Amin al-Husseini. Related on the female side to Yasser Arafat, former leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, revered by...

GAVRILO PRINCIP is famous for Gavrila Princip Street in Belgrade, home to my favourite restaurant Zavičaj's, where I have enjoyed three times now the best craft sausage, roast potatoes, cabbage salad, mustard and a memorable house red. GAVRILO PRINCIP is also famous for assassinating, in Sarajevo Bosnia, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and starting World War One. "Assassinate" is too strong a word. I believe he was provoked. The under

‘”On the morning of Palm Sunday, while children slept their innocent sleep and the church bells were ringing for prayer to God, the German aeroplanes without warning let fall a rain of bombs on this historic town”’. So wrote King Peter of Yugoslavia after the bombing of Belgrade 6th April 1941. ‘The King went on to describe the terror of the women and children who were machine-gunned as they fled from their homes by low-flying planes.’ (1) Hitler termed this invasion Operatio

‘You who burned my house and killed my child, who shelters beneath a foreign wing, a traitor who accepts a salary from the enemy! Did you...

December 1941: Fleeing the German destruction of Užice in Serbia, Tito and the Partisans crossed the River Drina in winter, climbed the mountains of Bosnia on the other side, and walked through the forests. Bosnia Herzegovina is a very mountainous country. In winter it is snow bound. As someone who has driven through Bosnia in the snow, I have difficulty understanding why the Nazis thought that they could successfully invade the country. Even today, the r

Komiža, Vis - port of the Partisan and Allied fleet September 1943 – Fascist Italy capitulates to the Allies. Nazi Germany invades the...

‘Despite his experiences at Drvar, Tito had not lost his liking for caves,’ wrote Fitzroy Maclean, Churchill’s liaison officer with the Yugoslav Partisans. Less than a fortnight after his dramatic rescue from a cave near Drvar in Bosnia during Operation Rösselsprung, Tito installed himself in yet another cave halfway up yet another mountain on the island of Vis, three hours east of Split on the Croatian coast. At this time, Vis remained the only island in the Adriatic unoccup

Some years ago, I was chatting at work with an Arab woman from Egypt when the topic of democracy came up. ‘Arabs can’t do democracy,’ she...

My father was Irish, English and German. My mother had Italian, Venetian, Slovenian and Croatian/Montenegrin grandparents. After World...

The BALKAN ESSAYS of Hubert Butler The Irish Pages Press, 2016 I bought Hubert Butler’s Balkan Essays specifically to read The Artuković File. Naturally, I finished it first but after I had read everything else, Butler’s effect of understated horror was just as strong. In the restrained style of the scholar, he allows the reader to create his own vision of Croatia during World War 2. The writing is beautiful but unimpassioned, its

Hats off to Slovenian author Goran Vojnović! I have just finished reading his best-selling novel Yugoslavia, My Fatherland which he...