At the beginning of the pandemic, in March last year, Greece became a very distant country. We had paid for a summer vacation on Skiathos. As old fans of Parga, we told ourselves that an "affair" with Skiathos would be good for our stable relationship with Parga. Then what happened happened. Borders closed, countries became mousetraps. The "funniest virus" has killed thousands of people in the country, millions abroad.
Voucher instead of Greece
A vacation in Greece, once a matter of course, has become a bittersweet memory. If we do not count the few tourists from Serbia who stormed into Greece last summer via Bulgaria, before Athens closed its borders again, there were no Greek summer joys, from lying on the beach to chewing gyros.
Travel agencies issued vouchers instead. English word voucher, meant a receipt proving that you have given money but have not yet received the goods or services. On our voucher it was written that we paid for a summer vacation on Skiathos, worth 480 euros. In other words - summer vacation on a long stick. Last spring, it was just a vague promise that we would get our hands on the Greek coast as soon as this tourist superpower, like the whole world, woke up from its pandemic hibernation.
This spring, a year after the start of the pandemic shutdown of global tourism, indications began to emerge that Greece will still be reachable during the summer.
He will-he won't
We visited the agency regularly. Until May, they did not know how to tell us whether or not there would be departures for Skiathos. Then there was the famous visit of the Greek Minister of Tourism to Belgrade, who politely explained that Greece would recognize all the vaccines administered to the Serbs. It sounded nice, but in practice nothing happened for days. We stopped by the agency again, where again no one could tell us anything. Offers for Albania and Egypt are there, but not for Greece. Official papers from Athens are awaited. We were just thinking of diverting to Albania, when the agencies started throwing out this year's offers for Greece. Our agency again had an offer for Skiathos. But this time, for the same money, you get a stay of ten instead of 15 days. Corona ate our five days of Greece! We did not want to agree to this kind of deal. We gave up on Skiathos - our mother did not give birth to it.
Sithonia instead of Skiathos
The agency offered fifteen-day arrangements on good old Halkidiki, a "three-fingered" piece of coast where in our previous lives there were far more Serbs than Greeks in the summer. The first accommodation that we liked was taken (no one could explain to me when before), so we took an apartment in the small town of Neos Marmaras in Sithonia, not to say - on the middle finger.
So, already at the beginning of June, the Greek dream will become a reality. But until departure and during the journey itself, it will be on the verge of a nightmare. Back in the summer of 2020, the Greek government invented a form that every passenger had to fill out: The Passenger Locator Form (PLF). On the website tom and tom. The guy at the agency filled out the form for us and pulled it out of the printer. But that's not all. On the day of travel, the competent authorities of Greece will send to the agent Quick Response code - the famous QR, an electronic code from which every Greek policeman can read that the Greek state really wants us. On German websites, travelers are warned that anyone who arrives in Greece without this code can count on a fine of up to 500 euros. And our agent will send us the code via smartphone. Admittedly, we will have to remind the agent of this obligation by phone before midnight, but that's how it is in the country of Serbia.
Another obstacle appeared when - the day before the trip - it was announced that the North Macedonian-Greek border crossing Đevđelija-Evzoni would not work at night for some time, from 22 pm to morning. This meant that buses departing from Belgrade in the afternoon and evening hours could not arrive at that crossing before the crossing. An alternative route leads through Bulgaria.
Bulgaria instead of North Macedonia
For all those boarding south of Nis - between Leskovac and Vranje - a stingy message arrived to come to the Gazprom gas station near the Nais Hotel, on the highway near Nis, around 20:XNUMX p.m. It's that roadside hotel at the opening of which the progressive elite went wild with trumpeters. The bus will pick us up there, and then the direction Dimitrovgrad. We found a man who will drop us off in our car and take it back to Leskovac.
The wait at the gas station was quite long on that fresh evening at the beginning of June.
We asked a woman on the phone, who was the road leader on behalf of several agencies, when the bus would arrive. "We have some delay, we will be a little late". When asked if we should wait at the gas station in the direction of Pirot or perhaps at the Hotel Nais, she said with undisguised irony that it is physically impossible to meet at the hotel, if the bus arrives from the direction of Belgrade. She obviously did not know that the hotel and the gas station are connected by an underpass. That is the special charm of traveling with Serbian travel agencies. You never know what caliber your travel companions will be.
The bus arrived more than two hours late. When we entered it, the passengers from Novi Sad explained to us that the tire did not burst, it was not a traffic "jam", but a good number of older tourists did not have a PLF form in printed form. Then the bus stopped somewhere where there was a printer. Making calls, sending confirmations, how do I send this, it won't open for me, etc. One of the agencies simply forgot to tell people what to do.
