The Fracture Zone (26 page)

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Mine was a tiny Fiat I had rented in Tetovo the day before, the firm asking only that I give them my Hong Kong identity card as guarantee that I would return it. A colleague, based in Moscow, then borrowed it from me, and as is often the way in a war, I am not entirely sure what happened to it. My ID card, however, has since expired.

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The most stomach-turning example of the kind of Turkish atrocity the Serbs might think they have cause to avenge appears in Ivo Andric’s Nobel Prize–winning novel
The Bridge on the Drina.
It describes the torture and subsequent impalement of a peasant caught trying to wreck the Turkish bridge: It is an utterly haunting scene, a description that offers some insight into the depth and longevity of true Balkan hatred

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The word is Turkish, and means “mountain.” The Balkan Mountains are known in Bulgarian by their rightful name, Stara Planina.

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Had I arrived a little earlier in the century I would have had to take scrupulous care with the timetables: Although all railway trains ran to European time, the Bosporus ferries ran to Ottoman time, on a clock that marked the start of the day not at midnight, but at sunset.

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The odalisques were divided into classes, and included the
ikbals
—the sultan’s favorites—and the
geuzdes,
those women to whom he had, literally, “given the eye.”

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And only a fair chance of surviving his occupation of it. Of the 178 grand viziers who worked from Topkapi, 1 in 5 died violently. There were two traditional routes to the grave: Either the court executioner bowstrung him (as with Kara Mustafa, whose severed head we saw in Vienna), or the sultan knifed him personally.

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The town in northern Anatolia after which the cherry is named. The Greeks called it Kerasos. It was the Romans who first found the fruit and named it after the town.