Normally travel sites are keen to espouse the romantic qualities of various destinations – early February was so cringeworthy for top 10 lists of cuddling spots in the sun that cynics everywhere spent a good two weeks vomiting up their disgust, pausing only to open a new browser window that started the whole thing again.

Well, here's the glorious exception.

Taking permanent residency in Zagreb, the Croatian capital, in October 2010, the Museum of Broken Relationships started off as an installation in 2006, and then a travelling exhibition, collecting an odd array of found objects relating to break-ups, from the relatively benign and comedic, to the truly tragic, culminating in a visitors book which encourages contributions. Curated by Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić, the museum has stopped formally soliciting donations from the embittered or nostalgic, and the strength of its concept has seen it make the shortlist for European Museum of the Year 2011, alongside such prestigious institutions as London's Victoria & Albert Museum.

Why not make a romantic weekend of it? That way, even if it goes wrong you'll be enriching the experience.

The toe-tag was finally filled out May 22 2006, when Montenegro quietly excused itself from its union with Serbia, ending the pretence of a single Yugoslav nation that had largely become a myth once the cancer of extreme nationalism began to gnaw at the aging bones of brotherhood and unity in the late '80s, now, the cadaver of Yugoslavia is to be interred alongside its carer, fondly recalled autocrat Jozip Tito, in the House of Flowers in Belgrade.

Still the most visited museum in the country, the House of Flowers at the Museum of Yugoslav History has received 20 million visitors in the last 30 years (more than three million in 2005 alone!), and with no entry fee, remains high on the agenda for any budget traveller in the Serb capital. Mostly filled with Tito's assorted gifts and clutter, as well as his office and tomb, historians from Bosnia and Croatia met with local officials in early February 2011 to plan a comprehensive exhibit on the history of their late federation.

“The exhibitions will be organised thematically and they will present development of the Yugoslav idea, creation of the country and its fall,” said historian Predrag Markovic to Balkan Insight. “The disintegration of the country will probably be placed at the exit and the space for that period is small. This has nothing to do with politics, but with the fact that we want to present whole and complex history on the country and there is just not enough space.”

The museum will present the history of the country from 1918 to the '90s with focus on the composite nations and the statesmen who influenced it, from across the political spectrum from the royal family though to the partisan hero turned president for life.

“We can think what ever we want about Yugoslavia,” concluded Croatian historian Hrvoje Klasic to the Jutarnji news site, “but that state marked the lives of generations, in a good and in a bad way. Yugoslavia wasn’t just the idyllic picture from propaganda movies where young people were smiling or hugging Tito, nor just the ‘dungeon’ of this or that nation or the country of persecution and repression.”
The funeral is planned for May 2011.

As of June 20, 2011 booming Hungarian airline Wizzair will become the first low cost carrier to fly to the Macedonian capital, running three flights a week from the utilitarian low cost Mecca of London Luton. Wizz CEO, Josef Varadi, told Utrinski Vesnik newspaper that they're also considering runs between Skopje and Frankfurt, Paris, Amsterdam and Barcelona.

With fares starting at £26.99 (31.95 euros) and construction underway on another terminal at Skopje Alexander the Great Airport, as well as renovations at Ohrid's St. Paul the Apostle Airport, the often overlooked Balkan nation is set to explode onto tourist itineraries.

Skopje Alexander the Great, run by Turkish operator TAV Airport Holdings since the long, slow death of MAT Macedonian Airlines which was banned from airports for millions of euros of unpaid fees and finally spasm into bankruptcy last January, has had its runway extended by 500 metres to deal with long-haul flights – making the airport bigger than both Belgrade Nikola Tesla and Sofia. With the improvements completed by October 2011, TAV hopes the to turn Skopje into a hub for returning members of the Turkish expat community and entice Turkish Airlines into setting up a base there.

Alp Er Tunga Ersoy, the Deputy Manager of TAV in Macedonia, told Southeast European Times, "Our goal is to make Skopje a popular regional hub by using its advantageous geographical location. Thanks to this investment, Macedonia will have state of the art airport facilities and Skopje's Alexander the Great Airport will be one of the main drivers of economic growth in the region.”

Critics remain, er, critical, but whatever the end result, it certainly bodes well for regular travellers to Southeast Europe - at least until TAV goes bankrupt as well.

The films of Emir Kusturica are essential viewing for any would-be Balkan traveller, from his earlier, bittersweet tales of growing up in communist Yugoslavia ('Do You Remember Dolly Bell?' and 'When Father Was Away on Business' being highlights) to his more volcanic celebrations of regional absurdity (such as 'Underground', 'Black Cat, White Cat' and 'Life is a Miracle'), resplendent with frantic pacing and brass bands. Now Kusturica could be adding to Bosnia and Herzegovina's physical landscape, not just its cultural one.

Having announced his intention to adapt Bosnian author Ivo Andric's Nobel prize winning 'The Bridge on the Drina', he's chasing funding in order to reconstruct the town of Kamengrad, near the titular Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge at Višegrad in Bosnia's semi-autonomous Serb entity, the Republika Srpska. He hopes if constructed, it'll be allowed to remain standing as a tourist attraction once filming is completed.

“In order to fulfill this grandiose cultural project, the state has to back it up,” said Kusturica to Glas Srpske. “As it stands, Serbia is interested to help filming Andric’s tale and the president of Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik, is willing and very eager to help [with the] construction.”

