Srjdan, our Serbian innkeeper, is a perfect host. Knowing that we are bound to lose ourselves in the streets of Sombor, a Serbian town near the Hungarian border where the night before we had checked into his bed and breakfast with its opulent furnishings and paintings of lush Italianate beauties, he leads us to a dusty crossroads and points in the direction of Rastina, a tiny village where the road peters into a dusty track by a rickety watchtower. From here we can see the sparkling fence built by Hungary as it marches across vast acres of newly harvested fields of corn. We make our way toward the fence—a formidable ten-foot-high structure with double coils of razor wire affixed to metal posts sunk deep in the ground—and follow it for half a mile or more in the direction of a ruined farmhouse surrounded by bushes.
There are signs of activity on the Hungarian side—diggers and tractors creating clouds of dust as a second layer of fence is prepared. A police car draws up on the other side, and seeing our camera and tripod, an officer asks—in English, the lingua franca—what we are doing. “We are taking pictures for an exhibition,” we tell him. “We have permission from the Serbian police.” “You do not have permission,” he says, “because you are standing on Hungarian soil.” He points through the wire to a small white post that marks the official border, five feet on our side of the fence. International law requires that both countries must agree to the construction of border barriers. The Hungarians did not ask the Serbians for permission to build their fence. Instead they erected it more than three feet inside Hungary, ceding a de facto ribbon of territory to their Balkan neighbor.