Bosnian Gobbets

The word gobbet is usually a terrifying one for undergraduate historians. They are a staple diet of modern history exams, where one is presented with a text that can be as short as six words, and on that basis write a 1, 500 word critical essay, in exam conditions. A brutally exact and contextualised knowledge is needed to be successful; the text can be something as feeble as " I saw Chamberlain today. PM very gloomy". No flannel or padding is possible with such scant material.

It's the historical equivalent of 20-20 cricket, where one has to go in and immediately start biffing the historical white ball all over the park, or get out quickly and hope that someone else can do better. So gobbets here is meant in the gentler sense, in just being short observations about this week, viz.

1. Why are French sporting teams so damned lucky? Sarajevo went very quiet on Wednesday night, as the BiH football team took to the field at the Stade de France, knowing that a win would see them qualify for a major football tournament for the first time. And, for an hour, the Bosnians dominated a shockingly poor home side, who did a good impression of having met for the first time in a Métro carriage half an hour before kick off. Dynamo Moscow's Misimović, surely the most under-rated attacking midfielder in Europe, passed the French off the park and was the electricity in the Bosnian dynamo.

Sadly, much of the ammunition he provided fell to Manchester City forward Edin Džeko. The big no. 9 was doing a very good impression of Tony Cascarino on Wednesday. He was absolutely terrible, missing two or three really easy chances, before, in typically mercurial fashion, making and scoring the brilliant goal which saw Bosnia lead at half time. Džeko has terrific upper body strength and is quick, but in terms of skill and temperament he's still a bit of an unguided missile in my view, and is very, very frustrating to watch.

Sadly, France equalised with about twelve minutes to go through a penalty, and the Bosnians had run out of steam by then, leaving them to rue their profiligacy in the first half. With typical abysmal luck, they have now been drawn with Portugal in the play-offs, the worst draw possible, as this is the team that eliminated BiH at the same stage before the 2010 World Cup. If only Bosnia could have a bit of self belief, they could gain revenge, but it seems unlikely. The spirit of the old Yugoslavia team hangs around this current BiH team; they are wonderful to watch, very gifted technically, and flatter to deceive, never quite prevailing in games where it matters. Sarajevo was twelve minutes away from an amazing party on Wednesday night; instead, the pubs had emptied half an hour after the full time whistle, as folk dissipated away in bitterly disappointed silence.

France are better organised under Laurent Blanc, after the utter shambles and scandal of the Domenech era, but they are still a deeply mediocre side who won't make it beyond the group stages of Euro 2012 next year; a side extremely fortunate not to be facing a play off. I can think of only two of the current French group of players, who would have got near their all-conquering squads of 1998-2000.

Let's not even start on the rugby world cup semi-final today. I heartily detest rugby union for reasons for too numerous to mention, and will loathe it to my dying day, but I really wanted Wales to win today- and it sounds like, yet again, France were extremely lucky to progress to the final. Almost certainly, however, a righteous vaporising awaits them at the hands of the Kiwis or the Australians. Nonetheless, no one has heard of rugby here in Bosnia, so it's been bliss to be spared the egg-chasing "world cup" (British Commonwealth plus one or two exotic others, more like) in its entirety.

2. It's been largely poor stuff from the ex-Yugoslav countries in qualification. Alongside BiH, Montenegro have been the team to really stand out, qualifying from a difficult group behind England. The doughty Montenegrins- lacking a genuine goalscorer, but very, very determined and hard to break down, particularly in Podgorica- face a winnable tie, against a poor Czech side, for a place in Poland and Ukraine next year. Croatia face the Turks in another difficult to call tie, the men in the red and white chessboard shirts have had a very quiet time, since the heyday of Slaven Bilić's team leaving Steve McLaren cowering under his umbrella, in a Wembley monsoon. Both sides seem to be in transition although I think the Croats are marginal favourites.