It won't be the first time Kusturica has build a town from scratch and Drvengrad, near Užice in the east of Serbia, was built specifically for 2004's sublimely beautiful 'Life is a Miracle', and remains not only his home, but home to art retreats, a ski resort and a film festival. If he recreates a similar feat for 'The Bridge on the Drina', it'll not only bring much needed tourism to the Republika Srpska which is often overlooked in favour of Mostar and Sarajevo, but provide a sorely needed celebration of Bosnia and Herzegovina's unique history and culture.

Still a widely read indictment of the brutal Ceausescu era, where the few danced on tables paid for by the backbreaking labour of the many, the continued appeal of 'Red Horizons', a tabloid-friendly tell all by former foreign intelligence chief Ion Mihai Pacepa, is almost indicative of its author's charmed life.

Defecting in July 1978 after six years as the dictator's chief security advisor and deputy head of his propaganda-spewing spy network, Ion Mihai Pacepa glossed over his own role at the top of one of the most repressive regime's in 20th Century Europe and instead wrote a populist exposé, recognised on its 1988 publication by the New York Times' David Binder as semi-fabrication by the “happy hooker of the spy trade.” A compelling read – one of the benefits of not letting facts get in the way of narrative – its recollections of Ceausescu's inner circle, their brutality and excess (of which Pacepa's role is never really acknowledged), are gripping, but its reading of international affairs, Cold War politics and Eastern Bloc intelligence gathering are absurd semi-fantasies, since discredited by US intelligence agencies who noted that Pacepa frequently changed his story to chime in with more recent reports.

The CIA no longer take him seriously, (saying of one of his texts, "Pacepa doesn’t connect the dots, he adds new ones."), but the ludicrous pomposity with regards to the role played by Romania in the career of Yassir Arafat (who apparently hadn't even considered the idea of American imperialism until the KGB suggested it!), amongst other delusions, remains core to 'Red Horizons' and its mouthwatering compilation of homophobic fascination, thinly veiled racism and outlandish conspiracy.

Fittingly for a man who once counted disinformation as his job description, Ceausescu's former spymaster has made it the heart of his career in the 'free world', having spent the last decade dancing like a circus bear for the American right – penning increasingly fantastical columns for various hawkish journals that seek to create an absurd, paranoid narrative of evil forces inspired by the Soviet Union and arrayed against the blameless United States. Highlights include his claims that Saddam Hussein's non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction were spirited away by Vladimir Putin, and bile spitting polemic about how John Kerry's rhetoric owed a debt to the Kremlin.

The fact to embellishment ratio has since grown so great that Pacepa is widely derided in Romania as a "snake oil salesman", spicing up the same old stories for the Western media. 'Red Horizons', a blend of sensationalist half-truths, is where it all began.

No stranger to architectural folly, Nicolae Ceausescu bulldozed the magic out of 'little Paris' to construct an egotistical, North Korea-style monument to hardline Stalinism. Now Bucharest is gearing up to add the region's largest cathedral to its overflowing CV, alongside the world's second largest public building (Ceausescu's Palace of the People, second to the Pentagon), the largest hotel and the largest shopping mall in South East Europe.

Construction of the Cathedral of the Redeemer is due to begin this year and wrap up in 2013, it'll cost 400 million euros, most of which comes from a much criticised government loan, and at 120 metres high, it'll dwarf the current tallest – Bosnia and Herzegovina's Church of St Peter and St Paul in Mostar – by just shy of thirteen metres.

Journalist Laurentiu Mihu complained to Balkan Insight, “This project is too much extravagant and a new cathedral is not a priority for Romania. Instead, the Church should do something real for the redemption and development of society by putting these enormous sums into a huge nationwide social project."

Bucharest passed the point of no return a considerable time ago and the sheer scale and crassness of the Communist-era reconstruction is undoubtedly part of its appeal, nevertheless with existing Orthodox churches and historic buildings crying out for a bit of love amid the smog and bustle, the Cathedral of the Redeemer is going to meet with little enthusiasm from travellers.

Skopje's plans to build a museum in the grounds of the Macedonian capital's Kale fortress has been halted mid-construction following complaints about its overt Christianity and demands of a Muslim equivalent.

The museum was to be built in the style of a medieval church over the foundations of a recently excavated 14th-century Orthodox church and although authorities claim it'll be entirely secular and devoted to architectural finds from the site, Macedonia's biggest Albanian party, the Democratic Union for Integration, has cried foul and demanded a mosque built adjacent.

"Our message is that Albanians also contribute to and have responsibility for the creation of cultural traditions in Macedonia," protested Izet Mexhiti, the DUI mayor of the Skopje municipality of Cair, to Balkan Insight.

Originally built in the 6th Century and reconstructed in the reign of the Emperor Justinian I in 10th and 11th Centuries, Kale fortress has been the source of some of the Balkan's most impressive archaeological finds, from woodwind instruments believed to pre-date the construction of the fortress by an incredible 3,000 years, to more recent, though no less impressive, haul of Byzantine coins.

Would it have killed anyone to talk about this before they cracked on with the construction, and come to some sort of solution without the seemingly inevitable factitious arm wrestle?

As long as politics and lack of dialogue between communities keeps Macedonia's fantastic history in storage, the victims won't be either one group or the other, it'll be both. Not only does Macedonia need to strengthen the shared culture that binds it, it needs a culture of adoration for its ancient sites and cultural heritage to rival (and doubtless, irritate!) its Greek neighbour, and lures in tourists by the coachload.