Of Ghosts, Insomnia, and Travel
Waking here often comes with a sense of unease, a forgetting of what I’ve dreamt about, but an awareness that it was none too pleasant.
Explaining an unsettled, disruptive mood cast upon a morning is a challenge for the best of writers, so I fumble in trying to do so.
I’m in Serbia. Belgrade, this country’s capital and once-capital of the former Yugoslavia.
The Balkans are a region fraught with tensions from long before history ever met the page. We think of the Balkans and delude ourselves that the wounds are fresh, leftover from blood spilt in the ’90s as neighbours in the former Yugoslavia parked snipers on hillsides to snuff compatriots in the name of tribal tensions and historic ethnic beefs.
In theory, Yugoslavia wasn’t some ancient land severed in the wake of communism’s fall in Europe, it was cobbled together during World War I, hinging on the nationalistic dream of visionaries of Slavic descent in Croatia and other Balkan states, as they suffered through the end of Venetian rule, the faltering of Ottoman oppression, and the rise of the Austro-Hungarian dominance. The people of what would one day be Yugoslavia dreamt of autonomy and unity that could bring their tethered ethnicities under a national brand, for lack of a better word.
But, like all political concepts and philosophical beliefs, what’s idyllic and aspirational on paper becomes a fool’s errand when meddling humans interfere with its execution.
And so goes Yugoslavia, a creation meant to lionize the nationalistic dream of those Slavs — Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs — from the 1700s onwards, and a nation that would barely last 75 years. Deceptive, though, that, because civilization in these countries extends back over 7,000 years.
But I’m no historian. I can’t for the life of me begin to express the complex historic and nationalistic strife that colours this region. Delve into Rebecca West’s masterwork, Black Lamb & Grey Falcon, to sink your teeth into that rich history.
A Traveller’s Observations
What I can tell you about the Balkans is that there’s something unmistakably electric that courses through this region for those perceptive and intuitive enough to pick it up. Partly why I’ve spent so much of my nomadic time travelling here — nearly a third of my time abroad now — is because this region feels like a spark to a powder keg. It’s peaceful now, but will it stay that way?
After all, so legendary are Balkan tensions that World War I launched because of them (see assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo and World War I), and those tensions in this region are escalating again, thanks to agitation and provocations from Russia. How shaky is peace? What looms as politics ever inch closer toward extremism and fascism throughout Europe, particularly in parts of these Balkans, where people long for peace yet still feel stoked by ethnic loyalties?
Much of what I know about this region is anecdotal, from talking to people, and anyone who’s ever learned anything from talking to people knows two things about that — one, the information is usually conjecture and often wrong, and two, no matter how wrong it is, there’s usually an element of truth in the lies.
Take Albania, for instance.
Storytime: In Which Steff Visits Albania
When I told my AirBNB host in Naxos, Greece, in early 2017 that I was excited to be heading to Albania in the coming weeks, he scowled. “If I hear you go there, I pull you back myself. They are liars, thieves, killers. You study Albania mafia, you see this is true.” To end-punctuate this, he spat on the ground as if spiting the nation.
I was taken aback by the strength of his convictions and began questioning my plans. I told another fella in Athens of this plan.
“Mm,” he grunted. “Greeks don’t like Albanians.” When I pressed as to why, he told me much the same line — “criminals and liars.”
Later, during an Uber ride to Athens International, I asked my very fluent driver about this antagonism between the countries. He laughed and told me about when communism was coming apart and the fledgling democracy rising in Albania, how the country was so broke, it had to cut costs where it could. This coincided with a building boom in Greece, where the Greek government acknowledged the strong reputation Albanians had for construction skills and pronounced open season for Albanians to enter Greece for work during this period of growth.
With a built-in exit plan offered, the driver told me the Albanian government saw its chance and turned to the jails filled with political and criminal prisoners and announced that they could be released from jail if they agreed to leave the country.
And so, yes, the Greek experience with modern Albanians became one infused with criminality and the mafia.
But that doesn’t speak of Albanians as a whole, a people I found unfalteringly kind and interested and friendly toward me during my two-month stay in 2017. Never once did I feel unsafe. I was never even cheated by taxi drivers, which, as someone who’s travelled to 22 countries, I can tell you is a rare and even weird phenomenon. Not only do I not regret staying seven weeks in the country, but I hope to one day return for another lengthy visit.
So, there are both lies and truth in what we hear anecdotally from people on the streets.
