The Balkan pages

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It was early in the morning of the 19th October 2004 when I was sitting in the train from Skopje to Belgrade. The first sunlight appeared above the valley where the border between Macedonia and Serbia is situated. I was to enter Serbia for the first time in my life. My destination was Nis, because I wanted to visit that city for a day, and since I was in Skopje I could make it in a day. When the train stopped at the Serbian border station of Presevo the border police and the customs entered the train and I was a bit nervous: now I am in Serbia and there is no way back. My thoughts were numerous: “this is the country where all the evil started when Yugoslavia collapsed now I can’t go back anymore”. “This is the country where 5 years earlier NATO bombs were dropped and my country participated”.

The police officer looked angry and asked “passport”, which I gave him immediately. He looked in my passport and started to smile “ ahhh Holandija”…
I got more nervous, because I was thinking this was the start for more problems… He asked me where I went and I told him that I was on my way to Nis for a day.  “ Dobro” he told me and that was it. The officer of the customs came a bit later: he started to talk Serbian to me and I said to him:  `Ne znam Sprski´. He asked me where you from? I told him “Hollandija”. A smile appeared and he asked me where you go? I replied I go for one day to Nis. He said to me: “have fun in Serbia!”

I was astonished, was this it? The train continued its way through the valley of the Južna Morava (South Morava) and after a couple of hours I arrived in Nis, where I walked straight into the city. I came quickly in front of a monument of the victims of the NATO-bombardments in 1999. The list was long (with people from my age and younger and older), and there were also victims of the cluster bombs that had been dropped by Dutch F-16's. I was frozen and even when I write this now tears still do appear. My thoughts were “ this I did not know, this I did not saw on television, why?”. It was a hard confrontation for me and a very good lesson of life.

The whole day I walked through Nis and I really enjoyed it. The people were friendly and helpful, even the men who sold t-shirts of Mladic and Karadzic. He told me his story and I could not understand it, but that came later, much later when I started to read about Serbia and Yugoslavia.

That 19^th of October 2004 I could smell a bit of Serbia, and the same customs officer in Presevo which I met that same morning told me that I had a good taste, because I bought the right bottle of Slivovitch…

It was 4 years later when I came back and was welcomed by new friends and had new horizons. My opinion is that you cannot understand Serbia when you haven’t been there, when you did not meet and talked with people. These pages I created for them, my Serbian (unknown) friends, because I was and will always be welcome. While having good discussions (even sometimes when we did not agree) with a drink I felt the huge hospitality, the charm and the passion this beautiful country. Serbia deserves more respect nowadays. If you want to read another story, which is much nicer then the one above please click here.

I hope that through these pages (which are under development) you can discover more about Serbia and that once yourself you want to discover it. You will fall in love with Serbia, just as I did....

If you have any recommendations or remarks, please feel free to contact me. You can contact me via the contact form here.

's-Hertogenbosch, 26th February 2010