Serbia and Slovenia cancelled one another out in a very bizarre qualifying group, won easily by Italy but, surreally, seeing Estonia make the play offs. Having spent some time in Estonia in the last 3-4 years and seen them play on many occasions, I am absolutely astonished at their transformation. This was a team that went winless for over a year in 2007-8; the last time I watched an Estonia international, they were a sorry, dis-spirited shambles, routed 7-1 in Sarajevo by the Bosnians. However, their unsmiling head coach Tarmo Rüütli, who nearly lost his job after that humiliation, has transformed them into a hard working team much greater than the sum of its little-known parts. Back to back wins against an ageing Northern Ireland team for the Estonians, left Serbia needing to beat Slovenia in Maribor; Slovenia prevailed 1-0, being cheered on not only by their home fans but by a capacity crowd of cornflower-blue clad loons at the A le Coq. stadium in Tallinn, watching on a giant screen.  In the three days that followed, both Vladimir Petrović, the deeply unpopular Serb head coach, and Noerthern Ireland's Nigel Worthington, have paid with their jobs for Estonia's success.

It was such a strange group: Estonia won in Belgrade last October, and suffered a catastrophe in Torshavn at the hands of the Faroe Islands just three months before this high point of their footballing history. Their qualification is a wonderful story, but I suspect it will end before Euro 2012 begins; I really cannot, even with my most optimistic glasses on, see them beating the Republic of Ireland over two legs in the play off.

Finally, to no one's surprise, Macedonia's John Toshack has the biggest job on his hands. After his promising start against the Russians in Moscow, Toshack has subsequently overseen an excruciatingly dull 1-0 win over the mighty Andorra in Skopje, followed by a tumble down the slippery slope to a 1-4 disaster in Yerevan. Tuesday's home draw with Slovakia restored some deeply wounded pride, but worryingly for the Macedonian FA, the stadium was virtually empty for this meaningless final game. Toshack needs to unearth some new young players from somewhere, and improve their morale, if they are to make an impact in the 2014 world cup qualifying group.

As for Scotland? It would have bee typical if we had gone over to Spain and won, but the reality is that the damage was done by abysmal, negative, fear-filled showings away in Kaunas and Prague. Craig Levein has failed to convince a significant minority of Scottish fans that he has the necessary attributes to make Scotland competitive and challenging seriously for qualification again. The 2014 group- featuring the Croats, Serbs, Belgians, Gary Speed's resurgent Wales, and Macedonia, looks very difficult for us again.

3. I've finally got some research underway at the faculty of fine art here in Sarajevo. Nonetheless, in terms of art, there's been slim pickings. The National Gallery, supposedly re-opening on 11 October, remains absolutely closed, and the question as to when it will re-open usually just produces a shrug of the shoulders. The reality is, however, that since the 1992-95 conflict here, art has been a mobile and temporary phenomenon in terms of its display; initiatives like the small duplex 10m2, run by two French curators, are one of the few still points in a continuously changing small scene. 10m2 has been closed all week, but there is an opening of the contemporary Porschism collective there tonight, so I think I shall be sneaking along to that. Other then 10m2 and the extremely itinerant SCCA, which I have yet to find, there is not really much other than the Fine Art academy, constituted as such in 1972, and a few small commercial galleries of very varying quality. It will take time to uncover what seems to be a very fragmented and ephemeral contemporary arts scene.

4. I think I'll have another week of pretty intensive work in Sarajevo, then will spend the week after next travelling to a few places outwith the capital. I need to go to Konjic, a small town which was home of Tito's bunker, now a major exhibition of contemporary art; Mostar; and Jajce, home to a Museum of the Partisan struggle. So there should be quite a lot on here in the next couple of weeks.

5. Google Maps for Macedonia, Serbia and Bosnia is pathetic. Seriously, the information is so scant, poor, and misleading, they might as well not bother.

