20 July 2009 – Šar Planina

He was sunburnt with a sparkle in his eye, and he walked easily over the rough high mountain terrain. This was Dragi, one of the Šar Planina Park wardens enjoying the rare experience of a day out with visitors. Šar Planina is (or was, depending who you are) one of Serbia's most remote and beautiful high alpine national parks lying on the Kosovo-Macedonian border. This range of high mountains stretches for some 70km SW into the wild wastes of northern Albania. Due to the Kosovo war this Kosovo Serbian enclave with its rusting ski resort and superb scenery rising up to rocky peaks of 2500m is now frozen in time. Foreign visitors are only just rediscovering cosmopolitan cities like Novi Sad and Belgrade, but the idea of exploring remote corners of Kosovo is unheard of unless you belong to UNMIK. But here we were, Miloš, Uroš, Milan, Isabel from Cambridge and I, on a visit to see the extraordinary range of wild flowers and outstanding scenery.

Dragi had been rather forced upon us by the Park Director when we went to visit them. We were quite happy with our own maps and plans, but it turned out to be a real blessing. He took us quietly and steadily up through the beech forest quickly turning to pine through some wild terrain, hard rocky screes and over high meadows where bears had swiped the tops off ant hills, until we reached Jazinačko Ezero, a lake of crystal clear melt water fed from the rocky peak above. Dragi stopped now and again to gather mountain flowers. Taking a knife he walked and gathered a bag of Hajdučna Trava, a white flowered alpine Achillia, and yellow Kantarijon, or St John's Wort. This will be hung up to dry to make a bitter yellow tea sweetened with mountain honey taken to cure almost any illness you mention. He walked and gathered, and sometimes he would entirely vanish while you were looking in the other direction, only to reappear way below seemingly seconds later, like a mountain spirit gently smiling at our stumbling ways.

Šar Planina has a rich Balkan flora of over 2000 species, many endemic to this remote fastness straddling borders both political and natural. But the northern side of Šar Planina is extraordinarily beautiful and abundantly rich in mountain flowers partly thanks to the lack of grazing by sheep since the Kosovo war of 1999. Several thousand sheep had been traditionally grazed in these high corries (by Albanian shepherds?), but since the war the sheep have disappeared and there is now no grazing at all on the northern side at this end of the range. The chamois might have been exected to expand but we were told that poaching was a problem. It is easy to see the contrast when you stand on the ridge at the top. On the Macedonian side there are Albanian shepherds on summer grazing with their flocks and Šar Planinac mountain sheep dogs. They burn the grass and the creeping juniper, and they graze the sward tight. Whilst on the “Serbian” side there is a decade's worth of alpine vegetation enjoying this sabbatical in wild colourful abundance. Yet balanced grazing would help keep the mountain the way it has been since time out of mind. Even now, among the rusting cable cars lower down there is a spreading forest of soft needled molika pine (P peuce) encroaching on the skiing pistes. The nutcrackers seemed happy though, churring and rasping like the spotted Alpine jays that they are.

Our day with Dragi was the third in this breathtaking wilderness. Those used to the rich grain lands of northern Serbia would find it a bit disappointing for birds. It is a harsh environment where birds and animals live in specialist niches on thin pickings. The mountains seemed silent and empty but for the nodding flowers and murmur of rocky burns. No golden eagles or peregrines this time, but for all that we had some good sightings. A covey of Rock partridge flew up and disappeared around a hill of jagged grey stone. A hobby flow over our heads, dark scimitar winged hunting for the Tawny pipits. We found a family of bright yellow billed Alpine choughs with 4 young in an old ski lift terminal, and a bright little Alpine accentor twitched its tail in agitation as we passed. Several pairs of Pallid swifts were nesting with the house martins in the eves of the empty hotel at Brezavica, and the finding of a mountain adder caused excitement.

At the lake we found a couple of “Albanian” family enjoying a day on the mountain just like us. They had walked up from their village on the Prizren side of the pass. We could hear them speaking in Serbian but Dragi explained that they weren't Serbs, and nor were they Gorani, another Muslim people group found on the other end of Šar Planina. They called themselves “Bosniaks”, which as far as I know is a new invention after the Bosnian civil war. Like the Gorani they were of Slav origin, but living among the Albanians they had taken the Muslim faith in the time of the Turks. Now they were scattered around like so many Balkan families. One family had returned for a holiday from their new home in the Netherlands. An older boy was studying in Sarajevo. The others lived in this mountainous valley under Šar Planina on good terms with Serbs and Albanians alike, but jobs there were none. As the name Šar implies, patched and striped with summer melting snow, this mountain is a speckled treasure of diversity.