Sarajevo is a wonderful city. The people smile and say hello, help you with directions when lost, and are happy to answer most questions. You wouldn’t know that this city was bombed consistently for over 4 years, including a day when 2.5 bombs dropped a minute, from the outward appearance of the people. 300,000 citizens lived in Sarajevo at the start of 1992 and by 1996, at the end of the war, 110,000 had been killed via bombs, sniper fire, fire fire, and at the hands of men.
The war started after the death of Tito, the dictator of Yugoslavia. He self proclaimed himself the ruler of Yugoslavia - 6 countries and 2 providences, inhabited by 25 million people in the 1940’s. For over 40 years, he was a pretty benevolent ruler. He allowed freedom of religion and freedom of speech. Everyone had jobs and was taken care of. He just demanded that no one spoke ill of him or his region, otherwise his secret police would pay you a visit and ensure you loved Tito as much as everyone else.
In 1980 he died without a successor, so 8 presidents were elected from the various places (6 federations: Montenegro, Serbia, Macedonia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, and 2 provinces: Kosovo and Vojvodina) that were former Yugoslavia and a power struggle ensued. After small fights broke out amongst the different religious sects and countries, the Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, dubbed “Little Tito” (since everyone believed he acted similar to the real Tito), was elected to give a speech to bring the people together. It was immediately clear that after his first few words, he was anything, but Tito.
Slobodan Milosevic speech can be summed up by saying that he believed the Serbs were the superior people, being Orthodox, and they would fight to ensure that Serbia came out on top of all the former Yugoslavian countries. This started the segregation of the Serbs from the others in Yugoslavia and an ethnic cleansing of the Serbian Muslims in Bosnia, known as Bosniaks, by the Bosnian Serbs and Serbians. The 4 year war that terrorized Bosnia and Herzegovina citizens ended in One day, after the signing of the Dayton Agreement forced upon the presidents of BiH, Serbia, and Croatia by US President Bill Clinton, France President Jacque Chirac, and various other countries. Croatia was also fighting with Serbia, but it was over their independence from the rest of the Yugoslavian countries.
The agreement is said by the Bosniaks to have came about after a video leaked of United Nations soldiers working alongside Serbia soldiers illuminating Bosniak civilians being separated into women and men only lines. It is said, that the men and boys were then driven into the woods by the Serbian army, forced to strip naked while they dug their own graves, and shot dead. It took 6 days for the international community to do anything about the estimated 8000 men and boys that were killed after the video leaked. These people were hiding in Srebrenica, a city that the UN turned into a safe zone, after making the Bosniak’s 28th military division vacate. During the entire war, the 28th had managed to protect the city from siege and were considered the most powerful Bosniak army group in the country. According to the Serbians that we talked to, it is believed the war ended after the Serbians proved to the French President that more than 5,000 Serbians had been killed (they gathered any bodies they found as proof).
The Aussies and us all learned our history of the Bosnian War from different BiH tour guides in Sarajevo, so the history was a bit one-sided. Zejko, a through and through Serbian, tried to set us straight with his version, but I believe each interpretation is in the eye of the beholder. In both version lots of people died, it just varies on how the war started and ended.
We learned most of this history after going on a tour of the Tunnel of Hope. Since the Bosniaks were surrounded on all sides, the U.N. took over the Bosnian airport and helped the BiH citizens built a tunnel from the dangerous section to the free territories that stretched into the surrounding mountains. Anyone was allowed to transverse the 800 meter long tunnel that was only 1.6 meters high and 1 meter wide. A person could only go one direction in the tunnel at a time, and the direction changed every 2 hours. It took 4 months and 4 days to build the tunnel.
I had asked why people, who had to leave the safety of their homes, travel 12kms from the center of town, through sniper alley (yes, assholes shooting people), and avoid bombs, wouldn’t just stay in the free territories, but apparently there were Serbs hiding out there as well and the further people went into the mountains, the closer they came to being unwelcome by the Croatian army. So essentially, Bosniaks risked their lives several times a week or month to visit the black market sellers in the free territories so they could pay 3x the price for food and basic necessities before heading back into the fray of their beloved city. The currency of the war was not money, but cigarettes. Since everyone here smokes, I still can’t figure out how they didn’t light up all their “cash” before they had time to trade it.
But people survived and they are now thriving. The town looks amazing; modern buildings are sprouting up all over to mix with the 1800’s looking brick and mortar and daily life is continuing - people go to work, kids go to school, there’s laughter in the cafes and chatting on cell phones in the streets. If it wasn’t for the brown paint on the buildings covering bomb holes (left intentionally as a reminder), the glaringly obvious bullet holes shot through most buildings, or the Sarajevo Roses (red paint on the ground highlighting spots where missiles killed people), you would think Sarajevo a quaint little city with whimsical neighborhoods and gothic architecture.
Robby and I could have stayed there at least another day or two. We really only had one day to explore and we made the most of it. Did the walking tour in the morning which was overshadowed by an eerie wind, repercussions of the hurricane in Croatia the day before and Global Warming messing with the weather, so we spent most of the tour in a coffee house learning how to properly drink Bosnian coffee (like Turkish, but without cardamon). Apparently all of Europe was hit with strange weather and it went from 88 degrees to about 55, with our one day being raining, cold, and windy. But since we’re adventurers, we put on our rain gear and visited the Sephardic Jewish Museum, an 18 century home that had a film crew working in half of it, the newly built city library/antiquities museum, the Tunnel of Life, and we walked up a ton of steps to ride the newly reopened Cable Car to the top of Mount Trebević. We could’ve seen an amazing panoramic of the whole town had it not been covered in a layer of fog.
At the top, we got a little turned around before finding the abandoned 1984 Olympic Bobsleigh track nestled amongst over grown bushes and shading trees. The giant slabs of concrete lay discarded, their glory days long forgotten, broken in pieces by war or nature reclaiming her land, but the curving tracks, now covered in vibrant graffiti, lives on in 1001 Instagram photos and videos. History never really dies, it just evolves.
Robby and I had the whole track to ourselves as the stormy weather chased all the sightseers away. Apparently the track can get so swamped with selfie stick, photo clicking yuppies, you can never get a clean image. We did however manage to scare a family in a car as we walked out of the trees down the middle of the track that rose above the road they were driving on. I thought it was funny, not so sure about the parents.
With more rain approaching and the sun setting, we bid adieu to the deserted history and headed to meet the rest of our tour group for a nice dinner at the local brewery. They produce Sarajevska beers, really delicious ales that have a minute sweetness to them and are similar to blonds and ambers. After dinner, Mary, Ann, Robby, and I wandered a bit before finding the waffle shop we’d seen earlier. We ordered decadent waffles slathered in Nutella, apple pie filling, cream, chocolate bits, ice cream, and various other things that probably jumped our glucose dangerously close to diabetes. All in all, it was a sweet ending to a fulfilling day.
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