The Balkan Road. The idea of writing about this road began after the writer thought several times about taking a trip, as his sister did in the spring of 2002, escaping the hell of dictatorship, from which he also fled more than twenty years before. That road witnessed “waves” of fugitives, throughout its different eras.
Najm Wali takes us on a very profound journey through history, for everyone who crossed that path to escape something, starting with the Prophet Abraham. The most famous figure and the greatest religious stature in the literature of the three world religions. Where he migrated and passed back and forth on this road.Then he discusses the Babylonians, Greeks, and Persians, then Alexander the Great and his conquests, the brutal Crusades, the travels of Ibn Battuta, the American writer John Dos Passos on his trip to Istanbul in the 1920s, and Hans Christian Andersen, the famous Danish writer, and his trip to Constantinople, after which he is struck by the magic of the East.
All of these people crossed the Balkan route, and more throughout history. Transit, escape, movement, and illegal travel have not stopped. Migration, return, and transition, as the writer tells us bitterly, after his journey of passage and return along a road that will never be devoid of passers-by, whatever the names of their journey or transition; Balkan route.Najm Wali, an Iraqi writer, was born in Al-Amara in 1956. He left Iraq in late 1980. He studied German literature at the University of Hamburg, and Spanish literature at the Complutense University in Madrid. Today he lives mainly in Berlin, works as a freelance author, journalist and cultural correspondent for major newspapers, and his books have been translated into several languages. He also writes for several German newspapers on a regular basis. His works include the novels: “Flesh Hill,” “The Portrait of Joseph,” “Angels of the South,” and “Baghdad... Marlboro, by Bradley Mannick.”
