Remembering the start of the COVID-19 pandemic as an American refugee in the Balkans
Christopher Tremoglie
Monday marks the third anniversary of the beginning of the COVID pandemic in the United States. On March 13, 2020, the Trump administration declared a nationwide emergency and issued a travel ban to those traveling to the country from the Schengen area of Europe. It was a time of great chaos and confusion, and I was trapped in the Balkans.
While a student at the University of Pennsylvania, I was working on two honors theses for my majors, political science and Russian and East European studies. As such, my research led me to Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia during that semester’s spring break. I was scheduled to interview several people who fought in the Yugoslav wars and associate justices on the Croatian and Slovenian Supreme Courts.
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I departed a few days before March 13. As we all know, at the time, there was a lot of uncertainty surrounding COVID. Many experts claimed that travel was fine and people should live normally, while others encouraged social isolation and wearing masks in public. I consulted with my physician and was cleared to travel. I departed, equipped with an N-95 mask, latex gloves, and plenty of hand sanitizer. After barely 24 hours in Slovenia, the world drastically changed, and my itinerary fell apart.
My first order of business was to interview a Supreme Court justice of Slovenia. However, just as I arrived, I received an email stating he could not meet me because he had fallen ill with a mysterious sickness. Fortunately for him, he was eventually diagnosed with the coronavirus. And while COVID had not yet affected me, the cancellation would serve as an omen of things to come. The meeting was rescheduled for a few days later, and I would also now be interviewing a personal adviser to the president of Slovenia.
That is when things took a turn for the worse. The next day, I was informed that this meeting also had to be canceled because the adviser felt ill after exposure to someone who contracted COVID. A few hours later, the Slovenian government announced a lockdown for the entire country, a social distancing protocol, and a curfew. Other European countries issued similar orders, and the Trump administration ordered the travel ban. My research trip was effectively over.
In just a few hours, the world had changed entirely. When I first arrived in the city, people walked about freely, in crowds, out and about without masks. The downtown part of Ljubljana was lively, and plenty of people were dining along the city’s riverwalk. A little over a day later, it was a ghost town. It was a surreal experience.
My journey home was even more daunting. First, I had to take a bus to Croatia to catch a flight from Zagreb to the United States. The bus ride was uneventful, until we approached the Croatian border. We arrived at the border checkpoint at 12:20 p.m. local time; we would never move again.
Our bus just stopped at the border checkpoint and waited. We were not provided any information about why or how long we would remain there. Four hours passed before we were notified sternly by a Croatian border official, “It’s going to be a long night.”
We kept being told, “Only a little while longer,” by our bus driver. Twelve hours passed, and we were still on the bus. I left the bus to stretch my legs and try to find food or water. I walked about a quarter mile to a pavilion crowded with travelers shouting and yelling questions at border officials. Hundreds of people were being detained and not allowed to enter Croatia. I tried asking a question but was sternly told that I must return to the bus or I would be put in jail.
Eventually, I found one officer who told me that anyone traveling into Croatia from a country with an outbreak of COVID would be placed in quarantine at a Croatian hospital for 14 days — at our expense. This led to what I can only describe as civil unrest at the border checkpoint. Groups of travelers began to leave the buses and head toward the border. One of the passengers on my bus told me that they were rallying together to “rush the border” on foot.
It was now 1:30 a.m., 13 hours since I had any food or water. I decided to act. I didn’t want to be put in a Croatian hospital for two weeks. It also made little sense to participate in a storming of the Croatian border patrol checkpoint. I felt such an act in a foreign country was not the best move, especially during the chaos of an international health crisis.
I decided to go back to Slovenia. If I was going to be trapped in a foreign country, it made more sense to be in one where I was corresponding with a justice on the country’s Supreme Court. However, the only way to do this was by walking. So, at 2:15 a.m., I grabbed my bags off the bus and journeyed toward Slovenia. Six other people on the bus joined me.
We walked on the shoulder of the highway in the middle of the night in absolute darkness. Our merry band of traveling refugees walked along an empty highway’s shoulder before arriving at the border. After being yelled at by Slovenian authorities, we were eventually permitted to cross back into the country. I found a gas station on Google Maps that was 2.5 miles away and guided our small group there. A black market cab driver offered to take us back to Ljubljana.
I returned to an empty, desolate city. All the lights were off, and it was dark and silent. Not one person was on the streets. It looked like a scene out of a movie about the apocalypse. Luckily, a Best Western hotel was still operating, and I booked a room there at 4 a.m. The next day, I found a flight back to the United States. The Balkan Odyssey was over.