Summer 2011, my first walk along a border.
Greece: I went from Thessaloniki to Orestiada, and from there to the Greece-Turkish border.
In Orestiada I told the hotel owner that I was walking to Turkey he looked at me as if I was crazy (perhaps i am?) and said "be careful. they are mongoloids on the other side. they are dangerous".
In a book I have read that along borders people inherit enemies.
From Orestiada I went by bus to a town called Kastanies. Due to the bad economic situation, busses and trains were working rather randomly in Greece, which made it very difficult to move around.
To reach Kastanies I had to cross a small river, the bridge had fallen down and no one fixed it. The locals apparently use a tractor to come across. I tucked my skirt in and I walked across somehow.
From Kastanies I walked to Marasia, the village closest to the border. By the time I got there, the sun was up and burning, not ideal for photography. I met a very old lady cutting woods with a huge axe and she posed for my camera.
I hardly met anyone else.
There is some kind of buffer zone so i was prevented from going close up to the border.
Later on I also went to the village of Phytio (were an old guy on the train back tried to kiss me. very weird situation) and Didymoteicho.
winter 2011- my second border walk.
from Imatra, Finland, I walked along the finnish-russian border. My good friend Dagmar Tolonen, walked with me.
Normally winter is snowy but dry in Finland. The week I was there it was pissing down with rain. We walked in the freezing rain, totally soaked. It was difficult to walk as the road was icy and slippery, and it was difficult to photograph due to the rain.
We knocked on doors of a couple of farms and no one answered. In one it was clear that someone was inside but did not open the door, two people walking in the middle of nowhere is rather suspicious.
Later, in a pseudo-italian restaurant in Imatra, we were racially abused by a drunk finnish man who believed we were russians. I found it very funny, cause I am blonde and many times I have been mistaken for russian or easter european. Dagmar, who is half finnish half irish, did not find it funny and told the drunk to get lost.
We stayed in a lorry-drivers motel. The owner told us he is Finnish but his cousins live on the other side of the border, in Russia, and he does a yearly visa to go and visit, so he also gets cheap petrol and cigarettes.
images taken from google maps
In both cases I didn't get to photograph as much as I wished, but were learning curves thathelped me reflect on where I want to take this project.
