AMONG MY MOST TREASURED possessions is my passport from the early 1990s when I was a foreign correspondent in Budapest. Its worn pages, filled with faded stamps, are a mini-chronicle of lost empires, permitting me entry to states that no longer exist such as Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the German Democratic Republic.
My favourite was issued on 2 April 1992: visa number three from the first post-Soviet Ukrainian embassy, located in the Hungarian capital. The visa and accompanying stamps take up most of a page.
