Vitali Vitaliev visits some of the remaining European enclaves/exclaves - parts of one sovereign country, totally surrounded and landlocked by another
At moments of sadness and indecision, I often wander off to Ely Place – a seemingly unremarkable cul-de-sac off Holborn Circus in the centre of London. Passing through the ornate iron gates, separating this quiet little street from the hustle-and-bustle of Holborn, is like entering a mysterious "fourth dimension", the name of which is dislocation.
This straight tree-less lane, the former residence of the Bishops of Ely, is not officially part of London. It is a little corner of Cambridgeshire, still enjoying freedom from entry by the London Police, except by the invitation of the Commissioners of Ely Place – its own elected governing body. The results of the latest elections, duly dated and certified by "J. Franks, Esq., Clerk to the Commissioners", are displayed on the notice-board of the magnificent St Etheldreda Chapel - the oldest Roman Catholic church in Britain - halfway up the street.
One of London's best-kept secrets, Ely Place is a living anachronism from medieval times when the influential Bishops were determined to remain in their Cambridgeshire diocese even while on ministerial missions in the capital. In the local pub, one can view a stack of recent letters addressed to "Ye Olde Mitre Tavern, Ely Place, Holborn Circus, Cambridgeshire".
Why does this place agree with me so well? Why does it evoke in me the peculiar feeling of being elsewhere – the sensation both calming and disturbing? Is it due to the fact that as a Ukrainian-born Russian with an Australian passport and British residence I am a thoroughly "dislocated" person myself?
Whatever it is, Ely Place never fails to charge my batteries with the high-octane energy of discovery. Making a discovery is like writing a poem, for which, if we believe Boris Pasternak, one doesn't have to look up in the sky (or to board a long-haul flight – to paraphrase and to "update" the classic slightly), since there is plenty of it scattered in the grass underneath our feet. One only has to go to the trouble of spotting it, bending down and picking it up. The very existence of Ely Place is a proof of the fact that most wonderful discoveries can be made right on our doorstep – in Europe, in Britain, or even in London which we think we know so well, whereas in actual fact we don't.
Ely Place can be also regarded as a fully operational model of one of the most obscure features of modern Europe – the existence on its map of a handful of the so-called enclaves (also known as "exclaves" or "outliers") – parts of one country totally surrounded and landlocked by the territory of another.Many of them appeared in the Middle Ages – after the Treaties of Madrid (1526) and of Westphalia (1648), the latter ending the Thirty Years War and creating diverse and independent principalities which made the map of Europe resemble a sloppily manufactured patchwork quilt. Others resulted from landownership disputes, or plain mistakes. With the advent of capitalism, Napoleonic wars, creation of German and Italian states and the Swiss confederation, most of the enclaves were eventually re-attached to their mother-countries or swallowed up by host-states. Verenahof, a German village in Switzerland, was the last European enclave to lose its status as recently as in 1964, when it was happily absorbed by the Swiss.
If not to count Vennbahn, a former Belgian railway (now a cycling path) cutting into Germany south of Aachen to form several Belgian "pockets", and three Alpine Austrian villages that can only be accessed from Switzerland or Germany (so-called "pene-enclaves"), only four "proper" enclaves can now be found in Europe. They are: Campione d'Italia – an Italian town in Switzerland; Llivia – a Spanish (or rather Catalan) town in the French Pyrenees; Busingen – a German village in Switzerland; and Baarle-Nassau/ Baarle-Hertog– a unique Dutch/Belgian municipality comprising twenty two patches of Belgium and eight – of Holland.
It took me months to locate and to visit all four. The enclaves' near-obscurity is a shame, for their ambivalent and often ambiguous status makes them ideal for studying the increasingly cross-cultural and cross-national character of Europe. There are no better places for exploring the growing interdependency of European nations, further boosted by the introduction of the Euro, as well as their struggle to preserve their ethnic, cultural and linguistic peculiarities. Politics aside, each of them is resplendent with fascinating (often schizophrenic) idiosyncrasies of everyday life making these geographical and historical anomalies into perfect destinations for an inquisitive, knowledge-hungry traveller.