Skopje again and 9. Biennial of young Macedonian artists

Installation view of the Biennial at MoCA

So, today's my last day of another very busy short spell here in Skopje. I have had good meetings and discussions every day since I've been here, and new possibilities do appear to be opening out ahead of next year.

I wound up my affairs in Belgrade last Thursday. The week flashed by very quickly after my lecture: I met some interesting private collectors in the Serb capital last Tuesday, who have a really representative and very broad collection of Yugoslav art from the 60s through to the 80s. I also had meetings with a couple of artists from that period.

Having bunkered down in Belgrade for three weeks, it felt a little odd to be leaving, but I was impatient to be back in Skopje again. As well as meeting various artists and pals in the last few days, there was also the opportunity to catch the Biennial of Young Macedonian Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art, which was a varied exhibition of work around the politically neutral theme of still life.

Kristina Božurska, Zoomed Still Life, 2010 / 11

Two or three individual pieces really stood out in this show. Kristina Božurska's Zoomed Still Life was reminiscent of a late 80s Christian Boltanski, featuring over 300 little metallic cubes, arranged into a rectangle on the wall. Each individual cube is rusted away and is part of some crushed-up industrial debris; this piece, then, functions as the ultimate recycling of material in a post-object state; the rehabilitation of practical objects at the end of their lives, into a new and unexpected art-object phase: a kind of discarded readymade.

Filip Jovanovski, Still Life: The Cabinet of Professor Velimir Veličkovski: 24 Allegories to Explain the World, 2011

 Filip Jovanovski, whose work in progress I had seen on my last visit to the gallery,has made a real success of his "living still life", above. The installation is really well put together and has an intriguing range of objects, from a black and white portrait of Tito, through several of the professor's own paintings and books, to ephemera and tat from the 1970s and 1980s. It raises the question not only of the still life as object, but of the role of the still-life object in helping to build up a portrait of an individual. Of course, using the object to convey an aspect of the sitter's character, that cannot be conveyed by the image of the face and hands etc, has long been a tool of the portraitist's trade; this merging of portrait and still life throws up many interesting questions.

Sofia Grabuloska, Black/White Still Life, 2011

So, after meeting up with some friends later I have to pack up my stuff again tomorrow morning and set the co-ordinates for Sarajevo. It's about a ten hour drive so I'm stopping somewhere in central Serbia tomorrow night, as driving in the dark on unfamiliar Bosnian mountain roads would be an insane strategy. I hope to be in Sarajevo early Thursday afternoon, so my next update, with first impressions, will be from BiH probably early next week. It's the part of the trip I have most been looking forward to, as I have never been to Sarajevo before, and I also have plans to take in Jajce, Mostar, and Tito's bunker, now an art gallery, about 20kms south of the capital. As for Skopje? Well, it's a little bit sad to have to do a city I really enjoy in such short bursts, so I am very much looking forward to being a resident here next year, and writing up the great tome from a towerblock somewhere.

Crumbling Yugoslav-era "AutoMakedonija" sign in the city centre. Don't think the neon has worked since the mid 80s

I largely wrote this in Skopje, but never got around to finishing it so am putting it up now. Next update from SJ (where I am now) soon.

Belgrade 2

It's turned quite a bit cooler here this week. On Tuesday and Wednesday, Belgrade was visited with a near-biblical downpour; subsequently, the sun has come back, but it is now in the pleasant mid-20s rather than the mid-30s, and it is noticeably colder when the sun sets, around 1830. It's *almost* jacket weather again, not quite yet, though. Full blown autumn is in the post, but won't be here yet for another 2-3 weeks.

