Postcard from Belgrade: Come Visit our Plein-Air Propane Gas Tank Museum

Tuesday, July 22, 2025

The next time you're in downtown Belgrade, make sure to visit our plein-air propane gas tank museum. 

Postcard from Belgrade: the Venetian District

Friday, July 18, 2025

Known for its laid-back attitude and sun-drenched shoreline, Belgrade's Venetian District brings the Adriatic spirit to Gallatin County. 

With Dwight the Deer at Story Mill Park

Thursday, July 17, 2025

This looks like a diorama in a provincial history museum in mid-90s Bulgaria, but it's just the bike trail en route to Story Mill Park. 

Trailz

Thursday, July 10

One thing I miss about living in Bozeman is the accessibility to bike trails. In Belgrade I ride my bike to the supermarket, liquor store, and various other downtown locales when the weather is in agreement. Beyond the downtown area of Belgrade, which is small, there isn't much else to attract me as a bike rider. 

En route to Story Mill Park

Hike to Emerald Lake

 Friday, July 4, 2025

Hike to Lava Lake

Tuesday, July 1, 2025

N & P: Trimming the Tree Edition

Friday, December 11, 2020

This past Sunday I participated in one of my favorite Montana traditions: cutting down a tree and decorating it. 

The practice up here is to buy a permit for $5 at the hardware store, then go to a national forest and saw down a tree. Growing up in a pretty suburban neighborhood in Ann Arbor, and then really only living in large or large-is cities since then, I'd never experienced something like that. The first time I did it in Bozeman was on Christmas Day, 2009, when I went north of the Bridgers to cut down a tree with a group of local Russians. For the last several years I've been cutting down my own tree to the south of Bozeman, usually with a group of friends with whom I picnic, drink, and stalk trees. 

This year, of course, things are different. But there was a pandemic bonus: rather than the $5 that the rapacious hardware store extorted from us, now Montanans pay just $2.50 to get our permit online. Merci buckets, Recreation.gov!

It was nice to see some friends, outside at a quite socially distanced space. I brought a couple of beers and a turkey club sandwich and joined in the conversation with friends I hadn't seen for months. Then I borrowed a saw and cut down my tree, which I then dipped into an enormous vat of hand sanitizer. 

All in all, a nice day. And there was a strange feeling of nostalgia associated with it as well, as I had kicked off my quarantine back in March by taking down last year's tree. I wonder what the world will look like by the time I throw out this one. Better, I hope. 

And yes, that is a Santa Claus hat on top--purchased on the streets of Istanbul many a year ago. I've never been one for putting crosses or stars on the tree. Loyal readers of the JMB should know, at any rate, that the Borderlands Lodge is one of the last remaining outposts of secular Kemalism in Gallatin County. 

It's good to be in the mountains and, for the moment at least, healthy at the Borderlands Lodge. It's nice to have a tree, and even better to have friends willing to lend you a saw and set up a bonfire. 

And in the Eurasian Borderlands? What is going on there? Well, I thought you'd never ask...

Hunkering Down at the Borderlands Lodge

Friday, April 24, 2020

Well, it's been five weeks---no, wait...I just checked my calendar and actually it has been six weeks. Six weeks indoors, with a few exceptions. On the 12th of March, the day of my last classes before Spring Break, we got the news that we were switching to online education. Then, after a week of "break" that included more emails from my workplace than possibly any other workweek I've ever experienced before, we came back and started to teach online. 

We're just trying to stay above the fray
here at the Borderlands Lodge

It's been okay--I certainly can't complain. Given everything that's been going on, I frankly just feel lucky. I'm still getting paid, I can do my job from home--maybe not the way I like doing it the most, but I can still read, teach, and write. 

Reflections on a summer and the past seven years

Sunday, September 25, 2016

I wake up at around 6 and glance out the window. Through the cracks in the blinds I see that the sun is up, barely. Nevertheless, once I actually get out of bed thirty minutes later, the interior of my apartment is coldish. The windows were all left open a couple of inches the night before, but with the temperatures dipping into the low forties at night that's enough to make things chilly.  

