BALKANS

A trip through the Western Balkans, home to Europe's largest indigenous Muslim population, shows how marginalised cultures can coexist

- THARIK HUSSAIN

It's amazing what can be staring you in the face, and you just can't see it. Sometimes it takes someone else to point it out, or for you to be positioned in such a way that a new perspective manifests. Many believe this is what happens when we 'decolonise' our lens.

The experience I had standing outside a synagogue in the Serbian town of Niš was probably a case of the latter. I was into the second week of a family road trip with my wife and two daughters around the Western Balkans in search of Muslim Europe — those parts of the continent still home to a living, indigenous Muslim culture that stretches back, in some cases, almost six centuries.

We hadn't planned to visit Niš. It just happened to be the most convenient stopover when we re-entered Serbia after a day trip to Kosovo. Ideally, we'd have continued south into North Macedonia - our next destination - but as we'd entered Kosovo from Serbia, which doesn't recognise the predominantly Muslim nation's independence, to do so would have meant we'd left Serbia illegally, so we had to return.