Andrzej Stasiuk Stasiuk On the Road to Babadag

Annotation

Andrzej Stasiuk is a restless and indefatigable traveler. His journeys take him from his native Poland to Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova, and Ukraine. By car, train, bus, ferry. To small towns and villages with unfamiliar-sounding yet strangely evocative names. The heart of my Europe, Stasiuk tells us, beats in Sokolow Podlaski, and in Husi, not in Vienna. Stasiuk s journey is through the dark side of Europe s moon the flip side that lies behind the tourists favorite destinations, and reveals a very different and more sharply etched Old World. Where did Moldova end and Transylvania begin, he wonders, as he is being driven at breakneck speed in an ancient Audi loose wires hanging from the dashboard by a driver in shorts and bare feet, a cross swinging on his chest. As one funeral procession moves slowly down a main street, with an open coffin on a pickup truck, an old woman dressed in black brushes away the flies above the face of the deceased. From Byzantine-Tatar-Turkish encampments to Gypsy mansions, from Byzantine churches to the first minaret between the Baltic Coast and the Black Sea, simple and severe, a pencil pointed at the sky, Stasiuk s journey brings to life a strange world just beyond the edge of the familiar. This is travel writing at its very best.