Somewhere in the noughties So I was on Potsdamer Straße after boxing, sitting in a Moroccan shisha bar, smoking a water pipe and drinking a Turkish tea with a shot of lemon. Turks, Arabs, Germans, Africans walked by dragging their kids in tow. I had been sitting here for a couple of weeks now after boxing and I was gradually beginning to see the same faces – locals ...
It was 2004, and I decided to approach the Balkans from another end, this time through Bosnia. As I set forth from Berlin, I had a wavering vision of minarets and the old Turkish Baščaršija dreaming of Istanbul. I was impressed by the Bosnian notebooks of weird eastern motifs and secret Muslim villages of Austrian artist and novelist, Alfred Kubin. Prior to ...
How did it come about that your English is so perfect? I don’t know. I picked it up over the years. I worked for the British military service in Croatia. And before that, I worked for UNPROFOR, and then I worked for the European Commission for twelve years. So basically, it was the official language. You speak with a very ...
One Friday not long ago I met with Ero Behrić and Alen Hebilović – two erstwhile figures in Berlin’s Balkan party scene – in a Turkish café on Oranien Straße, half an hour before cuma – Friday prayers – at the Bosnian mosque on Adalbert Straße near Kotti. They always had cuma at two o’clock at the Bosnian mosque, which was a convenient thing for ...