It's been a very busy week here in Belgrade. This trip goes in waves; a few days of settling in, a long period of research, the a day or so's unwinding before the next long car journey. I have been doing 8-9 hour shifts in the art faculty library, trying to navigate my through a mountain of art historical telephone directories. In the main, my days have been spent in the company of Miodrag B. Protić, the first serious art historian of Yugoslavia, who was prodigiously active from the mid-50s right up until his retirement in 1981. Protić is a rather old fashioned writer, these days; his narrative is couched in the pseudo-scientific classificatory terms of art history in the 50s and 60s. he often categorises artists in rather strange ways, and his writing is fairly typical of art historical writing from Communist states; factual, "objective", and with regular references to the leading role played in artistic development by the guiding hand of the League of Yugoslav Communists, distinguished from the much more censorious Warsaw Pact art worlds, and the cultural liberalism of the West.

Miodrag B. Protić, The Water Flower, 1981

 In a sense Protić is a figure like Patrick Heron or Adrian Heath in 50s England; a painter-critic. He was prolific in the studio from the 50s until the early 70s, painting in a style which merged elements of French Informel and American lyrical abstraction. The results are often less than inspiring, but writing art history from a practicing artist's viewpoint often produces more interesting results on the page. Although dry, and technocratic, Protić's many volumes on different decades and periods in Yugoslav art are invaluable, as they include complete lists of exhibitions, year by year, and memberships of the myriad short lived avant-garde groups that re-emerged in Yugoslavia in the wake of the Informbiro crisis. (Amusingly, leading Communist Party intellectual and writer Milovan Ðilas had delivered a slashing attack on "bourgeois formalism" at the V. Communist party Congress in 1948; a few months later, he was obliged to do a very rough fifth-to-reverse gear change, to reflect the cultural cataclysm that Informbiro visited on the emerging Yugoslav socialist culture). An art historian attempting to do this, from scratch, in the present day, would find the task near to impossible, given the ephemeral nature of many of these exhibitions, and the scant documentation of some of them. I have taken photos of hundreds of pages from Protić compendiums, containing vital information on a vanished art world, and have also been able to make links and connections that i was previously unable to. These will be critical during the writing up process in 2012.

Sava Sumanović, The Shepherdess, 1924

 In recent years, names like Ješa Denegri and Misko Šuvaković have become important in writing about Serbian and Yugoslavian art history. Denegri produces a series of texts on Decades in Serbian art from the middle 1990s; in more recent times, Šuvaković has emerged as a kind of Duncan MacMillan in the Serbian context, leading a team of researchers in compiling the absolutely vast History of Serbian Art in the Twentieth Century. Šuvaković had a ringside seat in the development of late Yugoslav art from the mid 70s onwards, participating regularly in exhibitions at SKC, as part of the radical Grupa 143, and in subsequent avant-garde formations in the 1980s. This was a vital developmental period; students became increasingly disatisfied with the politically compromised "socialist modernism" of the period, that was hegemonic at art academies and dominant in the art market; new art practices emerged at the end of the 1960s, and lacked the space to grown and expand. Following student riots and demonstrations in Belgrade and elsewhere in the federation, in early June 1968, new cultural centres were created- in Belgrade, Ljubljana, Zagreb, and Novi Sad- partly as a means of providing a hole to allow the angry steam of a bored and restless younger generation to disperse.

BITEF logo from the mid-2000s

These centres- together with international festivals such as BITEF, and the Ljubljana graphics triennial- gave a space for the "new art practices" to develop in the 1970s. However, the Yugoslav state's manipulation of these developments was quite clever. Large sums were provided for early international festivals, to promote an image of liberal and tolerant cultural policy and artistic freedom; in practice, in the domestic market, the big international names were little represented and ather marginal, and the old socialist modernists such as Protić and his contemporaries continued to dominate the market for domestic sales, commissions and prizes. The odd paradox of creating international excitement, but being unheard of at home, was no doubt partially responsible for the exile of many of these younger people in the later 1970s; Gera Urkom and Zoran Popović to London; Marina Abramović to Amsterdam; Braco Dimitrijević to Italy, and Paris. By the later 1970s, the radical performance/happening/events scene had weakened markedly, and attention turned to issues of postmodernity, with painting and sculpture once again the main focus.

