DAY 85 - TUZI TO PODGORICA: 15 MILES (30,000 STEPS)

Uncertain arrival in Montenegro

14^th July, 2011

15 Miles (Total: 814.2 miles)  30,000 (Total: 1,561,491 steps)

“Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.” Karl Von Clausewitz

I crossed into Montenegro confident that I would find accommodation. I walked until it was dark through a beautiful nature reserve, but there were no signs of life. Struggling on in hope, I saw the light of Tuzi in the distance and knew that if I could make it there, then I would find a bed for the night. I arrived in Tuzi, which was alive with the sound of music and a string of cafes’ and bars. I went into three cafes’ that looked reasonable to ask for rooms—they had none. I asked if they knew of any and the reply was “no”—only Podgorica.

A taxi driver stopped and asked me if I needed a lift to Podgorica. I asked how much and he responded 10 euros; he then told me that he knew of accommodation too which was only twenty euros.  I thought that my luck was in. He drove me to the bus station and then introduced me to another man who did not speak English and he said he would take me to the accommodation. I was desperate for rest, but I sensed that all was not as it seemed and so I said that it was okay, I would make my own plans and gave the taxi driver a 20 euro note and held my hand out for the change.  He refused and said the fare was only 10 euros if I took accommodation and it was actually 20 euros.  I said to him that he knew all to well that he had said 10 euros before he even mentioned accommodation, but he just walked off back into the car and he was off. I have to say that I think it is the exception, rather than the rule, that I have not been ripped off when using taxis and the only two rules I can think of to try and minimise the risks are: 1. Insist that the metre is running and 2. Always give the exact fare, don’t expect change.

It was about 9:30pm and I wandered down towards what I thought was the centre of the town and found a cafe that had wi-fi. I ordered a coffee and chocolate ice-cream. In my Inbox I found a contact in Podgorica called Sinisa Nadavdian who worked for an NGO. I called Sinisa who was in a meeting, but called me back and immediately offered to come and collect me and take me to his office where there was a bed and I could rest. I was so grateful for yet another ‘angel’ to come and rescue me at a time of need. As an added bonus, the office was close to a shop where at 10:30pm they started unloading fresh bread from the oven and they also have Coke Zero. It had been a tough day but it ended on a bit of a high.

The next morning, I was contacted by Ivan Vukcevic, an extremely helpful and efficient official in the British Embassy in Montenegro, who had organised a press conference for me the following day.  I explained that I needed to walk to and from Tuzi in order to make up for a deficit that I had incurred between Koplik and the border where I had been unable to find accommodation. Ivan met me on the road up to Tuzi and gave me a very helpful update on current issues and possible questions in the region. This was very much needed as I hadn’t done any swotting up on Montenegro and the only thing I knew, was that they were in England’s qualifying group for the European Championships and had held England to a goalless draw at Wembley last year. The press conference seemed to go well and, as usual, journalists seemed surprised that the Olympic Truce actually existed as an instrument of the UN and that the truce was not only part of the ancient Olympics, it was the point of the ancient Olympics.

That evening Sinisa invited me to go with him to one of the two refugee camps on the outskirts Podgorica in which he worked. Both refugee camps were for refugees from the Kosovan War; one is for Romany Gypsies. We arrived at the camp on foot and it was like a scene from Gaza, with masses of shelters with rusting corrugated iron roofs, and walks built from scraps of wood and hardboard. The camp was teeming with young children at play. It was a visually compelling place and yet I somehow felt that it would be irreverent to take out my camera because the people there actually had incredible dignity and joy. They were so hospitable and welcoming, inviting us in and offering food and drink. I thought of my frustrations, trying to find accommodation and the vulnerability one feels when one is homeless and at the mercy of people who wish to exploit that vulnerability.  My heart went out to them, and for Sinisa, who felt called through his Christian Faith to serve these people.

Over a drink that night in a local bar I talked to Sinisa about his motivation for serving in such a difficult area.  He told me how he, as a Bosnian Serb, was himself was a refugee from the Bosnian War, so he felt he could relate to these people and understand them as they sought to make a living and in a strange land. As I reflected on those first few hours in Montenegro and contrasted the reactions of Sinisa and the taxi driver, I realised that the difference between them is summed up in one word ‘empathy’.

