It was still dark as I walked down Petrarkija Street towards the Music Academy, disoriented and confused in the early-March Sarajevo morning. From the bell tower of the cathedral, right around the corner, six o’clock rang out. With the last toll of the church bell, the irritating sound of a call pierced my sleepy mind.
“Hey, where are you?” Rada sounded angry.
I glanced at my phone: 6.02am. Damn cathedral. Had God slept in this morning too?
“What’s the problem? I’m only two minutes late!” I said, getting angry myself.
At that moment I saw her – right at the corner of Štadler and Pehlivanuša, exactly where we’d agreed, squatting in front of her car. She spotted me too. We both put our phones down. “Come on, hurry up!” she called to me.
Rada doesn’t like it when her passengers are late. And not because she can’t be patient. When her job requires patience, she will wait, for hours if she has to. But not today. Rada was on a very tight schedule. At 6.05am, just above Parkuša, we picked up a package. At Dobrinja, 6.25am, a young guy was waiting for us, on his way to work in a hotel on the Albanian coast. Then at 6.30am, in the Mojmilo neighbourhood, across from the King Fahd mosque – the biggest in Sarajevo, a gift from Saudi Arabia – we picked up a doctor who often takes this ride. And then towards Pale, where we picked up Ivana, a programmer, who was heading to Belgrade for a work meeting and a family visit.
Rada knows that if I’m two, three or five minutes late, everyone else will need to wait at least that long, or perhaps longer, if we get caught at a traffic light. And Rada hates to make her passengers wait. The people awaiting her passengers, and the ones awaiting the packages Rada carries with her, which are usually no less important, also hate to wait. That day, above all, Rada wanted us to reach the Drina river and cross the border before traffic got bad, which would be at around 8.30am. If we failed, all these people would have had to wait a lot longer.
“You get it now, what the problem is?” she asked brusquely, as we blasted down Marshall Tito Street toward Marin Dvor. I was a bit ashamed. “But what are you gonna do? We’ll get there,” she said. “How are you? What’s new with you? How’s your mother?”
Since she started taking passengers between Sarajevo and Belgrade 20 years ago, Rada has been performing an additional function, working as part of an informal postal network. She transports anything anyone wants to send, as long as it’s legal and can fit in a car. And if it wasn’t for Rada, for many people this would be much more difficult. All across the former Yugoslavia, the Bosnian war created borders that cut through families and friendships and all other sorts of relationships (perhaps with the honourable exception of organised crime “families”); this was followed by a steady dissolving of infrastructure – roads, transport routes, bus lines, postal services – that once kept Yugoslavia together. It was almost as if someone wanted to make sure that we were all kept away from each other, inside our walled and increasingly homogeneous ethnic communities.
“One time a woman came up to me in Belgrade, she’d bought everything you can imagine,” Rada said. “She brings two huge sacks and asks, ‘Will there be enough room in the trunk?’ I take a look and on top of one of the sacks sits a giant bag of popcorn. Well, all right ma’am, I think to myself, do you really need to send the popcorn too? There’s popcorn in Sarajevo. But what can you do, she is sending it to her mother. We’ll find room.”
My bag was also full of packages to deliver to Belgrade. I was bringing a carton of Sarajevo’s Drina-brand cigarettes for a friend, and the night before I had been given an envelope with documents – what they were or who they were for I didn’t know, but it was important that they arrived in Belgrade as soon as possible – as well as a pouch full of some strange powder with big chunks and a coarse texture. The man who handed me the pouch said the name of the substance but I didn’t understand what he was saying. Then he repeated it. I still didn’t understand but I decided to pretend I had. Now I was wondering if it was legal. I hoped it was. He looked like an OK guy. The person who put us in touch also seemed OK. At any rate, better not to mention this to Rada. If there was room for the popcorn, there must be room for my weird powder.
I started my “job” as an unpaid mailman in autumn 2020, when I first began travelling between Belgrade in Serbia and Pristina in Kosovo so often that people started noticing (though, for people to notice, it’s enough that you’re travelling more often than, well, never.)
One day I got a call from a friend I hadn’t spoken with for a while, but who somehow knew about my recent travels. A family from Pristina was on vacation in Belgrade and their daughter had left her doll behind when they returned home. While the weather map on Radio Television of Serbia shows Pristina as part of Serbia, as far as the Serbian postal service is concerned, this city doesn’t exist, just like other places in Kosovo where Serbs aren’t the majority. Private delivery services are way too expensive. The only way the doll could reach Pristina was for somebody to take it with them.
“Would you mind doing that? It’s not urgent. But, actually it is. It’s her favourite doll.”
