Cities and chimeras, Letters from Italy, Letters from Norway, Love in Tuscany, Among the Hyperboreans... those were the most beautiful, even sublime, sometimes pathetic journeys using the travelogues of most of us "baby boomers" who started their journey through world literature from Serbian, or if you really want - and I want to, oh really - from Yugoslav ports.
But not only travelogues, but also so-called youth novels Around the world in 80 days Jules Verne or Through desert and rainforest Henrik Sienkiewicz, and even the smells of the Texas desert of Llano Estacado by that German fraudster and eternal prisoner Karl May and so on until the great voyages of another Pole, Jozef Theodore Konrad Korzeniowski (later rechristened Jozef Konrad) and finally the great writers and travel writers Lawrence Darrell and Henry Miller. Even Branislav Nušić could not resist the French bon vivant and flamboyant Jules Verne, only that in his A trip around the world the main character's name was not Phileas Fogg but Jovanča Micić and he was not the wisest and bravest gentleman from London, but a dull and timid quilter from Jagodina.
In that "unheroic time" of Tito's communism, when the most exciting and dramatic events of our youth were sports successes or missed penalties, the general consensus without strong arguments was that travelogues were the highest form of journalistic expression, and that they were somewhere between journalism and literature.
Maybe they were, but in practice, travelogues had other forms and heroes for us then.
Namely, at that time, the main heroes of our Eastern European travels until the fall of the Berlin Wall were not Phileas Fogg and his loyal servant Passepartout, but Vegeta, "Caesar" vinjak and nylon stockings, and even hula hoops, if they are Bulgarians. Czechs and other Russians even heard. With half a suitcase of those precious items, you could have half visited Pest, Prague, Moscow and the former Leningrad, and still come back with fur coats and boots. What in the suitcase, what on you, if you don't pass out from the heat on the plane.
At the same time, the only, but huge, killer argument that our socialism is better than Hungarian and Romanian was - Trieste! They couldn't even write there, and we - whenever we think of it. I don't know why, but there is no Phileas Fogg, the hero of my childhood, in Trieste either, but the main actors of our travelogues are from there: "super rifle", "Roy Rogers", "levis 501", "Fioruđi", "carrera"...
For decades, I have listened to the stories of Novi Sad "fircigers" (some born in 1940) how they arrived in Trieste with their "thirties" in seven hours (without a pee-break), then in six, and as close to dawn as possible in just five hours of driving . And they cheated the customs officials like no one before them and like no one after them, because they are cunning and cunning, and the customs officials - on the contrary.
I thought there was no worse situation for travel writers than that customer tourism, from all that Vegeta and Vinjak "Caesar" (and why exactly "Caesar", and not my native "Rubin" for whom I almost gave my life), but it soon turned out that I was wrong. There is, oh really there is, there is worse, right here in our country.
Believing in travel writing as the highest form of journalistic expression, with the first smell from this powder keg I remembered that even four of the most famous (perhaps the best) journalists of the 20th century gained fame, or at least started, as war reporters. And that all of them had to cross seas and oceans (all four of them and oceans) to reach the fronts, and that the war came to my doorstep, from Pristina to Ljubljana...
Elem, Egon Erwin Kisch sailed from Vienna, the capital and most beautiful city of the most beautiful European empire of Austria-Hungary, to distant Mexico at the beginning of the last century to report on the liberation war side by side with Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. And on the other side, at the same time, there is an American John Reed (better known as Warren Beatty in the film Red) first sailed to Serbia in 1915 to retreat with King Peter through Albania to Corfu, to become famous two years later when he stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd with a certain Leon Weinstein (later renamed Leo Trotsky) and wrote a book about it Ten days that shook the world. And the third war correspondent, later even the Nobel laureate Ernest Hemingway, crossed the Atlantic Ocean two or three times - in the First World War to be an ambulance driver, then in the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, where it is not known what he was because he lied even more, far more than in the First War. He was well-informed, knew what the readership liked... And let's not even talk about Oriana Fallacci, who went all the way from Italy to Vietnam, wrote a handful of books that, in this turbulent time, are no longer mentioned even by professional readers or journalism lecturers or, God forbid , literature.
And now, this pessimist begins to optimistically believe that there is still worse, it will be worse, and that right here. So he began the third phase of his travelogue in Kosovo (then still "also Metohija"), continued it in Cankarjev dom in Ljubljana with a certain Janez Janša from the National Defense, instead of, as before, with Cerar and Bojan Križaj, then in Zagreb, instead of Šurbek about whom he wrote his first book, sits with retired JNA officer Franjo Tuđman, then in Vukovar with the president of something Goran Hadžić, then in Romania with a doctor of medicine Radovan Karadžić and Doctor of Literature Nikola Koljević, then in Knin, Kistanje and the Krka Monastery with Doctor of Psychiatry Jovan Rašković and the Rector of the Seminary, Doctor of Theology Slavko Zorica, his former roommate in the boarding school of the Faculty of Theology... and again in Kosovo (now without Metohija) with Patriarch Pavlo , about which he also wrote a book.
And now a book could be written about all of this, but I won't even think about it: the third phase of my travel writing has blackened exactly half of my life - these last 35 years of my 70.
That's why you should travel only through books, because everything is different in books. As my friend Mihajlo Pantić would say in the book whose title I am currently stealing - Captain of indoor navigation. This is not a country for travelogues and travel writers. It used to be, but it's not anymore. Well, it's not even for bare life.
