Almaty is one of the greenest cities I’ve seen, and I mean green in the old-fashioned not the eco-friendly sense. The architecture is more functional than aesthetically pleasing: modernist Soviet structures with all the finesse of giant concrete Lego blocks host public and residential life while glass towers built on petrodollars house capitalist enterprises that […]
Once Europe’s longest pedestrianized street, Nicosia’s Ladras Street has been transformed by the so-called Green Line that divides the city. The street’s traditional Cypriot life has been replaced by typical European retail chains, yet the requirement to show a passport to proceed hints at a deeper division. Despite attempts to bridge the cultural and religious divide, political tensions remain high; the city still bears the physical and emotional scars of the Turkish invasion of 1974, with no realistic end in sight.
The last time I was in Skopje, I had come to persuade the Macedonian interior minister to sign up to a trans-Balkan action plan for tackling organised crime to be launched at a ministerial conference in London. This time, many years on, the only crimes in evidence were a most curious and incongruous collection of […]
I cannot claim it to be universal law, but I often find the friendliness and hospitality of a country’s inhabitants to be inversely proportionate to their recent troubles. So it was when I snuck behind Burma’s iron curtain in 2005 where, despite (or because of) the brutal military rule, the locals were overjoyed to see […]
Arriving into Kotor by night, dizzy from sharp turns around the shores of the narrow, fjord-like bay that winds inland from the Adriatic, I was puzzled to see a yellow halo hanging overhead. At daybreak, the mystery was soon solved: the ‘halo’ became gravity-defying fortifications slung down the steep mountainside behind town from a small […]
Dubrovnik is sometimes described as a “living museum”, where its people live alongside one of Europe’s most stunning medieval walled cities. Naturally, locals commuting to work, doing the school run or their weekly shop may seldom pause to admire the finer points of the old town’s baroque architecture or even its picturesque location, squashed between […]
There can be few places where the scars of the Bosnian War remain so evident today: buildings pocked with bullet holes, split by shells or shorn of their roofs, and the quaint old town, with its iconic medieval bridge, looks as sparkling new as a Vegas imitation. Of course, the immediate aftermath of the Bosnian […]
The polished marble of Tito’s tomb is as flawless as his legacy in the eyes of those Yugoslavia nostalgics who are still sprinkled liberally across the lands of the former Socialist Federal Republic. The tomb is set within an oasis of tranquillity, flanked by lush vegetation within a mausoleum that in turn nestles within genteel […]
Visiting Sarajevo in mid-winter may mean that your toes go numb and your cheeks flush with the cold, but the snow-covered mountains form a magical backdrop for exploring this fascinating city: for a stroll across the triple-arched stone bridge opposite where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot, triggering the chain of events that led to WWI; […]
Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia may have been the most magnificent orthodox basilica in the Byzantine Empire, crowned with a stunning dome centuries before they were used in the western Catholic church, and subsequently one of the most important mosques in the Ottoman Empire, but in recent years felines have stolen some of the limelight. Gli, a […]
Nomad Scribe 