Depot or a Road to Fog

Andrija, the manager of the train station in Vinkovci, the popular depot, balances every day between two wastelands, the one in the railroads and the other in his own home. He is a Croatian War of Independence veteran with his traumas and sorrows, a living witness to the time when Vinkovci and, consequently, Slavonia were indeed ‘the bellybutton of the world’. Equally so he is a witness of the disaster that befell not only the railroad, but his town as well. His sons have decided to break with the age-old family tradition of working at the railroads, and went abroad as migrant workers or to the coast as seasonal workers. His marriage to Katarina is facing daily challenges of monotony, boredom and the impossibility of change.

Depot or a Road to Fog is a novel about Croatia today, a land abandoned by young people, where everything ends on a platform to nowhere, about people who need to find themselves to be able to understand others. About love that needs to be nurtured like a fragile plant, about a vanishing family. Ivana Šojat has written an homage to the railroad and a time when a town in the Pannonian plain had a future, to the people who fell asleep and woke up in a nightmare, but still hope to wake up.