After five weeks in Serbia, I'm back in Vidin again. I came back the day after the massive Belgrade protest two weeks ago, with 26 rolls of film in a box in my duffel bag because I was too worried about parcel inspection at either the Novi Sad or Belgrade post office to risk shipping it out from there, and decided to bring it across the border by bus and then mail it from Bulgaria instead. The bulk of the pictures are not from the protests, actually, but given that Serbian border police stopped Croatian journalists from entering to report from the capital, I didn't want to tempt suspicions by showing up at the post office with a boxful of exposed film immediately after the largest protest in Serbia in at least 25 years. In my paranoia, I didn't fully relax until through the border with the possibility of any exit-inspection (who knows?) behind us. It is remarkable how little reading about this sort of political climate affects you, versus how immediately it begins to work on your mind once you're—even as an interloper—within it.
If you, reading this, are not one of the several very kind people I'm truly grateful to have met at the Belgrade protest, or the earlier rallies, chances are now good, since the events of the 15th, that you've nonetheless heard in the media something of the movement currently taking place in Serbia. If you haven't, and especially if you're living in the United States, I urge you to read or watch some of the coverage that's been published/broadcast in major international media in the last couple of weeks. The Serbian people are making an example to the world.
Vidin, on the other hand—and much as it did all winter—feels outside of time. Except that the seasons are turning. I came specifically in curiosity about how that would register here, what the emergence of spring might look like in a place I've only ever seen in winter. There have been plum blossoms everywhere, and little river-cruise ships occasionally at port, and the days are longer, and fuller with birdsong, but the same insistent quiet and stillness pervades. After the restless currents nearly always present wherever I went in Serbia, I realized a good part of the stillness here owes to the tranquility of the air itself, how remarkably inert it often is.
Or maybe that's just what's manifest. So much else here seems suspended, too. Peter in his makeshift campsite amid the ruined foundations of some demolished and forgotten building, in a patch of forest beside the railroad tracks, explains that it's the birds who spread the plum seeds all over town, the birds to thank for the blossoms everywhere, as he brews cottonwood tea in a metal pail slung above the open fire. I tell him about what's happening in Serbia. He's been there, traveled the country on foot and was grateful to the police for not giving him any trouble about it, remembers Belgrade's beautiful architecture. The waterfront is changing fast, I tell him, they call it Little Dubai.
Nothing changes along this part of the river, he says. Most especially not the people. The world roils itself without and we are still as ever fishing on the Danube.
March 31 2025