num_pages: 272
description: 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. Where did Moldova end and Transylvania begin he wonders as he is being driven at breakneck speed in an ancient Audiloose wires hanging from the dashboardby a driver in shorts and bare feet a cross swinging on his chest. In Comrat a funeral procession moves slowly down the main street the open coffin on a pickup truck an old woman dressed in black brushing away the flies above the face of the deceased. On to Soroca a baroque-Byzantine-Tatar-Turkish encampment to meet Gypsies. And all the way to Babadag between the Baltic Coast and the Black Sea where Stasiuk sees his first minaret simple and severe a pencil pointed at the sky. A brilliant tour of Europes dark undersidetravel writing at its very best.
language: English
title: On The Road To Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe
publisher: Mariner Books