It was a vintage year for Balkan skiing. In 2005, Serbia was back in the mainstream, featuring in the Thomson ski brochure thanks, in no small part, to Serbian-born Stevan Popovich, a 20-year veteran of the UK travel trade. In the same year, the other truly Balkan ski destination – in the sense that, like Serbia, it has slopes in the Balkan Mountains range – began once more to make inroads into the budget end of the UK market: as Andorra lost ground, Bulgaria gained it.
          Not coincidentally, I skied in the two countries that year. And both trips were memorable, even if the skiing was not very stirring. The visit to Kopaonik, Serbia's main ski resort, and to the capital, Belgrade, was full of incident. In the "new frontier" economy after the fall of Milosevic's post-communist regime, the few were suddenly making money, the many were trying to follow suit, and only the senior apparatchiks were still playing by the rules. At Belgrade airport's petrol station, the forecourt attendant bizarrely tried to charge me more than the amount displayed on the pump; and a representative of the state tourism organisation – such a cowboy that it was amazing he didn't wear chaps – commandeered my hire car and proceeded to spin it twice on the snowy roads of Kopaonik, avoiding the parked cars only through extraordinarily good luck.
          The skiing was pleasant and peaceful: the part of the slopes on which mines had been dropped by Nato aircraft during the Kosovo war was closed (as it still is, I believe). The central part of the resort, a purpose-built ski village modelled on the defensible monasteries of medieval Serbia, absolutely beggared belief. When I look back on the trip, during which I became hopelessly lost in a blizzard in Belgrade, it seems like a fantastical dream.
          Ask Popovich generally about Balkan skiing, on which he is a seasoned expert, and he becomes somewhat evasive. But that is for political reasons. The wars in the former Yugoslavia did great damage to Serbia's ski business (Kopaonik is right on the Kosovo border) and virtually killed off Bosnia-Herzegovina as an international destination, despite the Winter Olympics held in Sarajevo in 1984. They also made "Balkan" something of a dirty word. Although Popovich is clear that Romania and Slovenia are Balkan ski destinations – "They're both in the Balkan peninsula, aren't they?" – he understands why they don't emphasise the fact.
          Serbia is obviously close to his heart, and it is a disappointment that Kopaonik no longer features in UK ski brochures. "When we reintroduced it with Thomson in 2004/5, it was good value and sold well. At first we used BA flights into Belgrade, which was not ideal: the transfer was too long. For the second season we had a charter into Nis, which was much closer. But Kopaonik's bed base proved a problem: accommodation is limited, and the National Park location hinders development."
          A further difficulty was Serbia's visa regime, which made travelling abroad difficult. As a result, Kopaonik's prices were effectively set by the home market – at too high a level for budget skiers from the UK. The charter flights couldn't be filled, and after three years, Thomson dropped the programme.