Summer vacation had a snowy start

News and Propaganda: Snowy Summer Fun Edition

Sunday, May 15, 2016

It's been a while since we've had an N & P, but I couldn't help doing so this week amid all of the...free time that I seem to have now. 

Hang on a second, something seems somehow different these days? What is it? Oh wait--now I remember: school's out.

Things change in Bozeman pretty quickly in the wake of graduation and the end of the school year. There's still a fair bit going on downtown, but the area around the university (which is on  the opposite side of a large residential area) is so quiet these days. There's hardly any traffic, so the biking is a lot easier. That is, it's a lot easier to bike these days so long as you're not pedaling in the midst of a snowstorm. 

N & P: Musings of a Montana State University Story Highbrow

Friday, March 11, 2016

Things have been pretty spectacular lately up here at the Borderlands Lodge, and I hope the same has been the case for you. Over winter break I was in Bozeman, mostly, and the spring semester began at MSU in mid-January. 

This semester I'm teaching an upper-division class in Soviet History as well as the senior capstone seminar, and much of the rest of my time has been spent reading, writing, and submitting grant applications for a new research project that I'm proposing. 

Trying to stay human in a world gone mad...

Tuesday, December 8, 2015

Amid all of the horrible events that have been taking place recently, it's hard to feel good about the general direction of the world. The events of last weekend, and the response to it, are so sad, sickening, and predictable.

I hope people can retain their cool. 

 Let's not cave in to fear.

  










Really, though, the events of the past few weeks--and especially since the San Bernardino shootings and people's responses to them--have been particularly revealing with respect to who among our politicians can remain calm in an emergency, and who would freak out and panic. The folks who are crapping their pants and demonizing immigrants--especially Muslim ones lately--are the absolute last people that I would trust to run the country during a moment of peril. If this is how they respond to a mass shooting--something that is horrible for so many reasons but which, after all, happens on a regular basis in this country--how are they going to react during a genuine case of national emergency?

Feeling Autumnal at the Borderlands Lodge

Friday, October 30, 2015

Some people have written in, asking what's going on in the Borderlands. A lot, to tell you the truth, or at least it seems that way. I've been officially given tenure and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor, for one thing. This is a multi-step process at Montana State which began with my department submitting my research file for external review in May of 2014. 

Getting tenure isn't something that takes place overnight. After sending out my file to external reviewers, the next big step--in September of 2014--was to submit my tenure file, followed by my department's vote the next month. From my department my case went up the food chain to a college committee, then a university one, then the provost, and then the university president. 

There was even a big dinner held at one of the university ballrooms in the spring of 2015. We were each handed a "certificate of recognition" that nevertheless could not explicitly tell us that we were getting tenure or being promoted. But even after getting my letter from MSU's president in April of this year informing me that I'd made it through all of the votes (without a single vote against) at the university level, and even after the nice dinner, the decision wasn't official until the board of regents of MSU could confirm it at their meeting in the middle of September. This vote, which was apparently retroactive to the beginning of this 2015-2016 school year, is mainly a formality--the regents vote on all of the cases for tenure and promotion as a bloc, as far as I understand it. That's the vote that makes everything official here, and then only in November of this year do I actually see my raise (back-dated, I've been told, to August of this year), a year and a half after first sending out my file to the external reviewers.  

So, I guess you could say that it's been something of a drawn-out process.  

Friday News & Propaganda: May 22 Edition

Friday, May 22, 2015

Life has been proceeding apace up here in the northern Rockies, where upcoming travel plans have sent the Borderlands Lodge staff into a flurry of preparations. Mainly, I'm just trying to find ways of keeping my backpack from turning into a bookmobile.


Uncle Gabor and I are preparing for our upcoming night flight

News & Propaganda: Skoolz Out Edition

Friday, May 8, 2015

As usual, things have been quite busy lately up here at the Borderlands Lodge. Classes at Montana State ended on May 1, and now the summer is finally upon us.

So I guess I can say that life is pretty good. 



