SARAJEVO, Part IV, Walking and Eating

I should have already mentioned our terrific tour guide, Neno.  Anyone taking a trip to Sarajevo should consider taking one of his free tours of the city (after which you should give him a generous tip, of course). Neno is a 27-year-old Sarajevan who has a passion for history in general and his city in particular.  He crammed an awful lot of information into three hours of walking around the city, which is just the way we like it. We have taken several free tours like this one in cities around the world, and Neno is one of the best guides we've had.

This post will cover all the places in Sarajevo that I haven't yet written about. If it seems a bit random, well, it is.

Marsala Tita (Marshal Tito) Street is the main street that runs parallel to the Miljacka River, which bisects the city.  In general, the various peoples who live in the Balkans liked, or at least respected, Tito, especially in hindsight, as he was the only man who was actually able to hold this diverse region together. His death was the beginning of the death of Yugoslavia.

SARAJEVO, Part III, Religion

At the beginning the Bosnian War of 1992-1995, Bosnia-Herzegovina had three main religious groups: Muslims (known as "Bosniaks), 44%; Orthodox Serbs, 31%; and Catholic Croats, 17%. There was also a small Jewish community.

An official census has not been taken since the war, but in 2002, according to Wikipedia, it is estimated that about 80% of Sarajevo's citizens were Muslim Bosniaks, 11% were Serbian Orthodox, 7% were Catholic Croats, and 2% were others--Jews, Romas, etc. The war obviously had a great impact on the city's diversity.

Each of the four main religions has a major building within a few blocks of each other in Sarajevo.  All four buildings miraculously survived the war, although the Muslim mosque was severely damaged and required extensive renovation.

The neo-Gothic Sacred Heart Catholic Cathedral was built in 1884-1889 during the Austro-Hungarian period and was modeled after Notre Dame in Paris. It was damaged but not destroyed by shelling during the siege, and has been beautifully restored.

Note our terrific guide Neno in lower right corner of photo

SARAJEVO Part II, War

NOTE: Although this is a post about traveling, today it is necessary to include quite a bit of history because one cannot begin to appreciate Sarajevo without a basic understanding of its past.  I'll keep the lecture as short as I can.

Aside from hosting the 1984 Winter Olympics, Sarajevo is probably best known for two things: for being the site where World War I began, and for being at the heart of the Bosnian War of 1992-1995.

On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the massive Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife Sophie were assassinated as they drove in an open-topped car near the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo, fulfilling Otto von Bismarck's prophesy that "One day the great European war will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans."

SARAJEVO, Part I, Reading

One of the things I like to do when I travel is deepen my experience through related reading. For any given trip, I can usually find a book about a place, a person, or an event related to one of our destinations.  For example, on our trip last summer that included Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Germany's Rhine River, and Amsterdam, I read these related books:

The Year that Changed the World, which outlines the escalating revolutions all over Europe and key people such as Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia and Miklos Nemeth in Hungary who helped bring about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union

The Lady in Gold, a book about Gustav Klimt and the Vienna Secession movement

Van Gogh: The Life, an exhaustive biography of the incredibly complex artist

For our most recent trip to the Balkans, three of the books I read were about Sarajevo.


The first, The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway, is a novel based on actual events.  In 1992 during the siege of the city, a musician named Vedran Smailovic, a cellist in the national orchestra, often played his instrument in the ruins and rubble left by the bombing as a way to commemorate and honor the dead.  He also played at funerals, even though they were often the target of snipers.

Galloway created a character based on Smailovic who positions himself in the middle of a town square where he saw many of his friends killed by a mortar attack while they were waiting in line to buy bread. In the direct line of sniper fire, he plays at the same time and in the same place for 22 days to honor the 22 dead.  The story is told through the eyes of three people who watch him intently every day--a young woman sniper trying to protect the cellist, a man attempting to find water for his family, and a man working in a bakery and trying to understand the brutality around him.

While the story is fiction, it draws its images from actual landmarks and events, and I was moved by the courage the characters showed in the midst of horrible conditions.  I did learn that Smailovic was upset that a western writer had "stolen" his story as the basis for this novel.  I can't really blame him for that.

ON THE ROAD TO SARAJEVO

After a quick breakfast (couldn't pass that up), we started out for Sarajevo at 8:00. On our way out of Zagreb, we passed a long, colorful wall covered in street art. Unfortunately, we had 250 miles to go, and since Google maps estimated it would take us 4 hours and 45 minutes to get there and we had no time to stop, I had to get these images from the internet:

It reminded me of the painted sections of the Berlin Wall. When I got home, I discovered that there are a few hundred meters of wall covered with art, and that Zagreb city officials actually encourage local artists to update the art every few years. If I ever get back to Zagreb, I plan to spend some time at this wall on Branimirova Street.