Back in Belgrade
But despite the jovial and nearly effervescent mood tonight at this promenade café in the heart of Belgrade, Serbia, where patrons relax as dusk falls with a rare, cool evening wind blows in another hot spell, I maintain there’s an underlying mindset I can’t shake here.
The quality of life is increasing in Belgrade and, with it, Serbia, but it’s been a long hard road climbing out from under the crushing sanctions and the bombings laid by NATO and the UN in the wake of the Balkan War of the ’90s. And here there’s a mixed sentiment. Some feel Serbia was merely acting in defense against ethnic cleansing committed in Bosnia and Croatia and Kosovo. Others feel their government was wrong in its aggressions, even if done in defense of ethnic Serbs in other regions.
It’s complicated, man.
Go to Bosnia, it’s a different story.
Go to Croatia, a different story still.
Watch the BBC’s huge, long, and excellent Death of Yugoslavia, shot as the war still raged, and it’s yet another story.
But trying to get people in any of these countries to talk about the war can be an ordeal. That doesn’t mean they’re not thinking about it, haunted by it.
A friend and I wandered Belgrade Sunday afternoon and were blown back by a 50-metre-long double-sided sign posted in front of the Parliament building about the “NATO war criminals” and the Serb victims of “Muslim criminals” from the war. Huge photos of beheaded victims lying on war fields, an unexpected find during a pleasant Sunday walk. Beheaded corpses! Hard not to feel a gut-punch from that — it’s someone’s family, no matter what they may have done to deserve it (or not).
Yeah, wounds ooze here. Tensions have never abated, and maybe they never will. Because, like I say, it’s not only about what happened 25 years ago — it’s about what’s been happening for centuries, millennia.
Every 30 to 40 years here over the last 150 years, there’s been yet another war in the Balkans.
It’s why people here relax so thoroughly when they can, because they know they only have today, everything can change tomorrow. But it also likely accounts for my unending struggles with sleep. I wrote about that in my story (PDF) for Canadian Traveller and how that “live for today” mentality helped me in grieving the death of my father in the winter of 2016/17.
Sleepless in Serbia
Here in Belgrade, my apartment is across from a bridge that was blown to smithereens in World War II, and something about my lodgings has me on a constant state of alert. I don’t rest well there and I suspect it goes beyond the bumpy bed, because my dreams have been furtive, dark, and weird this month, the few I remember.
Yesterday, I awoke in a panic after I dreamt of a public awareness effort on social media to find a friend of mine who’d wandered off four days ago and hadn’t been seen or heard of since. I delved into the turmoil it sent her community into, and the heartbreak and worry felt by our mutual connections.
So real was the dream that I woke with a start and logged into Facebook to find she’d posted just four hours previous about dinner with friends. Whew! Just a dream, then. It took time for me to get back to sleep, but it’s just another of the kind of dreams I’ve been afflicted with my arrival.
Last night’s dreams segued from jumping spiders who’d spontaneously reproduce five more spiders if you whacked one to my being attacked by a rabid squirrel that climbed in through the bedroom window and I literally had to beat off me with a bristle brush. Obviously I awoke from flop sweats.
The bizarre nightmares haven’t just found me in Belgrade, though. I felt the same way in Cambodia, the few times I found sleep while in Siem Reap for 25 days.
I’ve not written much about that country on my blog, I guess, because I’m still making sense of those contradictions. The Cambodian life during the day was lovely and restful when I relaxed in my resort, but the occasional encounter with landmine victims that also shook Anthony Bourdain during his visit, well, I found them disruptive, to put it mildly. And, invariably, nighttime was when the darkness took hold. I tossed and turned constantly, occasionally collapsing into baffling tears of exhaustion.
Both Serbians and Cambodians were responsible for ethnic cleansing against their countryfolk. Horrific violence, merciless killing, and, in some ways, neither has ever really come to terms with it.
Cambodia has confronted the darkness more than Serbia, because they’ve memorialized the Killing Fields and erected museums and monuments, at least. But Pol Pot was never held accountable, really. Few killers were ever taken to task. Instead, the tormentors live still among their tormented.
It’s only been in this decade some of the Serbians (and other Balkan war criminals) faced verdicts for their atrocities too. Just months ago, one Bosnian Croat accused of war crimes, Slobodan Praljak, drank cyanide and killed himself in United Nations court, on video (November, 2017). But there is no acknowledgement here in Serbia of what their side did to Bosnians, no mention of the 8,367 slaughtered at Srebenica by their forces in Europe’s worst genocide since WWII.
