At the beginning of May I embarked on a month-long journey around south-eastern Europe. I visited Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia. Aside from my research into transport networks I avidly recorded the troubled relationships between the abandoned and the preserved; the 'keep out' and the 'lived in'; and both the dead and alive. The images below represent some of these intriguing spaces and objects.
- Rebecca Harrison
- Rebecca Harrison
Prayers tucked between the stones of a church near the Rila Monastery, Bulgaria, keep faith alive even as the place succumbs to tourism and industry.
This train, taken between Sofia and the long-dead Bulgarian capital Veliko Tornovo, was an old Deutsche Bahn train. Metal plates and chains connected the carriages. You could see the track beneath your feet as you crossed from one carriage to the next. Who's to say what's dead technology?
The sun-burnt red roofs of Veliko Tornovo. The proximity between the dilapidated and the functional is startling.
One of my favourite sights/sites: a staircase that had no visible destination.
This house fascinated me. Was it being torn down or was it being re-built?
The telephone wires in Bucharest looked like an angry child's scribbles across the sky. I could only wonder how maintenance work was undertaken on such a system!
This ex-military building greets you as you walk up the main road from the train station in Belgrade. A scar left on the city from the Nato bombings in the late 90s, this skeletal structure almost incidentally preserves a memory many would rather forget.
A copy of a remote-controlled boat built by Nicola Tesla. The Tesla Museum in Belgrade brought to life many of the objects constructed by the inventor. Electricity crackled and neon glowed in demonstrations that deified science not aesthetic.
The devastation of Sarajevo was difficult to comprehend, even after two decades of re-building. This one-time hotel on notorious 'Sniper's Alley' stands as a monument to the country's violent history. Bullet holes pepper walls and pavements. The incongruous billboards pasted across the building, however, hint at the changing political face of the city.
The decadent architecture of this building once stood proudly in Mostar, in the Herzegovina region of Bosnia. Away from the capital the destruction of homes and domestic buildings was more tangible. Often they were not sealed from the public. Occasionally a light would shine from the upper-most window of a building that to an untrained eye looked like it had given up the ghost.
An eerie back-street in Split. Old and new jostle for space in this ancient city. Roman ruins prop up apartments and shelter market-stalls selling everything from fruit to fake designer watches.
Cups and saucers lie discarded on a dresser in a house that was ripped open to the elements. On the outskirts of Zagreb, Croatia, I was fascinated by the shell of a building that had once been someone's home.