Having come to explore Campione d'Italia, I was put up at a hotel in Como, about 20 km away, and had to cross the Swiss-Italian border several times a day. This was irritating due to long tailbacks and the unpredictability of the Customs officers who would occasionally wave my car aside for inspection. Being part of Italy, Campione is nevertheless not part of the EU (it is excluded from membership by a special Protocol), although its residents as Italian passport holders have the right to live and work in any EU member country - but not in Switzerland, on whose territory Campione is located. What a mess! No wonder, Kristina, a local journalist, confided in me that she didn't know who she was: "In Switzerland, they take me for an Italian, whereas in Italy, they dismiss me as a Swiss."
To add (Swiss?) apples to (Italian?) oranges, I soon discovered that although the residents of Campione slipped Italian voting papers into Italian ballot boxes choosing from the competing parties in the Peninsula, they received their salaries in Swiss francs, to suit the prices that were Swiss. The safeguarding of law and order was entrusted to the Como-based Italian police unit, and every time a policeman went home after the beat, he had to leave his weapons in Campione, in accordance with a Swiss law forbidding foreigners to carry arms across Switzerland.
The Campionese drove around in cars with TI number plates for Ticino, the neighbouring Swiss canton, and carried Swiss driving licences, but mailed their letters with stamps of the Italian Republic. Paradoxically, they were not expected to show their Italian passports when going to Switzerland, but were routinely checked when travelling to their native Italy. "I always have my passport with me, just in case," said Fedra, my Campione-based guide.
It all started in the year 777, when Totone, a local landowner, tried to buy an indulgence for his sins by donating his holdings, including the fishing village of Campione, to the Basilica of St Ambrose in Milan. As a result, Campione fell under the rule of the Milanese ecclesiastical authorities, and not those of nearby Como, as would have been more logical. Miraculously, this illogical bond survived all the ups and downs of history, including Napoleonic wars and numerous attempts by the Swiss to reclaim the village for themselves.
Campione's modern townscape is stunning: narrow streets winding up and down the hill; mountains, spotted with red-roofed houses, as if suffering from measles; the mirror-like surface of the Lugano lake. This Italian town looks and feels distinctly un-Italian – in its tidiness, in the absence of washing on the balconies, in the quiet demeanour of the locals who seldom gesticulate and/or raise their voices. Its spotlessly clean Italian coffee-shops sell inimitable Italian espresso, for which you have to pay in Swiss francs. Two seemingly incompatible life-styles packed into one square kilometre of the town, once poetically compared by Giovanni Cenzato to "a little Italian boy wearing a Swiss costume".
In his 1891 Handbook to Southern France, Karl Baedeker - somewhat disdainfully - referred to Llivia as "a dirty village of ancient origin with some ruins remaining". It is a pity that the great guide-book writer overlooked the most interesting feature of Llivia - the only Spanish enclave in Europe.
Founded by ancient Romans, Llivia had been a pawn in Franco-Spanish struggles up until 1659, when the Peace of the Pyrenees Treaty gave thirty-three "villages" (sic) in the Cerdagne Plain to Louis XIV of France. The French thought that Llivia was included in the transfer, but the Spanish regarded the territory not as a village (pueblo), but as a town (villa). Having spotted the discrepancy, the patriotic residents of Llivia, who wanted to remain Spanish, claimed that the Treaty had nothing to do with them, and the French had to agree. So we may assume that the enclave status of Llivia was the result of a simple historical boo-boo.
Today's Llivia is much less "dirty" than it, allegedly, was in 1891, and its per capita rate of recycling bins must be one of the highest in both France and Spain. Yet the hooray-patriotism of its 1000 inhabitants remains unchanged. Modern Llivia is fiercely Catalan, with very few people willing to speak French to a visitor – an unusual scenario for a village, sorry… a "town", totally surrounded by France.
A huge red-and-yellow Senyera – Catalonia's national flag – stood in the corner of the modest office of Josep Alcalde, Llivia's 36-year-old Mayor, a member of the United Catalonia Party, which he himself described as "moderately nationalistic". He told me of a letter he received the day before from a near-by French village a couple of miles away. The letter took fifteen days to arrive, for according to EC regulations, all inter-EU mail has to go though a sorting office in Amsterdam. "I could have walked there myself in half an hour and picked it up," he shrugged. The Mayor also complained that to call the same French village from Llivia he would have to dial an international code – the irritating discrepancy that I had experienced myself when my France Telecom phone card was rejected by a local public phone.
