To listen to an audio version of 'A Family Affair' click the play button "All origins become mysterious if we search far enough into the past. And almost all peoples, when we look at their earliest origins, turn out to have come from somewhere else." -Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History A fierce north wind … Continue reading A Family Affair: Szczecin, pt.1
Tag: travel
Faith in a Forgotten Place
"Where there are borders, there are bridges." I'd been researching a cross-border eco-tourism project on the Albanian side of the lake when Myrsini Malakou, director of the Society for the Protection of Prespa, suddenly said this during an interview. Her words crystalized for me a vague idea that I'd been carrying around throughout the time I'd spent in … Continue reading Faith in a Forgotten Place
A Sort of Homecoming
And you know it's time to go Through the sleet and driving snow Across the fields of mourning Lights in the distance And you hunger for the time Time to heal, desire time - U2, 'A Sort of Homecoming' Whenever I monitor birds on the lower hills I pass what is left of the village. I stay … Continue reading A Sort of Homecoming
City of Glass and Other Dreams: Berlin, part 1
"Berlin is a city condemned always to become, never to be." - Karl Scheffler, 1910 Perhaps no other city has taken up as much imaginary space over the last century as Berlin. It is a city forever in flux, not in the gradual, accumulated ways of most urban spaces, but with sudden, violent reinventions. Berlin … Continue reading City of Glass and Other Dreams: Berlin, part 1
The Long Ridge Down
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, … Continue reading The Long Ridge Down
Julian Hoffman 