Lazar Vujaklija, Piper, 1965. Zepter Collection, Belgrade

 These nuanced and interlinked developments can be fully appreciated in the fine collection of the Zepter Museum, a few hundred yards walk from the Fine Art faculty. Alongside the Sudac Collection in Varaždin, Croatia, this must be one of the biggest publically accessible private collection so Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav painting. Most variations are here; there is a large section devoted to "socialist modernism", an example of which can be seen in Lazar Vujaklija's Piper above. "Socialist Modernism" was a paradoxical art form, an art which used the forms and styles of modernism, not to criticise the social order and propose alternatives, but a modernism directed from above and geared to building consensus for the Titoist status quo. There are also good examples of postmodern painting and sculpture, such as Dušan Otašević's Piazza de Chirico of 1995. (below)

Dušan Otašević, Piazza de Chirico, 1995. Zepter Museum, Belgrade

One of the more interesting examples of recent Serbian art can be found in Uroš Đuric's Portrait of Rasa T., finished in 1992. This is a very clever painting, showing Todosijević in the style of a late 1920s Malevich painting. Much of Yugoslav painting in the 80s was concerned with the status of the art object, and using the styles and techniques of a defunct and discredited Utopian modernism, in an ironic sense, in the present day.  Đuric's painting cleverly exploits and alludes to this seam of ideas in the recent Yugoslav past, and includes representations of two of the conceptual artist's best known works, as part of a nod-and-a-wink portrayal of him as an aesthetic "revolutionary". Đuric is currently part of a very interesting showing of contemporary Serbian art in Regensburg, Germany, called "donumenta"; it's a biennial showing of art from the Danube region, and this year it is Serbia's turn to be represented.

Uroš Đuric, Portrait of Rasa T., 1992, Zepter Museum, Belgrade

Tomorrow I am doing a lecture on contemporary Scottish art and art education at the Fine Arts faculty, kicking off at noon; later I have to meet some collectors, and put in a couple more days work at the library, before returning to Skopje on Thursday. I will be in Macedonia for another week, before heading north-west to Sarajevo via Užice, another former "hero city" of Yugoslavia. So, my next update will probably be sometime over next weekend from Macedonia.

Belgrade 1

Faculty of Fine Arts, Belgrade

 It's not often that you can say that you are working in the place where World War One started. But that's exactly what I have been doing since the middle of last week. In a former life, the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade was the embassy of Austria-Hungary; it was to this building that the fateful telegram arrived from Vienna in the summer of 1914, ordering the Austrian ambassador to hand over the declaration of war to his Serb counterparts. It was a decision, ultimately, which was to shape fundamentally the state that was to be called Yugoslavia, and its successors, right up to the present day.

SKC, Belgrade

 I've been here for over a week now, and it has been largely hard work. I spent a day or so in the archives of the SKC- the students' cultural centre- that launched the careers of Marina Abramović and Rasa Todosijević in the early 1970s; the place where Joseph Beuys and Michelangelo Pistoletto visited, amongst others; the venue for legendary exhbitions such as the April happenings and the October salons, in the past. these days, it's still a pretty lively place, with two floors of contemporary exhibitions, and eating spaces, as well as an archive, library and offices.

In contrast to the laid back ease of the various towns and cities that I visited in Macedonia, Belgrade is a frenetic city. The traffic is constant and constantly irritable; Belgraders drive on the horn and the accelerator, with the other controls of their vehicles being largely ornamental. Long, slow moving crocodiles of vehicles all peeping hopelessly at one another is a daily sight here. It is also quite a unqiue place architecturally. Belgrade has been attacked and at least partially destroyed so many times in the last few centuries, that the oldest living house is barely 300 years old; the oldest building is a mosque dating from the sixteenth century. It is a city which has developed in layers; one Utopian vision has been swept aside for a completely different other, resulting in a jumbled built environment quite unlike anywhere else in Europe. On most of the main streets, Hapsburg style appartments from before 1914, interwar French-style appartments, Tito era towerblocks and corporate post-1999 monstrosties all sit cheek by jowl with one another.

