Following an eight-hour bus ride from Mostar, Jen and I arrived at a rather rundown bus/train stop on the derelict outskirts of a city that seemed twenty years behind the rest of the world i've known. Shoeless Roma children accosted us for money, and I felt very out of my depth. But we carried on...because at first glimpse, outer Saraevjo is rather sad--The Holiday Inn right next to the station stands as a monument of the war. It forms the outer curtain of something called 'Sniper Alley', where Serbian snipers incited terror upon the city's denizens for the best part of three years. Nearly 10,000 people were killed or went missing during this time.
In its history, the Sarajevo Holiday Inn also became the home for all foreign journalists and war correspondents from 1992-1995. It was the only working hotel in the city.
Similar to Mostar, the remnants of war were very visible--from pockmarked, shelled buildings to the deliberately bombed Bosnian National Library to the Sarajevo Roses.
A Sarajevo rose - the characteristic pattern of a mortar impact on pavement. Whenever a mortar killed more than three people the scar that the mortar shell left of the ground was filled in with red paint. These scars look like roses, thus the name. The main pedestrian shopping street in town was dotted with these up and down the boulevard.
From a less than auspicious start, we were directed to the tram and its tricky ticket system. If you've never made your way into a city blithely unaware of where you're headed or where you might sleep, let me recommend it to you now. The best adventures start here.
Straight off the tram we made friends with a rather dodgy looking local who offered us accomodation in his friend's private home located 15 minutes up a hill and next to one of the city's smaller mosques. Apparently the backpacks, hats and squinty eyes gave us away as tourists. We were greeted with sludgy cups of Bosnian coffee, a man who communicated with us in broken German and his daughter who spoke English. It was all rather confusing, but i'm still alive to tell the tale so nothing went too wrong.
When Jen was here five years ago, she was greeted by UN Peacekeepers guarding this cathedral:
and jobless, war-scarred men drinking tea near the monument dubbed 'Pigeon Square'. So today, despite any inward bitterness, Sarajevo has moved on, picked itself up and become what I imagine it was well before the war. Host of the 1986 Winter Olympics; haven to a thriving cafe culture and tourist industry; my favourite place in the Balkans; home.
more editing to come...
with the increase of altitude, the weather took a dip for the lower and we wore jumpers for the first (and only) time over the course of four weeks
Trg Oslobodenja, where everyone's an expert. I almost got caught in the fray of old, loud, shouty Bosnian men screaming to the players something that i translated in my head as 'don't move that piece, you stupid oaf, he'll put you in check mate in two moves!'
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