Objects left behind on the trail to Croatia Bihać (Bosnia and Herzegovina), July 2019

A few kilometres away from Bihać, along a national road, there is the official border with Croatia, and a check point to control documents and prevent migrants to cross the border. However, 500 hundred meters before the check point, on the right-hand site of the national road, a wood trail across the hills that separate the two countries begins. This is the trail that migrants do, mainly in the night, to try to cross the border and not been seen. The more the trail gest into the wood, the more objects left behind by migrants you can find. First, thermal blankets, heavy clothes, or shoes that may not be adequate to run in the wood; then any object that may look superfluous (such as kid’s toys, personal effects); than any piece of paper that could identify them (for the Dublin agreement, if caught by the police in any EU state, a migrant can be sent back to the first EU country he/she arrived in); then food and, right before the unofficial borderline dividing Bosnia and Croatia, water: thousands of empty bottles of water, as this is the last thing migrants get rid of before crossing and running not to get caught.