7,000 Years And Counting

By Pat Browning


On Sunday night PBS will air a Nature program called “Wild Balkans” and here’s the summary:


“Thick forests, vast wetlands, deep chasms - this is a wild, inaccessible place that belongs more to myth than reality. The landscape looks as if it was taken straight form Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings." But here there are neither orcs nor elves; rather, bears and wolves. This is not Middle Earth; rather it is middle Europe -the Balkans. Through the centuries this land has burned its way into the soul and spirit of its people. The jagged contours have thrown long dark shadows over the history of the peninsula, always in the middle, between forces of the East and the West. It's as if the bloody history of the Balkans conspired to conceal its natural wonders. The landscape is still untouched and in it are wild animals that have all but vanished from the rest of Europe.”


That’s not just hype. I’ve been there – once with a tour group in the wilds of Slovenia on a side trip to the Hotel Grad Otecec. The hotel is a 13th century feudal castle sitting on an island in the Krka River. It’s midway between Ljubljana and Zagreb, less than 50 miles from either, but so secluded it could be on the moon. The hotel makes all arrangements for hunting boar, pheasant, rabbit and other seasonal game, and for fishing.


Close by are two spas specializing in stress-related disorders and splendid isolation. Tucked in there is the small town of Novo Mesto, chartered in 1365. Beam me down, Scotty.


Soul satisfying as all that is, any trip through the Balkans should start in Belgrade. Some day history will be taught in the only way that makes sense -- by transporting students to where it happened on some mass-transit version of the Starship Enterprise.


I first wandered into the old Yugoslavia by accident. I picked a tour that included Austria, Hungary and Italy. Yugoslavia -- Land of the South Slavs -- happened to be in the neighborhood. It's quite a neighborhood.

You want history? Belgrade has sprawled there at the confluence of the Sava and
Danube Rivers for 7,000 years, give or take a century.


The Romans colonized it (lst Century A.D.).
The Huns destroyed it (441).
The Goths captured it (504).
The Avars sacked it (twice).
The Slavs conquered it (630).
The Bulgarians took it (827).
The Hungarians ransacked it (again and again and again).
The Byzantine Empire took it and lost it and took it and lost it …
The Crusaders passed through (1096-1189).
Turkey ruled it off and on for 300 years.
The Germans and Austrians captured it (1915).
The Serbs liberated it (1918) and Belgrade (Beograd) became the capital of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.
The Germans bombed and occupied it (1941).
The Americans bombed it (1944) and the communists moved in.
NATO forces bombed it (1999).


The old Yugoslavia is now Serbia and Montenegro, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia …


You do remember Macedonia, land of Alexander the Great? As recently as 2001, U.S. troops were there evacuating ethnic Albanians from Kosovo.


When I was in Greek Macedonia in the mid-1980s a tour guide took us to the border, where we stared across to that part of Macedonia claimed by Yugoslavia. Greece had been staring across that border for years, in what the guide called "the silent war."


And that is another story.

**The photo of Skadarlija Street is by Branko Jovansovic, found on the Belgrade website at http://www.beograd.org.yu/ (Click on the English tab at the top.)**

Warped

by Ben Small

As some of you know, I just returned from touring Croatia and a bike tour of parts of Slovenia, Italy and Austria. And of course, my mind turned to murder. I don't recall anybody writing a murder mystery involving a bicycle tour, but why not? Seems to me one could develop a story very Agatha Christie-like on a bike tour.

So many methods for the killer to use. He could oil a sharp turn on a downhill switch-back. Or she could reach down and thrust a stick or rod between someone's spokes. Or he/she could bat someone across the bean while passing.

Great. Now I'll be thinking about bike-murder all day...

Consider this: We had eleven people in our twenty person bike tour (not including two guides) who were part of one group from Ormond Beach, FL. Who knows the relationship these folks had before the trip? Maybe one has been cheating with another one's wife or husband. Maybe two of them are related and there's a will contest going on. Maybe one is the parent of a child arrested because of drugs supplied by another tour member. Whatever. These folks knew each other before the bike tour, and they'd had interactive lives.

What a chance for murder.

Just try to account for twenty people on a bike tour. Who's where at any time? Folks ride in different groups, and mix it up after rest stops or meals. Trying later to reconstruct who was with whom and when would be difficult -- again, just like an Agatha Christie murder.

Riding on paved or hard-pack gravel trails in beautiful valleys underneath the Julian Alps is a dreamlike journey. The air is crisp and cool, fresh, and spirits are high. The heart is pounding and the muscles are burning. Who's paying attention to details? Oops, somebody missed a turn. Okay. We'll catch them later. Or will we? What if they don't come back? What if somebody bumped 'em off at the last turn?

Okay, I'm sick. But so are you. C'mon, admit it. You go places and think about murder too, don't you?

Don't be surprised if there's a bike in my next book...

Site Work

by Ben Small

Some weeks ago, Pat Browning blogged about how many times she doesn't have a clue about plotting her mysteries until she visits a site, or something like that. Well, that registered with me. Granted, I'd already been to Mount Rainier before I wrote Alibi On Ice, but having been to that site, having climbed that mountain, provided all the inspiration I needed for the story. It just flowed, naturally.

And when I was ready to write a second book, I had no idea what I wanted to write about, except that I wanted Morocco and Spain to be a part of it. My wife and I literally mapped the book's plot out over the course of a couple days on our hotel's cliff-side terrace in Arcos. The site we were in, and the sites and sights we'd seen, fed our imaginations. And maybe the wine we were sipping and the cheeses we nibbled helped a bit, too.

Same with my third book. I knew it would be a Denton Wright book, but I wasn't ready to wag the tail I'd left in The Olive Horseshoe. That will happen in the fourth book, set in Croatia and Slovenia, where we're heading now. The third book? I took a drive south of Tucson over the course of several days. Took lots of pictures. Then, looking at the pictures I'd taken on my computer, the plot just popped off the page, ran through my head, and then fell onto my word processor.

It's true, one can write a book about a place one's never visited. Many people do it. Not me. I want to go there, talk to the locals, take pictures, and soak up as much local color as I can. To me, that adds a realism one can't get from the internet alone.

But then that's just me.

Maybe Pat and I were related in another life...