The Accursed Mountains: Journeys in Albania

£9.99

Travelling by bus, on foot, by mule and horse, staying with Albanians in their houses and crumbling Stalinist tower blocks, Robert Carver meets Vlach shepherds and village intellectuals, ex-Communist Special Forces officers and juvenile heroin smugglers, missionaries with jeeps and light planes, and ex-prisoners of Enver Hoxha who have spent 45 years in the Albanian gulag.
In the remote villages of the Accursed Mountains of the far north, he is the first Briton seen since World War II, when Intelligence officers were parachuted in to help fight the German occupiers. On his journey to Lake Gashit, high above the snowline on the Serb-Montenegrin border, Carver survives murder attempts and suicidal bus rides. He sees villages last visited by outsiders in 1933, which had effectively been hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world.

A bleak record of Albania in the summer of 1996.

"Robert Carver has fulfilled the dream of every travel writer to find somewhere strange, remote and unvisited, and to pin it to the printed page. The Accursed Mountains is a tale at once endlessly diverting and profoundly tragic.' - William Dalrymple