The Baščaršija (old bazaar) in Sarajevo
You could say that the Bosnian War (1992 - 1995) placed this country on our itinerary. I wanted to come here because I grew up with peers who arrived in St. Louis as refugees from the conflict. They were my middle school classmates, my brothers’ soccer teammates, kids my dad coached on that team; their adult relatives were not only my mom’s colleagues at the International Institute, but also later her friends. St. Louis is home to the largest Bosnian population outside of Bosnia. If you want to sip Bosnian coffee in a streetside cafe or munch on cevapi and burek without traveling to the Balkans, you might just pay a visit to my Midwestern hometown.
So Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) had to be in our plans; I’ve long had a fascination with the place. And part of that fascination, if I’m honest, is the horror of the war that occurred here in my lifetime. In our weeks in BiH we wanted to better understand what happened, so we devoted a lot of time there to guided history tours, museums, movies, and books. When people invited conversation about their experiences and their take on the situation, we asked questions. I think it's important to remember that the conflict is recent and the visible scars remain. There are buildings left ridden with bullet holes as an intentional commemoration of the events, red and white “roses” (memorials painted into the ground over the remnants of artillery explosions and sometimes deactivated grenades lodged in the sidewalk), and vacant properties whose owners fled never to return, but whose ability to sell has been impaired by all sorts of jurisdictional red tape since the war. And even if one day the buildings are all repaired, the cemeteries located right in the urban centers will testify to what occurred. It’s impossible not to notice how many tombstones bear the years of this war.
But it’s equally important to recognize that life goes on for Bosnians. We did a ton of fun stuff, alongside other people having a bunch of fun. We spent two weeks in the country, mostly in Mostar and Sarajevo, with some day trips to Konjić for rafting, Kravice for waterfall swimming, and Lukomir for mountain trekking. There’s rich cultural and religious heritage from so many groups across the centuries – the ancient Illyrians, the Slavs, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Ottomans, Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, the Austro-Hungarian Empire – and you can track it across time just by observing the architecture. Case in point, the 16-km stretch of Sarajevo’s main thoroughfare alone takes you from Ottoman Era buildings to Austro-Hungarian facades to Yugoslav Communist block-style structures. If that’s not a sign that you’ll have lots of history to unpack, I don’t know what is.
What we learned Part I: “Bosna” means “running waters”
Neretva River through Konjic; Kravice waterfalls
Let’s start with Bosnia’s geography. It is absolutely beautiful. It’s not a big country, which became clear to us when each successive tour guide turned out to be on a first-name basis with the previous one. It might have had something to do with the fact that history tourism, as you will see in this post, is absolutely a commercial enterprise for many a youngish professional in BiH, lots of whom hold advanced degrees in history and/or are published authors, but have struggled to find good jobs.
Mostar is in the south, in the agricultural region called Herzegovina. At just over an hour from the border with Croatia, it was our first destination in the country. “Most” means “bridge,” and there are lots of them spanning the Neretva River around which the city is built. One bridge in particular, the Stari Most or “old bridge,” was constructed during the Ottoman period, commissioned by Suleiman the Magnificent in the mid-1600s. This incredible structure stood through the centuries until it was used for Bosnian military transport and thus shelled by the Croats during the war. A museum there has footage of the 1993 bombing, and it really makes an impression to see this structure that had stood for 427 years collapse in about 27 seconds. Fortunately, in 1997 engineers began reclaiming stones from the river to rebuild the Stari Most. In 2004 it reopened, and the daredevil guys who rile up a crowd for tips before plunging 75 feet into the Neretva were back in business.
Between Mostar and Sarajevo lies Konjić, a smaller city also built on the Neretva River. It’s small enough that when our rafting tour ended well in advance of our train back to Sarajevo, we quickly ran out of things to do besides just walk along the riverpath. Still, the float trip was fun. We met a group of Spaniards, gave a ride to some fishermen, and saw another photogenic fox.
