Dots on the Map

For every country my wife and I have visited together for the first time during our marriage, we have placed a yellow dot on a large wall map in our home.  We added six dots following our recent summer sabbatical to eight European countries.  However, more significant than the dots we added are the dots already on the map where the countries no longer exist…..at least as they were named and we saw them years ago.  Yugoslavia, for example.

To summarize a few recent of very many complicated changes in this region, Yugoslavia became a nation more completely titled the “Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes” at the end of World War I, was renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929, and was reconfigured at the end of World War II as the People’s Republic of Yugoslavia.

Since we visited in the early 1970’s and brought home fond feelings for the rural people we stopped to “talk” with as we drove through the countryside, the former Yugoslavia has undergone an orderly and somewhat peaceful period of autocratic leadership followed by tragic episodes of civil war and ethnic cleansing after the dictator’s death.

A current map of the region no longer shows a single nation consolidating the republics of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and The Former Yogoslav Republic of Macedonia.  In the place where this one nation was held together by Josip Broz Tito’s socialist rule from 1946 until his death in 1990, we now find six separate countries, and Kosovo as an autonomous area within Serbia.

I’m not sure now which of those countries we actually set foot in four decades ago.  And after all they have been through, I’m not sure any of those countries we did visit would look and feel now at all like they were before the physical destruction and human atrocities of the 1990’s.

JER