Café turco com os ex–jugoslavos: Fotografia e histórias de uma viagem

O ancestral café turco, um legado do Império Otomano, património imaterial da humanidade, é um dos elementos culturais que ainda unem os ex-jugoslavos, mesmo que por vezes se esconda sob designações distintas em países diferentes.

A viagem foi suscitada pela leitura de um exemplar com 52 anos do romance “A ponte sobre o Drina”, do escritor jugoslavo Ivo Andrić, emprestado pelo avô dos autores. Os viajantes foram ver com os seus próprios olhos a ponte e o rio Drina que o livro descreve, na cidade de Višegrad, hoje situada na República Sérvia da Bósnia, na Bósnia e Herzegovina.

English description:

“Café turco com os ex-jugoslavos” (“Having a Turkish coffee with the former Yugoslavs”) is the nonfiction story of a group of Portuguese travelers setting out on a journey to four countries that once belonged to the former Yugoslavia, through words and photographs. The trip included Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia. The book also tells other stories about former Yugoslavians, letting the reader learn a little more about their culture, their food, their history, their languages, their landscapes and their architecture. It attempts to find out whether there are still cultural features uniting former Yugoslavs to this day and what happened throughout history for them to end up politically separated.

The ancient Turkish coffee, a legacy of the Ottoman Empire, which belongs to the UNESCO world heritage list, is one of the cultural features that still appear to unite former Yugoslavs, even though it sometimes hides itself behind distinct names in different countries.

The group trip was sparked by the book “The Bridge on the Drina”, by Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andrić. One of the authors read a 52 year old edition of this novel, borrowed from his grandfather and felt he and his friends had to see with their own eyes the real bridge and the Drina river the book describes, in the city of Višegrad, located today in Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Paulo Mendes da Silva and Pedro Mendes da Silva are Portuguese and were born in Luanda, Angola. They are compulsive travelers, computer scientists and twin brothers. Pedro Mendes da Silva shoots and Paulo Mendes da Silva writes.