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New Albanian bus routes
So what is the best way to get from Dubrovnik to Athens? Take the bus, we say, at least for the first part of the journey. Improved bus and ferry services now make it very easy to travel from southern Croatia through Montenegro and Albania to ...
Peaks of the Balkans: Discovering the Lhasa of Europe
The Peaks of the Balkans trail is a long-distance hiking route, in the shape of a figure-of-eight, which takes in some of the finest mountain terrain in northern Albania and adjacent parts of Kosovo and Montenegro. Rudolf Abraham describes how the ...
Rail Travel News
Two new high speed rail routes in France, extra trains through the Alps and new services to Ukraine are the headline stories in the summer 2017 rail timetables. We review what's new and what's ...
Election thoughts
We watched the run-up, the live TV debates and the tough exchanges veering at times towards acrimony. We've followed the arguments on national security, foreign policy and the question of who has the personal authority and good judgement to lead ...
Bosna-gauge Railways
Had the Balkan region narrow-gauge rail network survived, it would surely today be a cherished asset in promoting tourism over a wide region - in much the same way as the narrow-gauge Rhaetian Railway network has been important in attracting ...
Recalling Tito
From Skopje to Moscow, from Sarajevo to New Delhi, the names of roads and squares recall Josep Broz Tito, who was President of Yugoslavia from 1953 until his death in 1980. But what happened to all the Tito towns in former Yugoslavia? Titograd ...
Stamp of approval: To travel or not to travel
Border police at some of Europe’s toughest borders have delegated to them the power to make life-altering decisions about the fate of travellers. We take a look at how visa regimes undermine human ...
By train through Albania
The railway platform at Tirana was as full as it ever gets. That meant all of half a dozen people waiting for the dawn train to Pogradec, among them an English gricer and a Polish twitcher. The latter had travelled across Europe to catch a glimpse ...
Bulgarian affairs
Bulgaria is gearing up for more visitors from neighbouring countries, having just announced that from Saturday 19 December 2009 travellers from Macedonia and Serbia making short visits to Bulgaria will no longer need to secure a visa in ...
Raindrops keep falling
is London really wetter than Nice or Rome - an interesting cognitive ...
A road that disappeared
in search of the road over Cakor Pass that leaves Montenegro's Lim valley and heads east to Péc in ...
Exhaustion in Ulcinj
Karlos Zurutuza reports on a summer day in Ulcinj, a coastal town in southern ...
Adriatic small states: Montenegro and more
Montenegro's reappearance on the political map of Europe as an independent state encourages us to look at geopolitical curiosities in the Adriatic region. We examine Ragusa, Poljica and some former Italian island ...
Montenegro: accursed mountains
The mountainous country where Montenegro abuts onto Albania is one of Europe's true wilderness areas. Guest contributor Rudolf Abraham describes the Prokletije region. The name means "accursed". Read ...
Tito toponyms
The cult status surrounding Josip Broz Tito, the onetime president of Yugoslavia, shows no sign of diminishing almost thirty years after his death. The capital of Montenegro, Podgorica, was until 1992 called Titograd. And we report from the extreme ...
Adriatic republics - a stop on the iron road
Reports this week of Montenegro's imminent status as Europe's newest nation state have prompted us in hidden europe to take a look at some of the smaller republics that once featured on the shores of the eastern Adriatic. Who now remembers the ...
Andorra landscapes - uncertainty in Montenegro
Walkers heading for Spain on the footpath over the 2,500 metres col at Vallcivera come up the Madriu valley during the summer season, but few notice the remains of the old forge on the bank of the river that, with its characteristic Catalan design, ...
Orthodox Christmas in Cetinje - Christmastide till Candlemas - That Christmas Quiz
Cetinje, a little town that sits on a plain high in the mountains of the Republic of Crna Gora (Montenegro), is the onetime capital and still the spiritual centre of the Balkan republic that finds itself nowadays ambiguously attached to Serbia. ...