The Fracture Zone
My Return to the Balkans
Chapter One
Encounters at a Water Meadow
Since the Balkan Peninsula has for centuries been a place of mystery, paradox, and wild confusion, it may not be too out of place to recall that this narrative properly opens -- in the late summer of 1977 -- at a place that did not then exist, next door to a country that had at the time not been created, and among a people who, though sentient human beings in every accepted sense, had in another then not even been born.
In particular it started beside a water meadow of singular loveliness -- all cypresses and lime trees, small olive groves, and cool and lush green grasses -- that lies on the left bank of a prettily rushing little stream known as the Lepenec River. The river, which ultimately flows into the Aegean Sea by way of a gulf between the sacred mountains Olympus and Athos, rises in the snows of a small north-south line of hills known as the Sar Range, which themselves are a mosaic part of that formidable swath of geological wreckage -- that has helped foster all the long confusion of the Balka ... read full excerpt from: The Fracture Zone ebook