Unlike in Campione, which is not going to benefit from the introduction of the Euro in February 2002 (Switzerland is not an EU member), they can't wait for the Euro in Llivia hoping it would help clear at least some of the financial mess in the town, where both French francs and Spanish pesetas are freely circulated. "Our prices are much lower than those in France, and a glass of the same French wine that will cost one Euro there will only cost half a Euro here, so we are bracing ourselves for the French invasion," smiled the Mayor.
As the owner of the town's biggest hotel, "Llivia", he certainly knew what he was talking about, although his French wine analogy wouldn't have gone down well with the Mayor's own brother – the proprietor of Llivia's oldest restaurant Can Ventura. Only five out of a hundred wines on his impressive wine list were French.
… At noon, Llivia goes dead. Its narrow cobbled streets become deserted, and elaborately carved wooden shutters fall upon the windows of rustic stone cottages, as if the houses themselves shut their eyes for a siesta – a Spanish tradition, not observed in the near-by French towns. A warm stateless breeze brings a faint duty-free fragrance of wild flowers from the French Pyrenees across the border.
Busingen – a small German enclave in Switzerland – cannot be found on any maps. This must be due to the fact that it is actually a suburb of the Swiss town of Schaffhausen, where the residents of Busingen routinely do their shopping. Few of them, however, would choose to go shopping in their native Germany. Firstly, because they would have to show their passports or ID cards at the German border – the procedure they are spared when going to "foreign" Switzerland. Secondly, there are very strict quotas on the amount of German goods these German subjects can bring back to Germany (!): no more than half a kilo of meat, 125 grams of butter or a kilo of sausages. The quotas are imposed by numerous Swiss and German customs posts scattered along the erratic Swiss-German border that goes totally haywire in the Busingen-Schaffhausen area. In one instance, it runs across the beer garden of a Busingen pub, so that the tables are in Switzerland, and the bar – in Germany. Luckily, the customs posts are only open (or shall we say "closed"?) from 8 am to 5 p.m., except for weekends and public holidays, when they stay closed (which – obviously – means "open"!).
The reason for this frontier madness is that - not dissimilar to Campione -economically Busingen is Swiss, whereas politically it is German, albeit not part of the EU. Busingers get their salaries in Swiss francs – the only currency allowed to circulate in this one-street German village, but, being German citizens, they have to pay German income taxes, which, as I was assured by delightful Ursula Barner, Busingen's Deputy Mayor, was the bane of the villagers' existence. True, Swiss prices are high, but the taxes are relatively low, whereas in Germany it is the other way around: lower prices and very high taxes. In Busingen therefore they have the worst of both worlds, so to speak. "If the situation doesn't change soon, all villagers will end up in Switzerland," Frau Barner remarked sarcastically.
Alas, realistically speaking, this is rather unlikely. Indeed, Busingers are free to shop in Switzerland, but those willing to work (let alone to live) there need a hard-to-obtain permit, normally granted after many years of residence. A classic Catch-22 situation. And a possible nightmare scenario for a unified, yet thoroughly "dis-united", Europe of the future…
German inventiveness and practicality help Busingers ease the burden of their duality, if only slightly. The village has its own can number plates – "BUS", but two different post codes: Swiss and German – to avoid the missives from neighbouring Swiss settlements going to Amsterdam, no doubt. In the village centre, next to modernistic Burgerhaus, two differently coloured public phone boxes – Swisscom's and Deutsche Telecom's – stand next to each other sparing the locals the expense of international phone calls when phoning the nearest cinema or supermarket.
In their daily trials, the residents of modern Busingen are reaping the consequences of their own ancestors' unforgiving pride, better known as stubbornness. In April 1693, Eberhard Im Thurn, a popular ruler of then Austrian Busingen, was kidnapped and put in prison in Schaffhausen for a religious offence - to the villagers' considerable dismay. He was released in 1699, but Busingers had a long memory, and when Schaffhausen tried to incorporate the village into the Swiss federation in 1723, they came out adamantly against it. Eventually, Busingen fell under German control where it still remains as a living reproach to Schaffhausen for the mistreatment of its leading citizen. The fact that Swiss flags in the windows of sturdy Busingen houses by far outnumber German ones, however, can be seen as a sign of the villagers' belated readiness to swallow their pride after all.
