and subsequent conflict, has three official ethnic groups, religions and languages. The three ethnic groups try to segregate themselves as much as possible, to the extent that the state has three presidents at any given time: one Bosniak, one Croat and one Serb.

Bosnia’s national football team now includes players of all ethnicities (possibly to put on a unified front for the rest of the world), yet there are still tensions between these ethnic groups at a club level. We experienced this for ourselves during our stay in Sarajevo when a local team of Bosniak nationality was playing a Spanish team. We were told by our hostel owner to avoid certain areas in the city due to the high risk of violence – not because of any friction between Spanish and Bosniak supporters, but because of issues between the Sarajevo club supporters and Serbs and Croats (many of whom would actively favour any team playing against a club of Bosniak ethnicity). Before our trip, we were under the impression that most ethnic tensions had died down since the 1992-95 conflict, however in reality, this is not the case, and the country is still in a state of flux.

Despite the stunning scenery we witnessed throughout this part of our trip, we found it impossible to cast images of the 1990s conflict to the back of our minds. Former war zones like Mostar and Sarajevo are now completely unrecognisable to photos we had seen of these areas during the conflict, yet a great deal of the bullet and shrapnel damage remains as a silent reminder of a tragic series of events that killed over 100,000 people. Much like Albania, it is clear that Bosnia and Herzegovina is trying to shake off its past, however, due to the lingering ethnic divisions between its people, real change may take a while.

It’s difficult to put into words how much of an eye-opener the whole experience was for us, and we are very grateful to the College, and in particular Bruce Robinson (without whom the Henty Fund wouldn’t exist), for helping to support such an opportunity. We hope that future undergraduates are encouraged to undertake similarly ambitious travel, as it certainly has enriched our geographical understanding of the world.