But enough with the chit-chat. Here's the N & P:

Autumn at the Borderlands Lodge...

Monday, October 27, 2014

Well folks, these have been pretty busy and exciting times up here at the Borderlands Lodge. My book, Turks Across Empires, is apparently going into production this week, which is very exciting, and is supposed to begin shipping within the next few weeks. Those of you with academic affiliations: get your library to buy the book! Once the hardcover copies have been sold out, TAE will hopefully go into paperback and presumably be much less expensive.

End of Summer Fun at the Borderlands Lodge

Sunday, September 14, 2014

Well folks, it's been pretty busy lately at the Borderlands Lodge. Longtime Borderheads might remember that I've been writing a book this summer, and much of August was spent poring over the final draft. I made an index for the first time in my life. I looked at cover proofs and wrote pithy advertising text. I did stuff I'd never done before. 

Are you a Turk across empires?

Once my work with the book ended (it's still slated for publication next month), I had to get busy with my tenure materials. One nice thing about the digital age is that most of the documents that I needed for my file were already on my computer, but there was still a lot of work to be done.

While I've been really busy with the book and tenure, in my spare time I've been trying to stay away from my computer. I've gone on a number of great hikes this summer, which has been fabulous, in addition to reading a lot (offline, ie on the couch with my feet up and a book on my belly) when I haven't been working on work and career-related stuff. That's not such a hard thing to do when you live someplace beautiful. 

Twenty years in the Turkic world N & P

Sunday, September 23, 2012 Up here at the Borderlands Lodge we're celebrating 20 years of life in the Turkic World. It was twenty years ago this weekend that I flew out to Turkey to begin what I thought would be just a year or two before I found something better to do. Twenty years later, Turkey and the Turkic World are still a huge part of my life. Go figure. How did it all begin? Well, if you've read by bio you probably know most of the details. I had been traveling around southeastern Europe in the Spring of 1992, fresh out of college and trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. The plan, to the extent that I had one, was to find a job teaching English somewhere. Turkey was far from my mind, though. Instead, I was hoping to find work in some of the newly opened-up parts of Eastern Europe, someplace like Prague or Budapest. Istanbul was supposed to just be a quick stop between Greece and Bulgaria. It didn't quite work out that way. Traveling in to Istanbul I met a Turkish kid who would end up helping out a group of foreigners from the train I'd taken, myself included. One thing led to another, and I ended up getting a job at Marmara University. I tell the story here, if you're interested. The carefree days of 1992

Ne zaman? Bo-zaman! Photos from Bozeman

Monday, June 4, 2012 Up here at the Borderlands Lodge, the weather is still gorgeous. This is the latest I've stayed in Bozeman during the summer. It's a damn shame I haven't spent more of the warm-weather part of the year here because I live in an incredibly gorgeous part of the world. But it's not always ideal for someone working on the Russian-Turkic borderlands to get away in the winter--especially if you want to work someplace like Georgia or the Crimea, where it's not only cold but also very dark in the archives and everywhere else.

Borderland ski report

Wednesday, March 7, 2012 Well folks, up here at the Borderlands Lodge we've had, of course, very little snow this winter. That sucks, from a skiing standpoint, even if that has made it easier for me to continue tooling around town by bike.  Finally, though, we had a good dumping of snow on Monday and Tuesday. I was itching to hit the slopes. Unfortunately, time would be tight. I had a meeting in the morning and would be participating on a panel in the evening. Nevertheless, I managed a quick drive up to Bridger. I skied Alpine, the easiest slope, which is still sunny in the early afternoon (parts of Bridger get dark a bit early). True confession: I'd always considered skiing a bit decadent. A bit like golf. Yes, you're in the great outdoors but you're getting in a car and driving in order to go down a hill they've developed. Expensive gear is important. I get it. But I'd skied as a kid, and have fond memories of ending a day at Boyne Mountain in northern Michigan, following my Dad down an empty tree-lined trail back to the hotel. I think this is one reason why I like skiing the Alpine lift at Bridger.