By the way, in our agency a few weeks ago we asked to get the front seats if possible. "No problem, I made a note," was the reply. We got seats 52 and 53. It doesn't matter, the important thing is that we are already driving towards the Bulgarian border.
Gradina and then Kalotina
The representative of the agency said over the bus loudspeaker that a colleague from the bus who was in front of us called her on the phone that the Bulgarian border guard was nervous. "You enter the room only two at a time, the first goes to the counter, and the second to the yellow line in front of the counter. When both of them leave, the other two enter."
I listen to the heartless instructions and think of all those tour bus companions I've run over my head on my forays to Greece. Once, on a trip to Parga, it was a little man the size of Louis de Fines, who at three in the morning wanted to play a thrash folk song, to "spoil" us as we were crushed. Fortunately, in front of us at that time, judging by the black T-shirts with horror appliqués, four heavy metal players were sitting - a mustachioed father and three large sons. They just growled and Louis gave up. This time, the representative of the agency was not as hot as a copy of the movie gendarme Krisho, but unpleasant enough.
It's already pitch dark. A Bulgarian uniformed kerberka, a black-faced young woman with an expression of endless malice on her face, takes my passport without looking at me. She didn't say a word. Our "good evening" is in vain, "thank you" in vain after the salutary sound of a stamp being pressed into a passport page.
If I hadn't been around Sofia and Pernik, if I didn't have Bulgarian friends, great, relaxed and warm-hearted people, I might think that this is a grumpy, unprofessional person - a prototype for the country and the people. And it's not.
Let's go further through the Bulgarian night
"She's very upset," says the nurse on the verge of retirement, almost in a stable voice with a Vojvodina melody. A blue-painted corpulent woman with a man's haircut took on the role of a self-proclaimed commentator on everything and anything. There is one such character in every group, gifted with incurable linguistic dysentery, an ardent desire to communicate loudly to the world, and a lack of intelligence and tact.
I guess that this cowboy medic with her hoarse bass on this tour bothers some passengers less. Some of them probably didn't even hear her because they turned off their hearing aids. There were almost no younger passengers. Age: 65 plus. Although we are approaching sixty, the two of us belong to the bus youth group.
Why is it like that? Young people didn't get vaccinated? Are the kids still in school? Greece too bureaucratically restrictive? Aren't people generally overdosing on digitization - Digital green certificate, QR code for PLF, electronic confirmation that PCR was done? Too many electronic codes, too much English. Maybe this year, Montenegro and Albania, with looser regulations than EU-Greece, will move from the reserve bench to the first tourist team of the Balkans.
We pass through nighttime Bulgaria. Incompleteness of roads. Construction sites and sleepy neighborhoods with squinting lights. A half-doze and the nurse's monotone voice. Then the lights come on, the loudspeaker announces that we will have a short break 12 kilometers from the Bulgarian-Greek border. I go out to stretch my legs in front of an object of unknown construction style marked as a restaurant. After the break, I go through the papers and on the phone, to check if all the documents I need are at hand.
As dawn breaks over Dragotin
The ritual at the border is again the same, except that the counters of the Bulgarian and Greek border services are next to each other, and not as between Gradina and Kalotina, separated by "no man's land". No nervous here, just busy clerks. The uniformed Greek won't look at my phone or the papers I handed him. He just takes the passport, scans it, stamps it and gives it back to me.
So all this dust up around the paper was the product of speculation? Other passengers assured me that they looked carefully at the vaccination certificate and the passenger locator form. The two of us got by without it.
My first steps on Greek territory are easy. No fatigue, although, like everyone else on the bus, I slept badly.
The village on the Greek side, after which the border crossing is named, is called Promahonas. Until 1927, it was called Dragotin. It was settled by Greek exiles from Turkey, the place with a Bulgarian name belonged to Greece. And we are immediately in the vortex of Balkan history. We get on the bus, no one was detained. On the right side through the window you can see the river Struma, the ancient Greek Strimon or today's Greek Strimonas. Its valley opens to the south in the morning light.
Search Hellas with your soul
The ancient country already smells like salt to me, or so I imagine, driven by desire, because there are still over 100 kilometers to Thessaloniki.
Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, waged war on these river banks with Lycurgus, king of the Thracian tribe Edona. It did not end well for the king, says Homer. Another river whose beauty is marred by our knowledge of the mud of blood that history has deposited there. But I'm not going to think about that this morning.
I came here again to, on Goethe's advice, seek with my soul the land of the Greeks. Or at least to find that bright, blue-white country from the time before the pandemic, relaxed, tolerant even towards plebeian tourists.
Between me and the Mediterranean there are no more human borders and their madness. I close my eyes and drift off to sleep.
Bonus video:
