The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans - By Simon Winchester Page 0,3

lived on these wide plains. I worked for the Guardian in those days, and I recall reading, sometime in the late eighties, reports of impassioned speeches being made in towns in this region called Kosovo, to which I reacted with interest, because I had once been there. The speeches seemed to be inflaming local tensions between such men as this, and such as those others who walked beside my car that afternoon, and whose mutual loathings had evidently been festering and fermenting for many years.

Later than evening we passed, almost unknowingly, through a town called Kosovo Polje, and drove by a bare expanse called Gazimestan. This was a place that became recognizable in the newspaper reports of a decade or so later—the infamous place where on June 28, 1989, in commemoration of a battle that had been fought (and lost) there against the Turks six hundred years before, a little-known Serbian leader named Slobodan Milosevic flew down from Belgrade to address a rally of more than a million of his Serbian brothers and sisters in which he warned of—indeed, say many historians, instigated—the violence that was then simmering and that would very soon erupt across the Balkans. His most inflammatory comment was this: “Six centuries later again we are in battles and quarrels. They are not armed battles, though such things should not be excluded yet [emphasis added].” I have always thought for so historically significant a piece of rhetoric, this was rather poor, banal in the extreme. Milosevic, a puffy-faced man who had hitherto been head of the national gas company, was clearly no Lincoln, no Churchill. Perhaps, to be charitable, it was simply the translation. And anyway, it clearly got results.

But no, I remember little of passing through Kosovo Polje, or the battlefield of Gazimestan, except for the name; and I remember almost nothing of the drearily utilitarian city of Pristina we came to a few miles farther on, other than it being a place of cinderblock apartments and shabby shacks and smoky factories, to which I imagined I would never return—but to which in fact I was fated to come back, more than twenty years later in very different, very much more dramatic circumstances.

I may not remember much of the place they called the Field of the Blackbirds, nor of Pristina town, nor of the four of us swinging south in the car once more onto the fast and wide road that had a European highway designation: E-65. But I do remember noticing that the these great plains were barred to the south and the west by ranges of impressive limestone mountains that shimmered blue in the afternoon heat; I do remember climbing into the southern range and passing through a spectacular gorge. I remember dark and smoky tunnels, lit only by a few fly-specked bulbs.

There was a railway track to the right, and small steam trains would chuff happily along the valley, letting off villagers at country stops that smelled of creosote and roses. Beside the tracks, kept in check by its steep banks, was the Lepenec River. It was all so very pretty—which made more shocking the sudden appearance, once we rounded a bend as we were coming out of the canyon, of a grim-looking factory, all chimneys and gushing yellow smoke. The road signs declared this to be the settlement—there was a scattering of small red-roofed houses for the workers—of General Jankovic, and I remember thinking that he could have done precious little of note in battle if he had only this obscure and smoky cement factory named for him.

I remember all that, and, most of all, I remember the water meadow that I saw quite suddenly appear in front of me, spread out invitingly, an obvious place to stop, to rest, to take in the view. This, I thought as I slowed the car, was a magnificent place.

It was quite silent, except for the soughing of the wind through the cypress trees. The grass was tall and waved invitingly in the eddies of breeze. The stream chuckled and bubbled southward, and large brown hawks whirled in the thermals above us. I spread the map out on the ground to check just where we were: I identified the river as the Lepenec, and the hills behind us on the west as the Sar Range, and the much grander mountain chain off to the southwest—very high peaks indeed, some of them still capped with tired and dirty-looking snow—seemed to be the Rudoka Mountains, behind which