Balkans go Baltics: War memories and close bonds in Hector's new travel show
Hector Ó hEochagáinin at a hammam sauna in Istanbul for Balkans go Baltics, on TG4.
One of the things Hector Ó hEochagáin loves to do most in life is look at a map. His director, Evan Chamberlain, and himself — the pair have been working together on travel documentaries for over 20 years — will spread a map of the world out on the bed of a hotel room. On the table beside them will be a few beers. They’ll pore over the map, plotting, scheming like a pair of Victorian adventurers.
“I loved geography at school — the names of capital cities, mountains, rivers always got me going as a child growing up in Navan,” says Hector.
“My favourite one was the capital of Albania. I knew it was Tirana. It always got me bonus points! When I look at a map, I get a buzz. It’s my best friend. There's something about maps. They’ve been there for centuries. Google Maps in your car or on your phone is replicating what sailors had in their galleons hundreds of years ago with all their instruments and stuff."
Chamberlain and Hector plot their route. “We go: ‘what about this? Look at the Balkans. Look at the Bosphorus. Look at the Black Sea. What about if we go from here to there — from the Balkans to the Baltics?’ The title immediately gets people going. Where is the Balkans? Where is the Baltics? If you look at the map, it's a natural progression through Eastern Europe — one line to the other.”
Hector’s 3,000-kilometre hike from the Balkans to the Baltics in the north is the latest seven-part instalment of his travels around the world, as he gets a handle on the cultures and customs of Turkey and several countries from the former Eastern Bloc, including Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania and Poland, as well as two Baltic states. Each country gets devoted an episode. It’s notable, he says, how much a dent the communist experiment made on the people he met along the road.
“There's so much mental and physical baggage in the air in these countries. The old Yugoslavia was broken into six countries. All these countries are unique in their own way, but they have been covered by the curtain of communism. You can feel that there's been a lot of misery, war, tension, a lot of sorrow and death. A lot of oppression."
Hector says it's difficult for countries like Poland, Serbia, and Latvia to shed their past. "A country like Poland has been battered by the Nazis and ruled by the Russians. People think Eastern Europeans are cold and hard and very stern-looking people. But they put up with an awful lot of destruction over the last 60-70 years. It takes a while to break down these people, to get to know them, but I found them to be the most amazing, friendly, hardy people.
"I wanted to find out on the journey had I anything in common with these people, as an Irishman from an island a couple of hours away in Europe. What have we in common with them?”
Hector and his production crew had to pull an episode on Ukraine last minute, as Russian military forces started gathering on the Ukraine border just as they were about to enter the country for filming.
He touches on several other war-based topics during his travels, including a fascinating visit to Gallipoli, site of the needless deaths of more than 3,000 young Irishmen during the First World War. His visit to Auschwitz left a mark that still lingers.
“It was a beautiful, sunny winter’s day. There was snow falling gently, about three or four foot of snow on the ground. We walked in through that wooden gate. It's only seventy-something years since this happened, the blink of an eye — where millions of people lost their lives. Even talking about it now makes me feel sick to the stomach that mankind can be so evil to do what they did.
“When you look to the left in Auschwitz, that's the way to the gas chamber for those men and women. When you look to the right, even in the workhouses, in the places they were sleeping, you can see the marks on the walls, the stains of blood. There's a spirit of sadness, a sense of stillness, a sense of something awful having happened in the buildings and in the area. I felt guilty leaving it five or six hours later — guilty as a human being that this happened. How in the name of God have we allowed this to happen?"
Hector found the visit worthwhile but chilling. “Nothing can prepare you for when you stand in there in the gas chambers. They have one installation. It’s a glass box. It's about 20 metres long. It has children’s suitcases and shoes piled up on top of each other that they took off them as they went into the gas chamber. As a parent, it was harrowing to witness. It’s horrific, a place of history, but everyone should see it — to see what went on there.”
The atmosphere, of course, is lighter elsewhere in the series. It’s hard not to laugh out loud at the sight of Hector grimacing during a vigorous pre-dawn massage at the Turkish baths. He drinks rakia — a home-distilled spirit like poitín — in rural Bulgaria, singing along with the distillers in jovial mood; he visits Count Dracula’s castle in Transylvania; he polishes his tennis skills at Novak Djokovic’s centre of excellence in Belgrade.
Hector felt a particular kinship with the people he encountered in the Baltic republics, that he was with kindred spirits. He dancing jigs gleefully with the locals, who were playing accordions and dressed up like Wren Boys, in rural Lithuania, for example, during a festival to mark the end of winter, which climaxed with the burning of a 40-foot effigy of a scarecrow.
“When I got to Latvia,” he says, “I was out with a survivalist in the forests. A brilliant guy, who took me out in the snow on a frozen river in 10 degrees below zero on a canoe. We went hunting. We lit a fire. He fed me by this tree in the wilderness. He showed me how to survive in the pristine Latvian forests. Almost sixty percent of the country is under forest. It reminded me of the way Ireland could have been when Ireland was full of silver birch and mountain ash and oak trees and we were all tribal.
“What I got from sitting with this man, and the way he looked, with his blue eyes and his white skin, and the way he talked about Mother Nature — I felt a connection with him immediately, as a descendant of this island of the Celts because I know I'm descended from the Fir Bolg.
"If you look at the latitude line, Latvia and Lithuania are the true Northern European cousins of us. I felt really at home in a forest in the ice with a hunter survivalist talking about his love of the land. The feeling I got from Latvia and Lithuania was: these are my people.”
- Hector — Balkans go Baltics, TG4, Thursday nights, 9.30pm
