Holiday Read no. 4: _Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe_ by Kapka Kassabova

This book had me even before I turned the title page. The Balkans hold a place deep within me that I cannot even understand. We never made it that far south when we would travel to Yugoslavia. 

'The mountain has let you in. Now it won't let you out. '

Kassabova's writing has a magically realistic quality that makes me feel as if I have been pulled into the mountain with her.  I come to care deeply about the landscape and its people's stories, about the multilayered complexities of shifting priorities and politics of powers unseen.  The book reminds me to love the land when it calls to me, even when my physical person is not from there. 

I am a lighthouse I keep watch over, a lantern I carry on forward. I have been cursed and blessed with a lovely life, rich with textures and complexity, even at its most shallow points. Which ever direction I turn, the sea is before me, there is only my past behind and maybe not even that. No path, no village, no clear distraction. It is possible to exist between a wild sea and a wild land as both the harridan and saviour, one just has to remember that you're the one holding the key you're so frantically looking for in these moments. It isn't always something one can remember in the face of barbed wire, eery silence, open and veiled threats.  This book opens up so much of of land I have only allowed myself to wonder about. 

'You fall down and get up again, on your knees if you have to, like the oxen. We arrive naked and depart with empty hands. It's good practice, lest we forget.'