The next time, a request came from the other side: hey, do they still have that Skenderbeu drink? Please pack two for me, I really miss it. Then, in Pristina: it’s not easy to find film for cameras, and there’s that one shop in Belgrade where it’s not too expensive. Can you bring me some? A few months later, on the list of my successfully completed tasks were vinyl records by bands from Belgrade’s New Wave, a kilo of dried sausage, the keys to someone’s apartment, and books by Petrit Imami about the common history of Serbs and Albanians.
And that’s when I started noticing that almost all the personal exchanges between Kosovo and Serbia – between close family members, cousins and friends, between those who left, those who fled during the war, those who stayed and those who were caught somewhere in between – depended on three buses that ran day and night between Belgrade, Pristina and Prizren, and on the small group of people who travelled on these buses.
One afternoon in late May 2022, I was headed towards the hall of ticket counters in Belgrade’s bus station. My steps grew tighter; the narrow hallway between the counters and the departure platforms was packed with passengers, suitcases, shouts, rushing, confusion, hugs and kisses. Amid the commotion, my eyes were drawn to an old analogue station clock. The long white hands showed a calming sight: 3.49pm. I love it when I arrive early, even if it’s just one minute.
At that moment, my phone rang. “Where are you?” He didn’t sound angry but it did sound like he arrived before me, and on time. I started saying that I was early, but then I glanced at my phone: 3.52pm. Oh God.
We met at the entrance to the platform. We didn’t know each other but recognised each other easily. He was holding a large box with a synthesiser inside, a package I needed to deliver to a mutual friend.
“OK, that’s that,” I said, taking the box, and we parted ways. I was a mailman on a mission and I didn’t have time to waste on niceties. I ran to a counter and bought a ticket. Outside, at platform number four, the bus for Pristina was filling up. While the drivers in neat white shirts were hurriedly loading luggage, my attention was drawn to an old lady in black standing next to a giant plaid bag. It was so big, it was not clear how she got it here. She was patiently waiting in line. She smiled at me. We started talking.
“Where are you going in Kosovo?”
“I’m not travelling, son. I’m sending things to my family.”
I started to ask her what she was sending them, but one glance at the enormous Chinese-made bag answered my question. It was full of homemade food packed carefully into plastic ice-cream boxes and large glass jars. Are those stuffed vine leaves? I also saw an old plastic box of a brand of cheese from Sombor, wrapped in thick rubber bands so that whatever mystery it held, perhaps a salad, wouldn’t spill out during travel.
She told me her sister lives with her family in Gračanica, near Pristina. She hasn’t stayed with them since Covid broke out. She hopes to visit soon, perhaps next month, after some medical checkups.
“Do you often send things?”
“Not that often. They have food there, it’s not that they don’t. But they love it when I cook for them. Recently, my granddaughter celebrated her birthday. So, there is cake. It’s convenient this way, I just put it on the bus. Otherwise, it would be impossible.”
As I found out through several trips and dozens of conversations with people who send and receive things across the Balkans, it’s not all just an issue of food and its perishability. It is rather an issue of informal institutions being more reliable than the formal ones – if and when they at all exist.
Sitting with the drivers in the semi-dark of a roadside cafe with the longing name of Evropa in early summer 2022, I was trying to figure out what everyone was sending. Most of the travellers sat outside waiting for the signal for departure.
“What are people sending? Well, everything. Documents mostly,” said one driver, Afrim. “Paperwork for pensions up there, in Belgrade, for those who worked in firms before the war; for real estate, if somebody is selling something in Kosovo. Medicine. People also send money. Mobile phones, clothes. All types of stuff.”
“Do you sometimes experience any trouble?” I asked. Afrim gave me a sharp look. Maybe he thought I was a cop. His colleague Edin chipped in: “It happens sometimes that people don’t show up to pick up their things. Or they ask us to wait for them someplace else … How the hell am I supposed to wait?”
Sending packages by bus or taxi, by driver, friend or acquaintance, is one of the most functional social inventions in the Balkans. It’s as fast as the speed of a car or bus. And in a place where railway and airline connections have been all but destroyed or simply cancelled, it’s the fastest way to send or receive things.
One specific person – driver, friend or acquaintance – takes care of the delivery. It is a person you either know or have at least met, someone you’ve shaken hands with at some point and exchanged a few words. It seems in those 30 or 60 seconds a level of trust is built that is so much greater than it’s possible to establish with any postal service worker, hidden behind the counter with their promotional stock photos of yellow vans that always arrive on time.
Who would you trust more: a) a company with a slogan that guarantees your shipment will be delivered in the next 48 hours, and offers you the possibility to follow your shipment through a special code; or b) a driver who, when asked “When will it arrive, approximately?” – asked bashfully so as not to appear as if you are, God forbid, rushing him, because he has every right to get there whenever he wishes – first looks into the distance, inhales a smoke, and exhales: “It depends on the rush hour, but not before nine”? And they always give you a time that’s too early. Better for you to wait, than for the whole bus.
