Cemeteries

January 2021

This is the second 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. 

There are cemeteries everywhere in Sarajevo.

Some are large, like the Kovaći cemetery on the east side of the city, located just below the hill of the Yellow Bastion. Some are ancient, like the nearly 500-year-old Jewish Cemetery, the largest of its kind in Southeast Europe; it contains graves dating back nearly five hundred years, when Bosnia was one of the few places in Europe where Jews were welcomed. Some are tiny, small squares of grass located in the midst of the city or visible on a hilltop high above. During the war, residents converted “parks, schoolyards, gardens, alleyways” into burial grounds for the nearly 12,000 military and civilian fatalities. As a prominent Sarajevo funeral director proclaimed at the end of the war, “Sarajevo is the biggest graveyard in the world”.

The solemn gravestones and tombs provide a captivating glimpse into this ancient city’s history, into the life and death of its denizens through the centuries. And the countless graves bearing numbers between 1992 and 1996 convey palpably the human cost of the Bosnian war.

Many of the dead were of middle age when they died, born between 1940 and 1960. When the oldest were born, the Nazis still occupied Yugoslavia; when they died, the Serbs did. I wondered if they’d lost family in that first war, if they had grown up hearing tales of a fallen aunt or uncle or grandfather. Perhaps their children tell similar tales about them today.

There was the grave of a man who was born in the same year as my father (1965) and was killed the year we moved to America (1995). I marveled at how the divergent threads of destiny led one man across the world to prosper in California, and the other to breathe his last on the streets of Sarajevo.

Still others were barely adults when they were killed, born in the 1970s and dead before they reached twenty. Many of them had probably been soldiers, spending what should have been the best years of their lives fighting for their country’s life. Had they been scared to die? I wondered what thoughts had flashed through their heads in their final moments, as the searing metal rent their flesh and ripped their futures away in a blinding flash of pain.

I came across the grave of a little girl (1985-1994). Nine years old, one of the nearly 1,600 children killed during the siege. I wonder if the rest of her family had survived, whether the mortar or shell or rifle that took her life had spared her father and brother and sister. I thought of how many times her mother must have cried to God in the ensuing years, wishing their places had been switched, that the round had instead landed two meters to the left and taken her life instead of her daughter’s.

I wandered through the grass, surrounded by a sea of white stones gleaming in the afternoon light, every single one marking a life cut short. The accumulated sum of human experience--brief moments of joy and tiny beautiful sorrows. Hopes, dreams, fears, insecurities, memories. Love. A great mass of potential energy that will never turn into motion--innumerable songs unsung and stories untold. Twelve thousand flames extinguished, their light forever stolen from this world.