Belgrade Street

 In Yugoslav times, Belgrade could claim not only to be capital of the federation's art world, but probably the most significant artistic city in south-east Europe. The National Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, both boasted very impressive and representative collections, not only of Yugoslav art, but also of modern art from the European continent, as well as from the USA. Sadly, these days, both institutions are closed as a result of a lack of money, and an extremely long and time consuming re-building process. Older Belgraders joke that the National Museum was more accessible during the German occupation; it has now been closed for seven years. Few would hazard a guess as to when either will be re-opened, but presumably the medium-term target is 2020, when Belgrade is hoping to be named as European City of Culture. This rather implies membership of the EU by that stage for Serbia, which, as far as can be predicted, seems about right.

Belgrade is also an incredibly stylish and fashion conscious city. The main shopping streets are choked with a mixture of chain stores and smaller, independently run clothes shops; my completely unscientific straw poll of passers by suggest that at least four in every ten Belgraders commonly leaves the house looking like they just walked off the front cover of Elle or Dazed and Confused. Since the very bleak and materially deprived isolation of the Milošević period (1986-2000), Belgrade has fallen over itself to go through a reinvention as a fashion and clubbing mecca.

Ten years ago, Belgrade struggled for tourists; now it has emerged, particularly in the last 2-3 years, as a hedonistic place, seducing all the young Inter-Railers with their limited budgets for the weekend. It might have been expected that Belgrade would have "done a Vienna" in the wake of the disintegration of the Yugoslav federation, in other words, become a dominating capital bereft of much of its former purpose, surrounded by a small, provincial country. However, the feeling of faded glory that clung to Vienna does not apply here. The massive changes in Belgrade's function and appearance in the last twenty years are merely the latest steps in a never ending walk of renewal.

For all the inaccessibility of the national collections, Belgrade is still very much an artist's city. The city centre is filled with reproductions of the most significant inaccessible paintings from the national collection. (Mind you, not everyone appreciates them; i saw one academic portrait being destroyed by a drunk man brandishing a skateboard, whilst he bellowed in Serbian about "fucking academic bollocks". No one batted an eyelid). the current exhibition at the "Donumenta" festival in Regensburg, Germany, focuses exclusively on contemporary Serbian art; from the established enfant terrible of the 1990s, Uros Djurić, through the innovative Artklinika collective of Novi Sad, to interesting contemporary street photographers such as the "Belgrade Raw" collective, whose website is well worth ten minutes of your time. The potential is definitely here for Belgrade to fully re-establish itself on the art making map, once the tourists are brought back by re-opened national institutions.

I'll write more from here before the end of the week.

Journey south-eastwards

Ohrid old town street & Zastava Fiça

So it's time to collect my thoughts after a few days in Ohrid, a beautiful small lakeside resort in the South East of Macedonia. Lake Ohrid is a gigantic expanse of water, surrounded by mountains; 2/3 of it belongs to Macedonia, and 1/3 to Albania, whose mountainous shores stand out clearly on the distant horizon.

It's about 700 miles from Rijeka, where I was last Sunday, and I took it in leisurely style, via overnight stops in steaming hot Zagreb (and some very nice fried Calamari in an old haunt there) and in a beautiful woodland hotel outside Kragujevac, which was filled, of all things, with an Irish television company making a series about the building of the Titanic. Er, Serbia was clearly an obvious choice to make that, then. Apparently it's boom time in the movies in the former Communist countries; the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Serbia are all vying hard to attract film makers via a series of cashback and tax free incentives. there was also a large party of elderly Italian men making the pilgrimage to Kragujevac from Italy, in their little Zastava Fiça cars- they made a very noisy and slow moving, if entertaining, convoy.