Somehow, for an astonishingly high number of people in the Balkans, the answer is b.
Then we get to the issue of pricing. When you send by mail, there are a number of relevant criteria: the weight of the object, its value, and the distance and speed of the delivery. Postal websites and applications are filled with detailed tables and calculations enabling you to estimate the price down to the cent. With a calculator or without one, it’s often quite high. But when you send it informally, that’s when you enter the field of a magical Balkan ritual, bounded by clear rules within which absolutely nothing is clear. When a friend or acquaintance takes a package, offering money for the service is a terrible insult. An unwritten rule says you invite the helper to a glass of juice or coffee, but discreetly, to make it look like you are inviting them because you really want to have a drink with them.
When it comes to bus drivers, things are a bit different. Every day, sometimes twice a day, they carry packages across borders, taking a risk (although, they often check what is inside; if it appears illegal, dangerous or easily breakable, they will refuse, no matter how much money they are offered). They carefully keep track of what they are carrying and for whom, and where people will await them. They write down names and phone numbers, call senders from dimly lit stops by the side of highways, arguing with people who are late or have simply forgotten to show up to pick up their packages.
In short, they expect you to pay them, and for good reason. But transporting things by bus isn’t quite standard, nor do the bus companies officially permit it, so there usually isn’t any official price list. It depends on what you’re sending, and sometimes on the mood of the driver, but some charge the equivalent of a full bus ticket, others a half fare. Others allow you to name your price.
And so we arrive at the precious social rule known as “However much you can give”. As with everything else in this region, the rule isn’t what it claims to be. On the surface, you are free to independently assess the value of the service. However, what you are actually assessing is the assessment of the other side of the transaction, that is, how much money will it take so the other person is not offended. That’s why, more often than not, you pay more than the service is really worth. All the same, it’s still cheaper than the postal service, and incomparably more interesting.
Last summer, it seemed that the days were gone when the Merdare border crossing was a place where you expected problems, either as a Serb at the Kosovo checkpoint or an Albanian at the Serbian checkpoint. Nevertheless, as we approached from Kuršumlija, on the Serbian side, the bus quietened down and the atmosphere became darker and tenser. There was a feeling of sinister anticipation. Perhaps the scenes of desolation all around us contributed to that. Empty fields, empty streets, empty houses. And a completely empty road.
Here and there, on signs along the road you see Albanian toponyms. But there have been no Albanians here for a long time. The call echoes through the bus in Serbian and Albanian: “Prepare your IDs!” In honour of the mutual non-recognition of Serbia and Kosovo, for Kosovar and Serbian citizens, passports are invalid here. First, the Serbian policeman entered. In dead silence, he collected our IDs and carefully sorted them in his palm, and then went out. After the check, the driver brought us our IDs back, but we got to keep them only for a minute, as it was now the Kosovar policeman that entered. The entire procedure was repeated.
All of a sudden, there was a problem. The customs officer was lingering around the trunk of the bus. He was arguing with the driver and showing him something. Passengers on the right side of the bus stared at him intently, and the left-side passengers stared intently at those on the right side because they couldn’t see the customs officer. What had he found? Would they let us through? Deeply buried fears rose to the surface. We knew anything was possible.
The driver shook his head. The customs officer also shook his head. He slammed the trunk door closed. We could all breathe again. We entered Kosovo. Now we begin seeing signs with Serbian toponyms, but no Serbs.
Back on my road trip with Rada, we were on a tight schedule but she allowed for a quick break at the petrol station because someone needed to go to the toilet. I used the opportunity to grab a cigarette, or rather, that was what I wanted to do when I realised I had none left. Luckily, I had a carton of Drina cigarettes that I’d brought to deliver to my friend Bojan in Belgrade. He wouldn’t mind.
Bojan belongs to a small group of journalists in Serbia who have been bravely and consistently writing about Serbian war crimes in Bosnia in the 1990s. Every week, links to articles arrive in my inbox that, I fear, almost no one reads. But Bojan isn’t giving up. He is currently working on a documentary about the Belgrade Circle, a not-so-small group of liberal intellectuals and peace activists that stood up against the war crimes of Slobodan Milošević’s regime in the early 90s. Thirty years later, not even a distant echo of their voices remains in Serbia’s political scene.
While we drove through Romanija, I felt like we were travelling through one of Bojan’s stories. We passed through the beautiful countryside of eastern Bosnia and saw road signs with some of the most horrible toponyms from the war, places that many in Serbia have only heard about from testimonies at the Hague, as symbols of massacres, rapes and ethnic cleansing.
