It is good to get out of the Anglophone world of political hysteria for a while. Here on the periphery of the empire, life carries on largely unmolested. There is a certain pressure that is absent, you slowly realize. Daily existence doesn’t feel invested with high-stakes political drama, as it is in the US and in the Western parts of Europe. We’ve seen no walking billboards of Identity, no multinational corporations hoisting the rainbow standard over the metropolitan centers, no skulking knots of young men from former colonies who seem to be unoccupied, and perhaps too attentive to one’s walking by. There are many visitors here in the Balkans, but to judge from appearances and overheard snippets of language, they are almost entirely European tourists.