Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe

People die crossing borders, and sometimes just being near them. The lucky ones are reborn on the other side.

There are two kinds of religious experience. Experiential, when you personally have an ecstatic or mystical experience. And canonical, when someone tells you what to think and believe, and you bleat in agreement, moving with a large herd. Ancient cultures were all about the former. And all the troubles of the world today come from the latter.

if the mixing of peoples was the order of empires and the ‘unmixing of peoples’ the order of nation-states, what’s on the horizon?

History is written by the victors, they say, but it seems to me that history is written above all by those who weren’t there, which may be the same thing.

If you are true, your words will be true. An untrue person cannot say true words.

Something must be done!’ ‘It’s because you don’t live here,’ Blago snorted. ‘You still believe in justice.

communism was in a rush, it had no time for bourgeois things like the past or the environment.

Agonia: form the Greek agon, contest. The origin of agony is competition, struggle. To be in agony is to measure yourself against others, a Sisyphean task. Perhaps agony is the very definition of being in the world and playing by its rules.

If innocence is believing the world is a safe and just place. That summer I lost mine.

The money came in bundles tied with elastic bands, in exchange for the promise of a lorry ride across the border. In many cases, people were dumped off before they even reached the border, and so they were back to square one, back in Turkey, back in Ali’s Café, but this time without money. It was groundhog day, a Sisyphean sentence – to endlessly go up and down the airless corridor that never changed, though everything else changed. And never to arrive.

secret services arrived, I was fed up. I said, Enough already! I want my life back!

Socialist personality in German. In East Germany and the rest of the Soviet bloc, a prescribed set of attitudes and behaviours that confirmed you as politically correct. In theory, the socialist personality was a repository of moral rectitude and ‘class consciousness’. In practice, it was an embodiment of that long-suffering creature Homo sovieticus, and effectively meant not having a face, a name, or a destiny, unless it was the right one.

If Lyudmila could uncover Bastet, the two of them would unite and rule not just a small Soviet satellite, not just the Children of the World, not just ancient Egypt, but – well, the whole Cosmos.

True, church murals in Bulgaria depict scenes where those who have taken cures from beautiful orisnitsi, or witches, are subjected to eccentric punishments in hell, such as having the Devil himself defecate on them, continuously. But to its credit, the Eastern Orthodox Church only condemned pagan practices in principle, not in practice.

Read between the lines: she healed killers of their guilt.

And as if blowing it up, flooding it, and keeping it behind the klyon wasn't enough, State Security special forces patrolled the area until 1989. Some locals say there was an additional 'live fence' of thousands of vipers specially bred for this purpose by Uzbeks along the southern Black Sea, under something called decree number 56. Why Uzbeks? Why vipers? Did decree 56 read: 'Let us fulfil the five-year snake plan in one year'?

how can a good man be a lawyer in a dictatorship?

sealed zinc coffins, like the fallen Russian soldiers in Afghanistan – so that no one would know how they had really died.

It’s precisely when you have lost your roots that everywhere you go matters hugely.