What WERE They Doing on that Hill?: Six Tourists Reenact Medugorje

In 1981, the year after Tito died, Yugoslavia was in turmoil. The ethnic strife that had been dormant under the much-loved Communist dictator was making its way to the surface. That same year, six teenagers climbed a hill in Medugorje (at that time a 17-house town) and saw the Virgin Mary.

All six of the teenagers (who are not exactly teen-aged any more) still claim see the Virgin's apparition , and Medugorje, though not recognized by that Vatican, has become a major pilgrimage destination, with over 1 million visitors every year (mostly Irish and Italian Catholics). Souvenir shops stocked with Jesus pencil cases and Mary statuettes line the streets.

We weren't so gauche as to ask Bata (left), our guide and host, if the apparitions were real. But we tried to ask some logistical questions: If you see the Virgin Mary on a hill, who do you tell? And, what WERE they doing on that hill in the middle of nowhere?? He'd have none of it. Bata had been perfectly blunt in offering opinions on the Serbo-Croat conflict, on the dubious merits of Balkan turbo folk, etc. But on this he was uncharacteristically evasive. If you believe, he said, it offers you hope. If you don't, it's brought foreign investment into an economically depressed region. Everyone wins. Why push it?

Four nights later, with tipsy exuberance, Adina and I decided that it would be a great idea to spend our last night in the Balkans climbing Marjan Hill with some fellow hostelers, in order to glimpse the city of Split and the Adriatic (right) from above. About 400 steps up the hill, we realized we were only half way there, and the sheen of our brilliant idea started to fade. What in the world were we doing on this hill in the middle of nowhere?? And then we noticed - there were six of us.

Okay, so, no. We didn't see the Virgin Mary. But the view of the moon over the Adriatic was pretty damn impressive in its own right.