In the center and north, you have hill and mountain country. We were going to do a much longer hike on the Via Dinarica, but it got rained out. Instead we did a day trip to Lukomir village in the highlands. It was a tiny taste of Balkan trekking, and I hope to get back for more.
Part II: “Sounds like a good idea to us”
Moving on to the “who.” The first post-Neolithic people in BiH were the Illyrians. (You might know them now as the direct ancient ancestors of ethnic Albanians.) In BiH they left behind enormous rock mound burial sites but then mixed with other invading people – Celts, Romans, Ostrogoths, Huns, and Slavs – and produced a whole new culture.
Christian Orthodox Church in Žitomislići; Bosnian Christian Church tombstone
So begins what one tour guide called the “sounds like a good idea to us” track record of Bosnians, welcoming in successive waves of new ideas with open arms. The Romans brought Christianity, which after the Schism became Catholicism, but by then had also absorbed elements of what became Eastern Orthodox, and ultimately went so far off in its own direction that there emerged an indigenous Bosnian Christian Church that both East and Western Rome called heretical.
Fast-forward to the 14th century. A series of feudal kings, or bans, attempted to consolidate power and built a bunch of mountaintop stone fortresses, some of which we visited at Počitelj.
Unfortunately their timing couldn’t have been worse, because just as they had gotten a hereditary monarchy up and running for a few generations, in came the Ottomans. Bosnia’s name and boundaries were retained, but starting in 1463 it became a territory of the Ottoman Empire.
Here was another good idea that the Bosnians, in broad strokes, welcomed: Islam. For one thing, while you could subscribe to a different religion under the Ottomans, your tax breaks and social roles improved if you converted. For another, Islam brought some vastly healthier and more sanitary habits into the culture – hygiene, medicine, and mass literacy. As our guide put it, “in France, they didn’t bathe and they stank, but they covered it up with perfumes. In Bosnia before the Ottomans, we stank…but we didn’t have perfumes.” Within Islam, another good idea: sufism, which you might know from the spiritual exercises of the whirling dervishes. We got to see an active tekke, or monastery/prayer house, dating from this era in Blagaj. Another great idea of the Ottoman period: tolerance. Sephardic Jews expelled by the Spanish Reconquista found a home here; Eastern Orthodox and Catholics too; those indigenous Bosnian Christians? – Historians are pretty certain they mostly converted to Islam in this period, as that church is no more.
The Ottomans lasted until the Austro-Hungarian Empire, after centuries of attempts documented in this museum we visited in Vienna, finally kicked them out. They paid homage to their predecessors, though, with the architectural style of Sarajevo’s National and University Library. A few Austro-Hungarian good ideas: urban planning, Europe’s first electric tram, and the railway network that still operates to this day. Sometimes it’s advantageous to be considered a backwater testing-ground for innovations intended for Vienna.
Part III: “We don’t joke about the Serbs”
That same war museum in Vienna has the car in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were assassinated by a Serbian nationalist. Sarajevo has the bridge where it happened.
And the rest is history - WWI history, which became WWII history, which set the stage for the rise and fall of Yugoslavia, which lit the fuse of the Bosnian War of the 1990s.
A fantastic tour, “The Death of Yugoslavia,” broke it all down for us. Here is my cliff-notes version:
WWI was horrific for everyone as we all know and, as happened in much of Europe, set the Balkans back a bit in development. But hey, at least they were on the winning side of that fiasco – at the Treaty of Versailles they were granted sovereignty. This new nation was called the “Kingdom of the Serbs, Slovenes, and Croats” until that became too contentious and was renamed the “Kingdom of Yugoslavia.” [Source of contention: Serbia had already enjoyed autonomy under Austria-Hungary and felt itself to be the rightful victim/complainant of WWI; therefore, Croatia and Slovenia really just existed post-war thanks to them, so they didn’t deserve the equal status implied by the kingdom’s title; also, the capital of this kingdom was Belgrade, yet another reason Serbia thought the Croats and Slovenes should stay in their lane].
