Roadsigns (Northern Epirus - Southern Albania)
Australian Macedonian Advisory Council
October 17, 2008
The mountains of Cheimarra are so steep, so precipitous, so jagged and haphazard as they arise almost from the edge of the Adriatic sea, that it is by sheer charity of the gods that they are shrouded in the lushest and most verdant veil of vegetation one has ever seen, if only to mask from mankind the knowledge that there are such things as absolutes.
We reach them as dawn clutches at them with its rosy-red fingers, driving down from Tiranë in an rickety jeep that threatens to spew forth nuts, bolts and questionable Bulgarian tractor parts onto a road so pot-holed as to not have looked out of place on the surface of the moon. "Italian roads," my driver explains. "They built them here when they annexed Albania in the thirties and they still haven´t been repaired." "Yes, I know," I reply. "That´s what you tell me every time. You really do need to get some funding down here."
Australian Macedonian Advisory Council
October 17, 2008
The mountains of Cheimarra are so steep, so precipitous, so jagged and haphazard as they arise almost from the edge of the Adriatic sea, that it is by sheer charity of the gods that they are shrouded in the lushest and most verdant veil of vegetation one has ever seen, if only to mask from mankind the knowledge that there are such things as absolutes.
We reach them as dawn clutches at them with its rosy-red fingers, driving down from Tiranë in an rickety jeep that threatens to spew forth nuts, bolts and questionable Bulgarian tractor parts onto a road so pot-holed as to not have looked out of place on the surface of the moon. "Italian roads," my driver explains. "They built them here when they annexed Albania in the thirties and they still haven´t been repaired." "Yes, I know," I reply. "That´s what you tell me every time. You really do need to get some funding down here."
"I suppose their idea of road repairs is to fill up the pot-holes with us," he ripostes and then breaks out into a mournful (and extremely long) epic song about the time when Captain Spiromilios landed in Cheimarra with his band of Cretan volunteers by boat and wrested it from the Ottomans.
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