GAVRILO PRINCIP is famous for Gavrila Princip Street in Belgrade, home to my favourite restaurant Zavičaj's, where I have enjoyed three...

‘Posing for his sexual partner as a martyred saint, Gabriele d’Annuncio was titillating himself with the image of a young man tortured...

‘”On the morning of Palm Sunday, while children slept their innocent sleep and the church bells were ringing for prayer to God, the...

‘You who burned my house and killed my child, who shelters beneath a foreign wing, a traitor who accepts a salary from the enemy! Did you...

December 1941: Fleeing the German destruction of Užice in Serbia, Tito and the Partisans crossed the River Drina in winter, climbed the...

Komiža, Vis - port of the Partisan and Allied fleet September 1943 – Fascist Italy capitulates to the Allies. Nazi Germany invades the...

‘Despite his experiences at Drvar, Tito had not lost his liking for caves,’ wrote Fitzroy Maclean, Churchill’s liaison officer with the...

I’ve always marvelled at the audacity of the Croatian priesthood pushing to canonize Aloysius Stepinac, knowing the crimes of the WW2...

Some years ago, I was chatting at work with an Arab woman from Egypt when the topic of democracy came up. ‘Arabs can’t do democracy,’ she...

My father was Irish, English and German. My mother had Italian, Venetian, Slovenian and Croatian/Montenegrin grandparents. After World...

Why had I never heard of the Vinča culture centred in Serbia and its developing writing system that predated Cuneiform by 2000 years?...

When I was born in Sydney in 1960, my grandfather, like many Australians his age, called Yugoslavs Balts. Even though Yugoslavia was...

How many women do you know who commence an historical novel based on their shoe size? Or their head circumference? Or their height? When...

'Truth and memory [are] exceedingly fragile,’ writes Deborah Lipstadt in Denying the Holocaust, the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory....

Hats off to Slovenian author Goran Vojnović! I have just finished reading his best-selling novel Yugoslavia, My Fatherland which he...

IRREGULAR ADVENTURE by Christie Lawrence BOOK REVIEW This absorbing book must rate as the greatest war story never heard of. It is the...

Friday 10th May Greek trains are dreadful. From experience I can tell you that the Hellas Express was not a patch on the Vienna Express...

THE MEETING by Josip Cazi On rainy evenings we used to walk through the muddy factory town beside the Danube, Jelice, my blue-eyed girl -...

At the beginning of the twentieth century, two opposing political movements emerged from the fall of the old empires: the extreme right...