Eastern Serbia – second half of March 2004

East of Belgrade:

On the routes of eastern Serbia, two things seemed to be omnipresent: dead dogs and trash. Even if you tried to look away from the dogs, you couldn’t avoid the trash that covered the landscape. Trash in the towns, trash in the streams and rivers, trash along the riverbanks, trash in the fields that lined the roads, trash in people’s own backyards. It was everywhere – heaps and heaps of it. It certainly didn’t help that the local or national government had neglected to put trash cans anywhere in the country. We spent five weeks in the capital, and I never once saw a garbage truck. Trash was either burned at home in the furnace or in the dumpsters, where you could often see either gray smoke or stray cats poking around. We passed entire villages and towns that had trash in every single yard, polluting the landscape and the streams. There seemed to be no collective consciousness of cleaning up or taking responsibility for your own actions. It happened to me numerous times that I was carrying a plastic bottle or bag, and people told me to just throw it away in the street. When I said I preferred waiting to throw it away at home in the trash can, they said it didn’t matter, that it wasn’t their own backyard. So I guess the assumption was that you can safely pollute your neighbor’s yard without a guilty conscious. Whatever the reasons, it is a veritable national catastrophe.

We passed concrete and brick houses with burnt orange shingles. As we headed farther east, we passed a few towns with enormous colored villas built by people who had gone to Western Europe, mostly Germany and Austria, to work, and who had brought back their savings to build big houses in the style of those in the countries they had worked in. Size seemed more important than aesthetics. The one remarkable thing in Serbia was the number of houses which were unfinished – the large and small ones both. Indeed, in some towns, it seemed as if the majority of the houses were started, then forgotten about once one or two rooms were inhabitable. They ran out of bricks or ran out of wood or window panes, or perhaps out of energy or money. As we looked at the houses from the road, big empty spaces stared back at us.

We passed through gypsy towns, we rode by clucking chickens on the side of the road, barking dogs which followed us and silent dogs which ignored us as they sunned themselves on top of dead, rusting cars. We passed shacks, we passed farmhouses, we passed an open-air market, we passed burning fields. And we passed unending roadside grave markers with the faces of those whose lives had been cut short by tragedy. And we passed more trash.

The farther east we travelled, the more we became aware that the Serbians in these border towns were wary of Romanian gypsies who had crossed the border, looking for higher wages and a better life. Many had lost their lives, in fact, by trying to escape Ceasescu’s reign by swimming across the Danube from their country to Serbia. The river, which is very wide at the Serbian town of Golubac, is a point where many people drowned before reaching the other side. The river is so wide at this point this is resembles more of a lake. We camped in one family’s garden, and it seemed as if we were seaside. Many people built vacation homes here.

We slept one night with Milanjo and his family. He seemed to wish that he had enough money to move out on his own with his family, instead of living with four generations in the same house. He showed us where he worked as a butcher in a tiny shop located on his property. He has little work right now, as it is the period before Easter, six weeks when the faithful do not eat pork. He will make a lot of money for Easter. His five-year old kept hiding from Stephane, but as soon as he would leave the room, she would come back and talk up a storm. Showed me her mother’s make-up kit and her dolls, then danced away just like a regular star.