Whilst the EU may have been celebrating the fall of borders since the end of Marxism-Leninism, in this part of the world they've been going up in the last twenty years. Had I done this journey in 1989, I could have driven from the Austrian border to here, without once being asked to show a passport. I've had to produce it four times in the last week, with the Serb and Macedonian borders being particularly niggly affairs, owing to the need to buy car insurance. No UK insurer will cover this part of the world (presumably there isn't enough money in it, and the accident rate is high) so I had to part with cash in order to receive a dubious piece of slippy telex paper in Cyrillic writing, in both countries.

A stone-faced insurance agent girned, huffed and puffed over my card for half an hour on entry into Serbia; in Macedonia, I had to leave the car at the border, and take a taxi into the dusty border town of Kumanovo, in order to withdraw cash and go back to the border to get my bit of paper. The facility to pay by card does not exist at the Macedonian border, nor can you get Macedonian denar anywhere but Macedonia, so it was either take the cab or go back into Serbia. The ride was very Butlins; an amiable, animated and genuinely psychotic unlicensed taxi driver got to Kumanovo in 15 minutes, largely by driving his ailing Fiat Uno at 120km/h on the wrong side of the road. There was a rather uncomfortable "chicken" moment, as we overtook a slow moving convoy and found ourselves head on with a big Polish articulated lorry; we abhorted that with about 15 seconds to spare, amidst a feline screech of balding tyres and an elephantine trumpet on the horn of the juggernaut.

A quick photo stop, 20 miles north of Ohrid

 These alarms aside, the roads outside of the towns are much quieter than I'd expected. There was quite a bit of roadkill in Serbia; a dead sheep stinking and rotting in the mid-day sun; various cats and Alsatians, guts everywhere, having met their end at night-time. It was intensely hot, and dusty; two Serb women, in headscarves, had to turn their back at the side of the road as they were enevloped in a huge cloud of dust by a passing lorry. On two occasions I saw horse-and-carts being driven over motorway bridges (presumably a good way of cutting out the seemingly endless motorway tolls in this part of the world). The Serb landscape, dotted with red-roofed white farmhouses and small towns, was baking; yellow, green, and parched.

Through Mavrovo National Park, Macedonia

From Skopje, the Macedonian capital, the road skirts the base of the Sar Planina mountains, and down through Mavrovo National Park. The road down to Ohrid is easily the most beautiful and captivating scenery I've seen yet. After Skopje, the landscape is lush, green, sweltering; the road to Ohrid is like a B-road in Highland Perthshire; narrow, steep inclines, very tight corners, then dizzying descents; deep valleys, steep inclines, long cool shadows cast by thick deciduous woods, also the feeling of being very remote and cut off, save for the occasional hamlet. In bleaker moments in my last job, I'd toyed with the idea of sneaking off down here, with nothing more than a Lada Niva 4 x 4, a big Sarplaninac dog, and a rifle for company. I'm sure my art books would have made a good winter soup, or could at least be sold for glue.

If you ever see me rolling in one of these, with a dog the size of a small bear in the passenger seat, you'll know I've tired of life

Ohrid itself is a very lively town. The streets are packed with folk eighteen hours a day; the many small supermarkets, pubs and souvenir shops never seem to close; the main Boulevar Turisticka is car-choked mayhem at peak times, with elderly Yugos honking irritably at pedestrians and scooters, and accelerating off with a trademark asthmatic rasp from the exhaust. The main pedestrianised shopping street, Bul Makedonski Prosvetiteli, is also the artery to the lake, where everyone goes at night, and to the winding Car Samuel, which leads to all the pubs and nightclubs. My hostel is just off Turisticka and everything is a ten minute walk away.

However, I'm going to go and see some more first, before writing down my impressions of four days here, later tonight.

Mavrovo shines emerald-like in the late afternoon sun