Between May and July 2024, Jon Worth, an activist calling for better rail transport in Europe, spent about a month documenting the state of cross-border rail connections in south-eastern Europe, boarding dozens of trains, mostly local, and also crossing or visiting a number of cross-border sections that currently have no active rail services.
Milica and Silvana are neighbours. Milica is Serbian, Silvana is Croatian. They live in Krupa, a small village of about 50 inhabitants in the hinterland of Zadar. We are in the so-called Krajina, the region that in 1991 proclaimed itself a “republic” and was reconquered by Croatia in 1995, causing the exodus of over 200,000 Serbs. Today this area, far from Zagreb and partly depopulated, is among the poorest in the country.
In Albania, a project that aims at boosting tourism in the coastal town of Himarë is putting at risk over 50,000 people living in the Shushica Valley, a tributary of the Vjosa river.
A new research centre has recently become operational in Ljubljana. It is the biotechnology hub of the National Institute of Biology (NIB), created thanks to European funds and inaugurated last February, which seeks to study and provide answers to the environmental challenges that await us. We talked about it here.
Thanks to European Cohesion policies and funds, through the Interreg VA Slovenia-Croatia cooperation programme, two projects were born and developed over time which spanned a period of approximately 15 years: Ride&Bike between 2007 and 2013, and Ride&Bike II, between 2018 and 2021. These projects have transformed the hilly regions between Slovenia and Croatia along the Sava and its tributaries into popular destinations for cyclists, walkers and horseback excursionists. We talked about the project in general here.
Western Macedonia is an inner region of Greece. It is located northwest of Thessaloniki and borders Albania and North Macedonia. It is a relatively little-known area of the country, visited by few tourists.
The project, financed with EU cohesion funds and concluded in 2022, developed along six thematic areas: the political meaning of the Danube, nature, Roman heritage, culture and architecture, trade, spirituality. For each of these themes there was a focus on diversity (biodiversity, landscapes, peoples, architectural styles, ideologies) and change (change over time, influence on the present, search for roots, historical traces).
Almost two weeks after Christmas was celebrated elsewhere in the world, and a day before Georgia celebrated Orthodox Christmas, Tbilisi’s ethnic Armenian community celebrated its own on 6 January this year.
On December 14, Georgia obtained the status of EU candidate country. There was a celebration in the Georgian capital: on the stage in the central square of Tbilisi were the highest authorities of the Georgian Dream government. Images and texts by Onnik James Krikorian.
On 17 October 2023, OBC Transeuropa, as part of the Media Freedom Rapid Response, organised an international conference to discuss the delicate intersection between democracy, rule of law and press freedom