Rada, a Serb refugee from Sarajevo, who fled the city at the start of the war, now lives in Pale, with a distinctly clear attitude about this topic: “We were lucky. Neither my family nor I were hurt by anyone, nor have we inflicted harm upon anyone.” If it were any different, I suspect that it would be impossible to do her job: “I went to Sarajevo immediately after the war. I have nothing to hide.”
Finally we reached the Drina river. “I used to smoke Yorks from Rovinj,” Bojan had told me, “until all ties were severed with Croatia in 1991, so I switched to Drinas.”
Bad call, Bojan – because the ties with Bosnia didn’t last long either. He started smoking them again in the early 2000s in Sarajevo. Bojan loves Sarajevo; sometimes he just disappears there and comes back more alive than ever.
Why the heck was I bringing him Drinas? Weren’t there any in Belgrade? Somehow, in March 2022 the 140-year-old Sarajevo tobacco factory, located in a country where almost a third of the adult population are passionate smokers, shut down. Old Drinas were still in stock though, and Bojan wanted to smoke them as long as they lasted. I wondered if we could claim the same thing for the Belgrade Circle. The anti-war movement in Serbia has broken down, and we have been using up old stocks of ideas for years. But they’re dwindling.
When we got to Belgrade, I searched for the person for whom the powder was destined. I found her in the inner courtyard of an old villa in the centre of the city. The street was packed with a hellish noon crowd, but in the yard, full of delicate red and yellow flowers, there was complete silence. Her name was Lula, and she was just like the villa in many ways: elegant, sad and turned inwards. “I haven’t been out at all in a long time,” she told me. “This is no longer my city.”
I delivered the letter and the bag. I decided not to enquire about the contents of the envelope. I assumed there was a reason that it was sealed. But I couldn’t bear to not ask about the bag of mysterious powder.
“Tarhana,” Lula smiled. “A soup mixture. My aunt Ešrefa from Travnik prepares this for me, and sends it through my nephew. They prepare it differently in Serbia. It’s good too, but I like hers.”
Lula had plenty to say about the packages that are sent between Belgrade and Sarajevo. Born in Sarajevo, she had been living in Belgrade since the end of the 60s. She’s a person who, immediately after the beginning of the Sarajevo siege, collected and shipped humanitarian aid to the besieged city. She struggled for every shipment to reach who it was intended for. And she fought for thousands of them, shipments and people. “When I see cardboard boxes today, I feel nauseous.”
I left her on the terrace of the old villa, observing the flowers, while she slowly chewed over the memory of a time when some resistance existed.
The last time I saw Rada, it was in the restaurant Kraljevo, not far away from a big parking lot on Sarajevska Street in Belgrade, where she usually picks up and drops off passengers. She had spent the whole day in the car and was very tired. She told me how she has been fainting lately. The other day, she could barely get in the car. But still, she transported her passengers and packages. She is receiving regular treatment now, she told me, and things will get better. It was a hot day. We ordered a light lunch, soup and cabbage salad. The tavern was empty and the waiter was bored, so he made inappropriate jokes. Rada charmingly ignored him.
“Anyway, I have a story for you,” she told me.
“In Sarajevo, there is this Bosnian woman, Mirsada. She had a husband and a son. And the son had a Serbian friend, Marko, who didn’t have parents. She liked him a lot. But that’s when the war started. She wondered what to do with him. Mirsada hid Marko in her house, so he wouldn’t get killed. She told me, ‘Rada, I kept him in the freezer. My child went off to the battlefield, and Marko was in the freezer.’
“She hid him until she found a person, somebody she could trust, so that she could get him into the territory of Republika Srpska, and then to Belgrade. And so, time goes by, and Marko becomes a very successful man. He starts a family, starts a business and everything goes flawlessly for him. And Mirsada, her husband dies, she stays with her son. And I don’t know the details, but somehow they got in touch with Marko. Imagine, after all these years …”
“And then,” Rada pauses, “then her son dies too. And Mirsada is left alone, and Marko becomes the only light in her life. Since then, since I’ve been working, he keeps sending her stuff. A bag of beans, peppers, walnuts, kajmak, a jar of honey. And he makes sure to send some money, 50 or 100 euros, but always with some food.
“So, I asked him once, ‘Marko, my boy, you buy this food, and she has to go out and collect it and carry it back up to her apartment – wouldn’t it be easier for you to send her the money so she can buy it herself?’ He tells me, ‘Rada, I tried doing that but she is happy when she gets that box of kajmak and she can say – look at what my dear Marko sent me!”
And that’s when I finally got it. It’s not things that travel, it’s people. And only when people can’t, do they send things. But even then, in actuality, it’s not things that travel – but people’s feelings.
Some names have been changed. This is an edited version of a piece originally published on Kosovo 2.0. It was a runner-up in the European Press Prize 2023. See europeanpressprize.com for the winners and other nominees. Distribution by Voxeurop syndication