You’d be quite right in thinking that this isn’t part two of our journey to Szczecin in Poland. And rather than have you looking for it, or wondering whether I’ve deleted the subtitle of the previous post and therefore the obligation to write a follow-up, I’ll confess to not having written it. Not yet anyways. Much of [...]
Archive for the ‘Balkans’ Category
Glimpsed, In Passing: 2011
Posted in Balkans, Nature, Photography, Travel, tagged 2011, life, Nature, photography, travel on December 28, 2011 | 29 Comments »
The Circumference of a Second
Posted in Balkans, Birds, Geology, Insects, Landscape, Nature, Prespa, Wildflowers, Writing, tagged bagworm moth, environment, eternity, Henry Vaughan, Landscape, Nature, nightjar, perception, photography, poetry, Prespa, Wild Apples, wild flowers, writing on June 24, 2011 | 24 Comments »
To listen to an audio version of ‘The Circumference of a Second’ please press the play button. for Dimitris Noulis Sometimes just a few words can transport us. A friend had emailed me the first line of a 17th century poem by Henry Vaughan, and I found myself reading it over and over: I saw [...]
The Light of Birds, Evros Delta
Posted in Balkans, Birds, Landscape, Nature, Travel, Wetlands, tagged birds, environment, Evros Delta, memory, migration, Nature, photography, quality of light, spring migration on May 28, 2011 | 28 Comments »
To listen to an audio version of ‘The Light of Birds’ please click on the play button. They’re returning, wave after wave of them spilling over the delta of the Evros River. The sky is streaked with sharp-winged falcons, with storks whitening the meadows when they descend, with flocks of ibis that close like black umbrellas on [...]
The Karst Country
Posted in Balkans, History, Landscape, Photography, Prespa, Writing, tagged birds, deep time, journal, karst, limestone, Nature, photography, Prespa, Terrain.org, wind turbines, writing on March 26, 2011 | 12 Comments »
Some of you reading Notes from Near and Far may remember that Julia and I have been working in the hills high above the Prespa Lakes monitoring birds as part of an environmental assessment for a proposed wind farm. It is there that I had the good fortune to meet Stavros, an Albanian shepherd who plays the flute [...]
Glimpsed, In Passing
Posted in Balkans, Butterflies and Moths, Landscape, Prespa, Wildflowers, tagged Albania, cardinal butterfly, crocus, fire salamander, FYROM, Nature, photography, Prespa, V.S. Pritchett on December 28, 2010 | 18 Comments »
As the year wanes I’d like to mark its end with a few photographs. While place can be dense with the layers of our living, with the accumulated histories of wild creatures, cultures and faiths, the tightly knit webs of ecosystems or urban architecture, sometimes we’re afforded merely a glimpse of it. These images are such glances. Photographs remind me of [...]
The Long Ridge Down
Posted in Architecture, Balkans, History, Landscape, Travel, tagged Alexei Slav, Balkans, Bulgaria, churches, Melnik, monasteries, Pirin Mountains, trade routes, travel, wine, Winston Churchill on November 2, 2010 | 15 Comments »
Empires of any kind eventually slide, having risen within the shifting and fickle orbit of political, social, economic and religious realities. It’s in the nature of things to fade so that what once seemed eternal exists only as memory, or as a scattering of stones. The traces mark the land with ruins and clues, half-hidden or submerged, [...]
Enduring Time
Posted in Architecture, Balkans, History, Travel, Urban, tagged Arabati Baba Bektasi Tekke, Balkans, Bektasi, dervishes, Ottoman empire, Painted Mosque, Sufism, Tetovo, travel on May 22, 2010 | 10 Comments »
Two things were of particular interest to me when we travelled to Tetovo in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and they both concerned longevity. While one was a religious building that had withstood a devastating 17th century fire, armed ethnic conflict and the changing fortunes of shifting political borders, the other was a religious [...]
Welcome
My essay, Faith in a Forgotten Place, has won the 2011 Terrain.org Nonfiction Award. You can read it here!
Julian Hoffman is a writer living beside the Prespa Lakes in northern Greece. Notes from Near and Far is his blog on the nature of place.
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