New Europe - Old Frontiers

Some new pictures for my project about new borders in Old Europe: the first one is taken on a new pavemented road near Mitrovica, Kosovo. The woman in the picture spent there the whole night and I found her lying in front of a filling station, she was dehydrated, powerless and unconscious when I stopped to give her some water. The next one is from Mitrovica, Kosovo. Every evening the mothers of the fallen serbian soldiers gather near the bridge mourning over their dead sons. The third picture is also taken in the northern part of Mitrovica, stickers with the portrait of Vladimir Putin are omnipresent in this part of the city, inhabited mainly by serbian population. The next one is also from Mitrovica, every evening the mothers of the fallen serbian soldiers gather near the bridge mourning over their dead sons. The fourth picture is taken during a rehearsal in South Mitrovica and shows the actress Irma Ibrahimi, acting in the play "The visit" of Friedrich Dürrenmatt. The table with the empty cups are the remainings of a conference about breast cancer in the office of the NGO Community Building Mitrovica and the last one with the dog is taken a few meters from the border between Macedonia and Albania.

Gavoidija revisited

Ten years after I returned to the psychiatric hospital of Gavoidija, near the city of Lugoj in Romania. In 1999 I visited the ward for long-term inpatients and documented the poor conditions of health care system in Romania together with the journalist Claudia Popa for Renasterea Banateana. Ofelia, the woman on the first picture already appears in one of the pictures from 1999...

Bjeshket e Namuna, the Cursed Mountains, Albania

These pictures are part of a photo reportage produced in the Bjeshket e Namuna, the Cursed Mountains, in the north of Albania, close tot he borders to Kosov and Montenegro, only two weeks ago. The portrayed people are living near Theth, a town in the heart of the alpine wilderness of this part of the Albanian Alps. There is a man who survived the spiral of violence and revenge of the kanun, the old set of laws developed in the 15th century, after the fall of the communist regime in 1990 these ancestral laws had a bloody revival. After his brother was killed because of a few square meters of land, he was obliged to take vengeance, so he shot the murderer and was hidden by his family for years in a secret place.
The woman sitting on the bed was also living for years in fear of the violent actions of another family's members with which her family carried out a cruel blood feud.
The old woman on the third picture suffered in a different way of the hard life in the mountains: her husband was one of the many men who managed to leave the country, more than forty years ago. He never came back, she never left her home.