We haven’t seen much of what I’d call native dress in western Europe in recent years, although we did when we first started biking over here. I remember seeing women walking in the road in rural Portugal with colorful dress and balancing baskets and vessels on their heads when we biked there in 1996, but I don’t know that you’d see that now. Also, I’m not sure what native architecture even would mean in the context of Europe, when some of its residential architecture goes back Many centuries. You can still see many places in France, for example, where people are living in structures built into the walls of cliffs that at least externally look like they probably haven’t changed in centuries, if you look past the power lines and satellite dishes.
There are still pockets though, especially in backwater places in Spain, Portugal and Greece. You still see folks, older women in particular, walking along the road in traditional black dress.
Albania though was something else again when we visited it this spring. It felt like we had been thrown back into the past by at least a few decades, especially when we left the more touristy coastline and passed through villages still off the fast-modernizing roads. This was also the case in Macedonia, around Lake Prespa in particular.
We haven’t seen much of what I’d call native dress in western Europe in recent years, although we did when we first started biking over here. I remember seeing women walking in the road in rural Portugal with colorful dress and balancing baskets and vessels on their heads when we biked there in 1996, but I don’t know that you’d see that now. Also, I’m not sure what native architecture even would mean in the context of Europe, when some of its residential architecture goes back Many centuries. You can still see many places in France, for example, where people are living in structures built into the walls of cliffs that at least externally look like they probably haven’t changed in centuries, if you look past the power lines and satellite dishes.
There are still pockets though, especially in backwater places in Spain, Portugal and Greece. You still see folks, older women in particular, walking along the road in traditional black dress.
Albania though was something else again when we visited it this spring. It felt like we had been thrown back into the past by at least a few decades, especially when we left the more touristy coastline and passed through villages still off the fast-modernizing roads. This was also the case in Macedonia, around Lake Prespa in particular.
5 years ago