If Busingen strikes a visitor arriving by accident as eccentric and "wrapped in veil bizarre", then Baarle-Nassau/Baarle-Hertog - a cluster of Belgian and Dutch enclaves to the south of Breda - can be safely described as insane. The border here resembles an ECG of a patient on the brink of a heart attack. Like a hank of wool thread, chased by a playful kitten, it thoughtlessly leaps across streets and squares cutting through houses, offices and shops. The confusion is such that every single building in town has to be marked not just with a number, but also with a tiny Dutch or Belgian flag underneath it. Out of three houses, standing next to each other on the same side of the same street, one can be in Belgium, one in Holland, and the third one – split between the two.
"If the border runs through a house, it is better for a baby to be born on the Belgian side, because child benefits are higher in Belgium," Anne-Miek Smit-Rygersberg, a local Dutch artist with appropriately double-barrelled first and last names, explained without a shade of irony. In rural Baarle, it is still common to give birth at home with the help of a midwife.
Anne-Miek, who, according to her own words, was born in the house on the edge of Baarle, where smugglers often popped in "for a cup of tea" and went to a Belgian school "because it was closer", showed me her two purses – one with Dutch guilders, the other – with Belgian francs. "I buy medicines at the Belgian pharmacy where they are less strict with prescriptions, but flowers, cheese and spirits - at Dutch shops, where they are cheaper," she said.
The most thriving trade in the Belgian parts of Baarle is in … fireworks (I counted half a dozen fireworks shops in the town centre), which can be legitimately sold all year round in Belgium, but only on Christmas eve in Holland. The Dutch bits of the town respond with numerous sex-shops, not allowed anywhere near public buildings in Belgium, but thriving on the Dutch territory, next door to (and across the road from) the Belgian town council in Baarle.
There is literally no end to the duplicity of life in Baarle – the town with two Mayors (Belgian and Dutch), two sets of political parties, two town councils, two fire brigades trying to beat each other to conflagration sites, two post offices, two refuse collection services, and so on. It is the only town in the world where police forces of two different countries share not only the same police station building, but also same rooms, with respective filing cabinets painted in the colours of Dutch or Belgian national flags.
The existing twenty-two Belgian and eight Dutch enclaves that constitute modern Baarle are a huge improvement to 1843, when, in the aftermath of the Treaty of Maastricht, 5732 parcels of land between just two border posts: 214 and 215 – had their nationalities laid down separately! This "duplicate" 214/215 border post now stands in the town centre as evidence of Baarle's persisting split personality crisis, started in 1203 by the Duke of Brabant, who – in a gesture of gratitude and appeasement - lent a chunk of his territory to Godfrid of Schoten, the powerful Lord of Breda, but kept all inhabited - and hence tax-paying - bits (houses, farms, etc) for himself. In the course of centuries most dwellings disappeared, but the patches of land on which they stood retained their original "nationhood".
It is not just people that go crazy in Baarle – this natural testing area of "unified Europe". I came there in the company of two friends, armed with mobile phones, one of which showed "Belgium", the other – Holland on their mini-screens, whereas the operator's messages in both switched into French! And yet, some of the town's features gave me hope that united Europe and the Euro might eventually work. Here's an example. Several years ago, Belgium and Holland had different licensing hours which the landlord of one of Baarle's pubs, dissected by the frontier, blatantly exploited by installing a set of doors on each side of the border. When they stopped selling alcohol in Belgium, the patrons hastily left through the Belgian door only to re-enter immediately through the Dutch one and to carry on boozing. The situation was so ridiculous that eventually both states had to harmonise their licensing laws. More often than not, an absurdity has to reach its apogee to trigger authorities into action.
My visits to the enclaves, these tiny specks of historical dust on the face of modern Europe, made me think that the only way for the "common European home" to work was economic harmonisation without cultural interference. And Baarle's graceful Dutch Church of St Mary (the town has two separate Roman Catholic parishes – Belgian and Dutch), built by Belgian architects with Belgian red bricks could pass for the best symbol of European unity I had come across so far.
At the end of my journey, I was pleased to conclude that with all its hassles, life in modern European enclaves is a good example of the triumph of human spirit and ingenuity over the shenanigans of international bureaucracy.
Useful links
The latest edition of Vitali Vitaliev's book "Passport to Enclavia. Travels in Search of a European Identity" was published by Thrust Books and is available from Amazon.co.uk, alongside the book's Italian and other editions