Michael Palin's New Europe

In Medjugoree Michael encounters a visionary who first started having visitations from the Virgin Mary 25 years ago. In Dubrovnik he meets with lute maestro Edin Karamazov who made the recent Songs from the Labyrinth album with Sting. Michael ends this visit with a sheep sacrifice which heralds an afternoon of music and hospitality typically Balkan.

Michael travels from Transdniester, a breakaway state from the Republic of Moldova, to the Vaser Valley in Romania, where he joins 80 lumberjacks as they board a wood-fired steam train. He finally ends up at Bran Castle in Transylvania, the ancestral home of Vlad the Impaler and alleged home of Bram Stokers Dracula.

Michael travels from Tallinn in the north, through Latvia, to Lithuania in the south, sailing into the Baltic from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, formerly East Prussia. In Estonia he visits a pyramid house and samples the medicinal properties of leeches. In Latvia he visits one of the most secretive places of the Communist-era, the astronomical telescope.

High in the Tatra mountains of Slovakia, Michael skins a pig, and learns how to make sausages. He then departs to Brno to visit Tibor Turbas famous mime school, where he is asked to mime a cockerel. Travelling in a DC3, used during the Berlin airlift, he visits the island of Rugen, built by Hitler for his KDF (Strength through Joy) programme.