DAY 81 - LEZHE TO SHKODER: 24.1 MILES (48,200 STEPS)

Albania’s Dark Secret

11^th July, 2011

24.1 Miles (Total: 778.9 miles)  48,200 (Total: 1,490,891 steps)

‘An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.’ Mahatma Gandhi

I set off early on a very long and hard days walk, which almost ended with another bout of heat exhaustion. I arrived in Shkoder, late afternoon, and for some reason felt a distinct unease in the place. Many men I passed on the street would stare, eye to eye, without a smile or refuse to acknowledge my smile or greeting. In at least three cases, men spat on the ground in front of me—I was later assured this was not personal, as some men would spit on the ground everywhere. I checked in to the Razafa Hotel, an old Soviet style hotel, but great value at 15 euros right in the centre of the town.

That evening I met with Elona Prroj, who was to lift the veil on a dark secret about the northern parts of Albania. The secret was blood feuds. It sounds like something from the dark ages, but it is estimated that today as many as 1650 Albanian families are in hiding because of blood feuds. The blood feud is part of a system of ‘justice’ practiced in the rural areas and based upon a 500-year-old Canon of law called ‘Kanuni I Leke Dukagjinit’. The ‘Kanun’, as it is known, lays down the basis for seeking revenge for blood spilled. So, if a member of one family is killed by a member of another family, then the ‘law’ not only permits the grieving family to take a male life from perpetrators family, it tells them that their family can have no honour until the blood is avenged.

As the blood is avenged, then of course the avenged blood must be avenged by the other family, and so the cycle of violence goes on and on. The consequence is that when a family is ‘in blood’, in other words awaiting vengeance, then they all become prisoners in their own home—given that the blood feud can extend to cousins, then there can often be twenty males who are in self-imprisonment.

Now when I was in Tirana claims of the existence of blood feuds was often dismissed as mere folk lore, but I had reason to think again. The reason was that this story was being told to me, over a coffee on a balcony high above the city of Shkoder, by strikingly beautiful young lady named Elona Prroj.  Elona has established a charity called ‘Trapoya’, which works supplying food and counselling to families ‘in blood’. Elona spoke perfect English and was surrounded by members of her family and church while she told me of the events six years ago when an uncle of her husband had shot an off-duty police officer during a row in a restaurant.  Within days the uncle had fled into the mountains—some of the villages do not have any road access – and twenty-four male members of the uncles’ family went into hiding.

Elona’s husband, Dritan, was a church pastor in Shkoder and had resisted calls to go into hiding because he wanted to serve members of the church; for five years he lived with constant threats on his life and two attempts. Then in November 2010, a young man gunned him down in the street outside of his church when he was on his way to collect his two young children. The courage of this family was incredible, but the grace in first publicly forgiving the assassin of her husband, so as not to prolong the feud into another bloody round, then to devote her life to serving families who are under a similar threat.

The encounter with Elona had a deep and profound effect – some enlightening and some mystifying:

We discussed how the Olympic Truce, or simply the concept of truce, could be used to try and break the cycle of violence. I told Elona how the original truce was instigated to allow fighting men to lay down their arms and pursue peace without looking weak because they were competing in ‘manly’ sporting games. The key concept was that if you could have a truce for a few days, then it meant that peace was possible and could be tried for longer.

I realised that the aggressiveness that I encountered on my way into to Shkoder, was actually expressions of people living under a dark fear, not so much of the blood feud, but more of losing face and honour. I wanted to shout from the balcony, “your honour is not worth a single drop of anyone’s blood”. In some ways it would be understandable if the blood feud extended to the uncle who had killed the young man six years early, but to make entirely innocent people the target of vengeance is a demonic blood lust.

This practice of blood feuds and the essential restoration of ‘family honour’, could partially explain the propensity of conflicts and brutality of conflicts in the Balkans.

The more I thought I wondered whether these people were actually that different to perpetrators of gang violence in London or terrorist activities in Northern Ireland. At stake seems less the issue and more the need to restore honour for fear of looking weak to your opponents or supporters.

I reflected on a great weakness of Albanian culture, in that is that it is male dominated—the absence of women from what might be called the public square and the town square. Albanian town centres are filled with men drinking endless cups of coffee, women are virtually invisible and certainly when it comes to politics and business. The promotion of women in cultures such as Albania is not a matter of political correctness, it is a matter of moderating the testosterone driven macho-ness which is so fearful of looking weak, that it will perpetrate unspeakable acts of wickedness against the sons of mothers.

There was one other aspect of this encounter that I found most troubling.  It was pointed out to me separately that the Kanun was largely a code for Christians, who had fled to the hills following the invasion of Otterman Turks and their requirement of conversion to Islam. They further pointed out, that the Kanun was justified because there is a strong avenging of blood theme that runs through the pages of the Judeo-Christian faith. Jesus was the ‘final blood sacrifice to pay the price of our sin’. Yet this was for an all-loving God, who demanded blood satisfaction from an innocent for the rebellion of the guilty. Yet, Jesus said: ‘  ³⁸ “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’^[h] 39 But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.” (Matthew chapter 5) Who says “Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you” (ibid) and whose final request from the cross of crucifixion was “Forgive them father for they know not what they do”?

