Digital, Print, Radio, Video Journalist in Southeast Asia
Gaze across the pristine green hills of Trnovo and you’d be hard pressed to find a single sign of civilisation.
And that’s precisely the point.
A Dubai-based property developer sees this clearing on Mt. Bjelasnica – home to part of the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics – as a prime location to realise Bosnia’s biggest ever foreign investment: Buroj Ozone City.
Continue reading “Bosnia’s biggest foreign investment: Bonanza or threat?”
A Bulgarian trader in spare parts for buses has become a national celebrity after starting to patrol the Turkish border “hunting” for migrants. Many Bulgarians applaud his vigilante initiative, though others are deeply troubled.
“Bulgaria needs people like me, dignified Bulgarians, willing to defend their homeland,” says Dinko Valev, sipping a fresh-squeezed orange juice in a flashy cafe in his hometown, Yambol, 50km (30 miles) from Bulgaria’s border with Turkey. Continue reading “Bulgaria’s vigilante migrant ‘hunter’”
BELGRADE, Serbia — The tens of thousands of migrants who have flooded into the Balkans in recent weeks need food, water and shelter, just like the millions displaced by war the world over. But there is also one other thing they swear they cannot live without: a smartphone charging station.
“Every time I go to a new country, I buy a SIM card and activate the Internet and download the map to locate myself,” Osama Aljasem, a 32-year-old music teacher from Deir al-Zour, Syria, explained as he sat on a broken park bench in Belgrade, staring at his smartphone and plotting his next move into northern Europe.
Continue reading “A 21st-Century Migrant’s Essentials: Food, Shelter, Smartphone”
Skinned, squishy, and raw, sloshing around in a metal pan. Bull testicles are ugly. Buttery, brain-looking slime balls the size of papayas.
I find myself questioning my resolve, but they’re the reason I’m here in Lipovica, a farming village in eastern Serbia — I’m at the 13th Annual World Testicle Cooking Championship, commonly known as the Mudijada. Serbs have many options from which they could construct their national myth and global brand identity: international sporting success; rich and spicy home-distilled brandy usually made from plums, called rakija; tall, high-cheekboned women with severe and husky voices. So why testicles?
Continue reading “Notes from the 13th Annual World Testicle Cooking Championship”
One of Europe’s poorest countries wanted a road, so U.S. mega-contractor Bechtel sold it a $1.3 billion highway, with the backing of a powerful American ambassador. Funny thing is, the highway is barely being used—and the ambassador is now working for Bechtel.
Story by Matthew Brunwasser
Photographs by Matthew Lutton
Continue reading “Steamrolled: a special investigation into the diplomacy of doing business abroad”
Chalga music, a blend of Turkish rhythms, Balkan folk, and Europop, has become a polarizing force in the Bulgarian town of Dimitrovgrad, where many residents long for their socialist past
Bulgaria commemorates a murdered dissident — and takes a symbolic step toward reckoning with its communist past.
In the villages that nestle amid southern Bulgaria’s remote, scenically spectacular, economically underdeveloped Pirin and Rhodope Mountains, Pomaks—Bulgarian Muslims—are reclaiming their name. Marginalized under 45 years of communism, they saw Pomak become “a word you had to feel guilty about,” says Mehmed Boyukli, a leading Pomak analyst. Now, he says, “with the Internet, the term has become acceptable. It has become a symbol of all the cultural heritage we have preserved.” Continue reading “Reconnecting Cultures in the Balkans”
More than 100 legislators, government ministers, journalists and officials were blockaded inside the Bulgarian Parliament building late Tuesday night and into Wednesday, as the 40th day of largely peaceful street protests in Sofia, the capital, turned confrontational. Continue reading “Protests Trap Bulgarian MPs Inside Parliament”
In Turkey, Kurdish culture is having something of a Renaissance. Public expressions of Kurdish culture are now legal. Now a new cultural center has opened for traditional Kurdish story-tellers to practice their ancient art. Reporter Matthew Brunwasser sat in on a session.
Continue reading “Kurdish Dengbej Storytellers Revive Tradition In Turkey”
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