Sarajevo

January 2021

Sarajevo's Latin Bridge, where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assasinated in 1914

This is the first piece in a multi-part series on Sarajevo, in which I hope to capture and convey the various emotions I felt on my first journey there in 2019. 

Nestled in a narrow valley high in the Dinaric Alps of central Bosnia, Sarajevo sometimes feels like three cities at once.

If you walk through the warren of alleys in the historic center of town, you see Sarajevo as it was centuries ago, a city where Muslims and Jews and Christians dwelt together in relative harmony. This is one of the few cities in the world where you will find a mosque, a synagogue, and a church located within one block of one another--small wonder it was once called the Jerusalem of Eastern Europe. This former Ottoman stronghold became part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, a city where one spring day in 1914 Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and sparked the powder keg of the First World War

Take a weekend stroll past the BDI Center or along the pedestrian lane at the center of town, and you’ll see a vibrant, modernizing city, fighting to its feet after being dealt what many thought would be a fatal blow. Sarajevo today is full of life, of old markets, coffeeshops, and cultural centers. Children run through the streets, and in the winter you can take the old cable car up the old Olympic mountain for some of the best skiing in Eastern Europe.

Looming over it all, though, are the reminders of Sarajevo in the 1990s--bullet-scarred facades next to freshly painted ones, abandoned ruins along the main streets, the imprints of mortar shells on the sidewalk. This city was at the brutal center of the civil war that ripped Yugoslavia apart in the 1990s, a war in which it was besieged longer than any other city in modern history, One thousand four hundred twenty-five (1425) days of indiscriminate violence, cold, hunger, and pain. Most everyone older than 30 has some memory of the war--shivering in a basement as the artillery shells destroyed their house, the cries of a friend or family member as they bled out in the street, felled by a sniper’s bullet.

The fragile peace that holds this country together has done little to ease the underlying tensions that led to Europe’s bloodiest recent war. Indeed, the Dayton Accords simply froze in place the state of affairs as they were in 1996, setting the military frontlines as the internal borders of Bosnia’s two semi-autonomous entities. Today, a weak tripartite government attempts to rule a poor country divided on ethnic faultlines, where there has been no reconciliation process between former adversaries, where Serbian politicians actively deny the criminality of the genocide they helped perpetrate two decades ago. It’s hard to shake the fear that this powder keg might explode again.

History comes to life in Sarajevo. You’ll drive through the two main streets with your tour guide furiously pointing left and right, highlighting the sites of key moments during the war (he was a lieutenant in the Bosnian army). Driving past a busy intersection, he’ll tell you of how five men lost their lives in a battle there. The street where he was almost shot by a sniper, today the site of a pharmacy. Zooming by in your van, you feel a bit of the claustrophobia and the fear he must have felt during the war twenty-five years ago. The hillsides loom high over you on either side; small wonder they used to call this street Sniper Alley. The city is so much smaller than you would expect--at points the Bosniak front line was barely 1000 feet wide. You can sense a bit of the fear that likely flowed through the soldiers holding that narrow stretch of ground, every minute wondering when the Serbs would come swarming down from the hills and across the river.

The lines of control during the war (1992-1996)

You visit the tunnel under the airport, (which was controlled by the UN and therefore technically neutral ground), dug during the war by Bosnian troops as the only link to the outside world. For three years this was the city’s only lifeline--carrying food and water and ammunition in, wounded soldiers and civilians out. The tunnel is barely three feet across and six feet high--you have to stoop to have a look inside. The roof is held up by rough wooden beams, and there are lightbulbs hanging along a long electric wire, illuminating the makeshift metal rails built into the ground. Your guide tells you how after he was shot through the leg they pushed him out of Sarajevo on a trolley running along those rails. How he proudly walked back in nearly a year later, ready to fight again.

This tunnel, barely six feet high and three feet wide, was Sarajevo's only lifeline during the siege

High up in the mountains south of the city, you can walk along the now-famous bobsled track, a decaying cement wreck plastered with graffiti–built forty years ago for the 1984 Winter Olympics. The surrounding area, offering as it does a panoramic view over the entire valley, was where the besieging Serbs stationed their artillery and mortars. They used those guns to rain terror and destruction into the city, indiscriminately shelling military and civilian positions alike. Two such attacks on the Markale Market in February 1994 and August 1995 respectively killed 68 and 43 civilians, maiming over 200 others. Your guide will tell you how one morning a few weeks after that tragic day, his company awoke to the sound of NATO aircraft bombing Serb positions in these very hills. The West, after years of doing nothing, had finally decided to act. That was the moment, he says, when they knew the tide of the war was turning

The hills above Sarajevo, from where Bosnian Serb artillery rained death and devastation down on the besieged city

Everyone in Sarajevo has a story, from the restaurant owner to the DHL driver to the old lady feeding stray cats in the park. That man over there lost his brother in the war. That woman buying groceries was going to become a surgeon before a mortar shell blew off her left arm. The old lady at the burek shop remembers what it was like to huddle around a small fire in the freezing cold, burning the legs of her dining table for an hour of warmth. The hostel where you stay was rebuilt on the site of its owner’s childhood home, destroyed by a grenade during the war.

Sarajevo simultaneously reminds you of the depths of hell and the incredible resilience that enables human beings to survive it. The people of Bosnia have stared death and devastation in the eye, met it, and emerged from the maelstrom battered but unbroken.

In many regards, I think that Sarajevo is somehow symbolic of so many other cities and settlements throughout the brutal history of humankind. Places that endured the horrors of war and destruction, unspeakable tragedy and poignant loss--whose residents somehow endured and rebuilt. Sarajevo is Nanking or Warsaw or Stalingrad in 1960, Grozny or Monrovia today, Aleppo and Mosul and Sana’a in twenty years.

A journey here is a sobering reminder of life’s inherent unfairness and randomness. In 1984, Sarajevo was the richest city in the wealthiest socialist state in the world--the bustling, cosmopolitan capital of a peaceful and stable nation. That year it would host the Winter Olympics, a “national fairytale” (War Childhood) and a stirring moment of national pride and unity. Ten years on, that same city it was a bombed-out wreck, whose 400,000 inhabitants lived like rats in the ruins of their houses, surrounded on three sides by their former countrymen, who sought to wipe them from the face of the Earth. Not one of its residents chose this fate--yet they had to live through its horrors nonetheless, bearing its trauma for the rest of their lives. Such is the dispassionate fickleness of fate--yesterday it was them, tomorrow it could be us.

The bobsled track, built for the 1984 Winter Olympics, now an abandoned relic of Sarajevo's past