I visited Yugoslavia in 1978 as a tourist hoping for a good time; I returned twenty-one years later to a changed land.
Sarajevo, Mostar, Dubrovnik... the names are carved into the psyche of anyone who watched a news broadcast between 1991 and 1996. Zoe Bran visited these places long before the crises of the 1990's, and returned to try to make sense of what had happened in the intervening years - and why.
Zoe's compelling journey takes her from forward-looking Slovenia through beautiful but troubled Croatia, to the country most damaged by the conflict, Bosnia-Hercegovina. She explores the region's complex history and, as she delves into recent conflicts, lets those who lived through them tell their own stories. With compassion and objectivity, she asks what it is that sets apart one neighbour from another, and in almost every case receives the answer 'Tradition.'
In the Krajina region of Croatia, an elderly Serb man, home after enduring four years in a refugee camp in eastern Serbia, answered:
'We went to school together and married each other and then we fought. For what? For this?' He pointed at the almost empty landscape around him. 'No, it was for tradition... for traditions we hardly remember the beginnings of any more.'
