Original version

BBC World Service East and Southern Africa Schedule

BBC World Service East and Southern Africa

The Compass v2 Podcast

The Compass

Documentaries

Factual: Life Stories

With ideas too big for a single episode, The Compass presents mini-series about society

Surprising stories from unusual places. With ideas too big for a single episode, The Compass presents mini-series about the environment and politics, culture and society.

BBC World Service Australasia

BBC World Service Online

BBC World Service schedule for American satellite radio and the Caribbean

BBC World Service Americas and the Caribbean

BBC World Service

BBC World Service South Asia

BBC World Service News Internet

BBC World Service Europe and the Middle East

BBC World Service West and Central Africa Schedule

BBC World Service West and Central Africa

BBC World Service East Asia

The Compass: Walking The Iron Curtain : Walking the Iron Curtain: Booming Balkans

Factual

Walking the Iron Curtain: Booming Balkans

29/06/2022 GMT

Walking The Iron Curtain

BBC World Service - The Compass, Walking The Iron Curtain, Walking the Iron Curtain: Booming Balkans

A shared love of nature is helping heal centuries of conflict and division in the Balkans

The borders of the Balkans have splintered and cracked for centuries. Can a shared effort to protect the region's flourishing wildlife heal the wounds?

The borders of the Balkans have been splintered, cracked and remade countless times over centuries. Suspicions and hatreds, ancient and modern, still scar the landscape. Travelling through the southernmost regions bisected by the Iron Curtain, Mary-Ann Ochota meets the conservationists convinced that a shared love of the region's landscape and wildlife can heal division.

From Trieste in Italy, a staging post for generations of refugees- including the Ukranian exodus of 2022- she travels south-east to Lake Prespa where North Macedonia, Greece and Albania meet.

Conflict and poverty have driven people from this beautiful place but in their absence nature has thrived.  Can joint efforts to protect the region's bears, lynx and endemic fish and flora boost the economy and persuade the young people to stay and the diaspora to return?

(Photo: Three Cold War borders meet in the centre of Lake Prespa, one of the most wildlife-rich places in Europe)

The Compass: Walking The Iron Curtain 

Walking The Iron Curtain 

Mary-Ann Ochota explores the world's longest wildlife reserve

25 years ago a group of naturalists devised a cunning plan, to create the world's longest wildlife reserve.  The no-man’s land, between Communist East and Capitalist West was a death-strip for humans but an accidental haven for rare birds and mammals.  If it could be kept free of development then this European Greenbelt could help heal the continent’s natural and political divisions.  Mary-Ann Ochota travels the 12,500km length of the Iron Curtain to gauge their success as fear and conflict once more close-in on Europe's eastern borders.

Accessibility links

Programme Index

The Compass

Walking The Iron Curtain

Walking the Iron Curtain: Booming Balkans

Genres

Brand

Series

BBC World Service East and Southern Africa

About BBC World Service