Where There Be Ghosts
Others have written about areas that bring on nightmares or leave them unsettled — and it’s not a universal thing, by far. Some of us just respond to certain places. For the inimitable “Legal Nomad” Jodi Ettenberg, it was Hue, Vietnam, that left her fraught with night terrors in a city famously decimated in the war. The Vietnamese culture believes that being unable to lay their dead to rest means their ghosts will roam. In Hue, the dead largely went unfound, unburied, unhonoured.
Here’s what Jodi wrote of her experiences. (I highly recommend reading her whole post here.)
“I wanted to write a guide to the food but despite eating well the food remains an afterthought to my time in Hue. It is entirely out of character for me, but I felt a strange weight of the city’s history during my entire visit, one that gave me pause in terms of how to write this piece.
Every morning there I woke up gasping for breath, still strangled by the last terrifying hold of a horrific nightmare. I dreamed of family members committing suicide, of war, of drowning, of running through forests that never ended. I would drag myself out of the curled edges of sleep only to find the remnants of those nightmares sitting with me all day, resting heavily on my shoulders as I roamed in search of food. When I would forget about them, a small corner or the branch of a certain tree would bring with it a claustrophobic flashback. I would be fine, and then the blood would drain from my face, as if my dreams were chasing me during the daytime.
It seems unreasonable to say that I felt haunted the entire time that I was there, but I would be lying if I said otherwise. The hair on my arms stood on end during my entire time in the old city, spooking me. I do not normally have crazy nightmares, nor do I generally have problems with historical angry ghosts. But my weekend in Hue was a surreal mixture of fullness in my belly and complete confusion about the angst that I have only now been able to shake.
Something indescribable affected me deeply, despite having visited unfortunate places that have suffered far worse fates than Hue.”
Anthony Bourdain, too, felt unsettled in Hue. Of the Parts Unknown episode filmed there, he wrote –
“For this reason, this episode is haunted by ghosts. We hadn’t intended it to be so. But that definitely emerged as a theme.
You feel it as you drive the streets and early morning rice paddies on a scooter, walk the parapets of the ancient citadel, look at the flag hanging in the mist across the Perfume River. At one point, a young woman I’m having dinner with casually mentions that her mother doesn’t like her to go out after dark. Too many ghosts.”
For me, nothing has been so tangible or palpable as with Jodi’s experience. Seldom has my skin crawled or Spidey-sense tingled. I’d had bad dreams about those in my family, my friends, but nothing I need to put a CCR “Run Through the Jungle” soundtrack to. Instead, I’ve felt an occasional malaise, a walking funk, a feeling something just wasn’t quite right on the night air.
All I Know’s What I Know
There’ll be those who scoff at such things. Ghosts, vibes, feelings, moods. As if. As if a place can have a feeling. Pish-posh.
Ghosts, well, they’re not really something I subscribe to, but energy, yeah. In my experience, energy lingers and taints places for long, long after events subside and people die. The first law of thermodynamics claims energy cannot be created nor destroyed, just transferred or changed. Why can’t this apply to places? Why shouldn’t this dictate that where great evil occurs, a feeling of evil can linger?
I’ve mentioned a Croatian castle before in my writings. Over 1,000 years old, it shook me to my core and sent me racing out the door. I was buh-buh-buh-bored as I toured the building on a dull Sunday in autumn, 2015, but then I entered a windowless, thick-walled, heavy-doored room, and my heart immediately sunk through the floor, my hair stood on end, and I violently wanted to vomit as my body went ice-cold.
I’ve never run so fast. I don’t know what the hell happened in the room in the thousand-plus years it’s stood, but I guarantee you that Geneva Conventions weren’t in play when that shit went down.
Croatia, like Serbia and other parts of the Balkans, has seen much in territorial pissing matches, conquests, and sackings in the many millennia of civilization that have unfolded here. It’s like much of Europe that way.
In some places, it feels troublesome, dark, perplexing. In others, it’s peaceful and beautiful. These regions are complicated and rich in their experiences and the feelings they impart upon those in the thrall of them. That feeling, I’ve found, can vary from block to block, zip code to zip code, and it’s never some overarching pall cast over an entire region.
Still, if these lands could talk, they’d tell of heartbreak and loss, victory and destruction, joy and longing. They’d tell stories, deep and engaging tales that would wow and baffle you.
It’s not always a sunshiny experience when travelling. It’s important to remember that war is as much a part of the European experience as food and wine are. It’s no reason to avoid it or be scared, it’s simply something to note while travelling.
And sometimes, it might just keep you up at night.
