An out of date passport and a different world
OFTEN WHEN ONE IS SEARCHING for something, something, which you were not looking for, comes to light. A day or so ago, one of my old passports was discovered. It is an old-fashioned, blue-covered book with barely a trace of the wording and crest that used to be on the cover. I used to carry my passport in a trouser pocket, which rubbed against it and gradually denuded the cover. The ten-year document expired on the 19th of March 1990. This was a couple of months before I made my last trip to what was still known as ‘Yugoslavia’. Soon after that, civil wars erupted, and the country became divided into smaller independent units.
The passport gives my height but not my eye colour, which used to be recorded in earlier passports. It contains eight Hungarian visa stamps (one is illustrated above), all issued in London except for one which was affixed in Belgrade. There is also a Bulgarian visa stamp, which was issued in March 1983. In addition to these visa stamps, for which I was charged roughly $10 each, there are many border stamps – entry and exit. Most of these are for Hungary and Yugoslavia, which I visited frequently throughout the 1980s. In those days, Brits did not need a visa to enter Yugoslavia.
One of the border stamps is of special interest. It was issued when I entered Yugoslavia at Bozaj on the 5th of June 1984. Bozaj, now in the Republic of Montenegro, was a Yugoslav border post on the shore of Lake Shkodra. The stamp was placed in my passport a few minutes after leaving the Albanian border post, also beside the lake, at Han-i-Hotit. It was here that an Albanian entry stamp was put in my passport two weeks earlier when I visited the country, which was then even far more mysterious than North Korea is to us today. In 1984, the Stalinist regime headed by Enver Hoxha was still in place. The two weeks spent in Albania were both fascinating and unusual to say the least. I have described that holiday in my book “Albania on My Mind.”
In addition to the visas and stamps issued by socialist countries, there is one Greek entry and one exit stamp, both issued at Athens airport in August 1981. It seems that I was in Greece from the 11th to the 17th. Another stamp issued on the 13th by the Piraeus branch of the National Bank of Greece takes up most of one page and has something to do with money and traveller’s cheques, but my Greek is not up to translating it.
The accidental finding of this old passport brings back many happy memories of travelling in parts of Europe that have now changed beyond recognition – for better or for worse.