To begin to counter the evil of the blood feuds one needs not look through the pages of the Kanun, nor even of the bible, but to simply look at the example of Elona Prroj and her response to being brutally and undeservedly robbed of a good and innocent man whom she loved. For through Elona’s response, we see the triumph of love over hate, hope over fear and light over darkness and catch a glimpse of the true nature of the person to whom she and Dritan devoted their lives to following.

DAY 79 - MAMURRAS TO LEZHE: 18.3 MILES (36,600 STEPS)

A Tale of Two Heroes

“Should you seek great things for yourself? Seek them not.” Jeremiah 45:5, NIV

Statue of Mother Theresa at Tirana airport Albania has two great heroes—Mother Theresa who was in fact Kosovan and born in Skopje, Macedonia, and Skanderbeg who was buried in Lezhe.

Skanderbeg was a warrior king in the classical mold—a brilliant military strategist, wily political operator, and brutal despot. In 1444 he formed the League of Lezhe to challenge the Ottoman Empire. Skanderbeg was an educated man of noble stock. From his fortress at Kruje he managed to unite the Albanian princes and be a thorn in the side of the Ottoman Turks and frustrate their advances in Western Europe—especially the northern city-states of Italy.

Over a period of twenty years, he was victorious in twenty battles and withstood three sieges of Kruje. In some ways these ancient military leaders can be respected because they didn’t sit in short sleeves in air conditioned situation rooms, thousands of miles away from the battlefield, watching events unfold on HD flat screen TVs, whilst sipping cups of filter coffee before giving permission for satellite guides missiles to be unleashed against the enemy.

Skanderbeg monument, LezheIn Skanderbeg’s time, to commit to battle was to lead your forces onto the battlefield yourself and experience the utter carnage and arbitrary slaughter at first hand. One wonders today, if we would see quite so many military engagements, if our political commanders, or their family members, were required to personally lead their military forces onto the battlefield and look their opponents in the eye. Back to Skanderbeg in the battlefield—to merely survive so many battles was deemed to be proof that the ‘Gods were on your side’ and so the legend would grow. It is claimed that he had killed three thousand Turks with his own hands. He survived the slings and arrows of his opponents on the battlefield until the age of sixty-three and fell victim to a mosquito bite and died of malaria. After his death the kingdoms of Albania came under the protection of the powerful city-states of Naples and Venice as a mark of their gratitude for his thwarting of Ottoman expansion.

Mother Theresa–Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, was born in the Ottoman Empire in 1910 and at the age of eighteen decided to become a nun, leaving her native Albania (following the Treaty of London in 1912, Skopje was part of Albania) and went to Ireland to join the Sisters of Loreto at Loreto Abbey in the southern suburbs of Ireland—here she learned English and trained as a teacher. The Sisters of Loreto had a mission school in India and soon Teresa (named after Theresa of Lisieux—parton saint of missionaries following her vows) went to become a teacher and later headmistress of Loreto Convent School in Calcutta. Challenged by the effects of the Bengal Famine in 1943, she decided to leave the relative comfort of the convent, and to devote herself to the service of poorest of the poor by living among them. Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity and the mission statement she wrote, stated that the work of the Order was: “To care for the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone.” It is clear from her early diary entries that this was far from an easy decision, as she had no income and needed to beg for supplies and for accommodation. The vulnerability she experienced during these personal times of poverty, created within her an empathy, an understanding of what it meant to be poor and laid the spiritual foundations for a remarkable work.

It started with a handful of nuns and today has over 4,000, still delivering life saving and life dignifying care—what a legacy. On my journey through Albania, Kosova and Montenegro, I have lost count of the number of cathedrals which have been dedicated to the memory of this ‘sister of the poor’. In an age in which people crave attention and accumulation of the vestiges of power, she turned her back on them all. The more she rejected the material and political trappings of power, the more she accumulated a far greater moral power based upon love of humanity.

Skanderbeg may have slain 3000, but Mother Teresa must have saved hundreds of thousands. Skanderbeg may have accumulated vast wealth and lands, Mother Teresa gave everything she had away to the poor. Skandebeg was resplendent in his armour and flowing hair, Mother Teresa was small in stature and wore a simple white sari. Skanderbeg pursued power, Mother teresa pursued people. Albania may have two national heroes, but only one is universally known and revered outside its borders—there is a reason for that, and there is a lesson in that.