Clearly, things were set up to go really well for this kingdom by the time WWII came around. Sure enough, when the Axis powers rolled into the Balkans they definitely didn't meet a united front. The Croatian Ustasha quickly collaborated, thinking something like, hey, maybe these guys aren't as bad as Serbia, and carrying out concentration camp atrocities that even stunned the Nazis. Everyone else in the region was occupied by 1941, resulting in the same tragedies as everywhere that National Socialism touched. And, as in other parts of Europe, by 1944 people had begun pushing back. These were the Partisans. They joined the USSR and the Allies and helped win WWII.
The Partisan Memorial Cemetery, Mostar
One Partisan leader, Josip Broz, better known to history as Tito, rose up out of the shambles of the state with the strength of the Communist Party behind him, and negotiated with the victors an independent nation called Yugoslavia. From the end of WWII to his death in 1980, he served as the strongman of Yugoslavia, courted by the East and the West as he crafted a socialist republic out of six separate nationalities: Montenegro, Macedonia, BiH, Croatia, Serbia (including special regions Kosovo and Vojvodina), and Slovenia.
After subscribing for his first few years in power to what is perhaps best called a “Stalin approach” – brutal murder or re-education of anyone who wasn’t an outspoken Partisan during WWII, a clampdown against any opposition party, an unforgiving “we must work to rebuild what the war destroyed” urgency – he broke, famously and publicly, with the Comintern. The next few decades were ones of progress and military might. Matt and I saw evidence of what our guide called “just a small fighter jet bunker” near Mostar. It was apparently nothing compared to the naval, air, and military posts Tito built throughout the country, stockpiling weapons of war in every republic…
…to tragic end. Over the decades Balkan people started to enjoy a much higher quality of life. Stable incomes, paid vacations to the West where the latest Italian name-brand goods were especially appealing. Into Yugoslavia’s command economy crept a whole lot of what looked like capitalism. Meanwhile, although extensive propaganda and national education attempted to generate a new-age “Yugoslav” identity, ethnic and religious differences plus historical animosities remained intact, and when Tito died (1980) and the wall came down (1989) and the USSR broke apart (1991), a united Yugoslavia, which had just in 1984 hosted the Sarajevo Olympic Games, was on its last legs.
Again I’m painting with incredibly broad strokes: Facing an imminent power vacuum, the Serbs wanted to maintain centralized power (remember: Belgrade was the capital and the military seat), but the Croats wanted a capitalist government and demanded the right to bow out of Yugoslavia and be their own nation. Slovenes too. Bosnians too. In the end, Slovenia fought a short war and won independence. Unfortunately for BiH, Croatia sat across one border and Serbia across the other, and both had people who identified as ethnic Croats (Catholic) or ethnic Serbs (Orthodox) inside BiH, and both wanted a slice of the land between.
This is how the Bosnian War started in 1992. At first it was Serbia vs. united Croats and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims). Then it became Bosniaks fighting two fronts: Serbia and Croatia. Then Croatia negotiated a separate peace with Bosnia in 1994 and jumped back on Bosnia’s side. This, by some accounts, sent the Serbs into the genocidal rage which resulted in such events as the Srebrenica Massacre of July 1995. This, in turn, elevated the concern of the international powers who in 1995 intervened substantially more than in previous years to help bring about the peace.
“The former Yugoslav states – we have our jokes. Friendly jokes,” our guide said. “Usually with Slovenia there’s not much to make fun of since they are so successful. We can only joke that they are so small. We fly over and say, ‘look – it’s Slovenia!’ ‘Where?’ ‘Oh, you just missed it.’”
“The joke about Croatia is that you have to be very careful with Croatia; they are too smart for their own good and too crafty for yours.”
“We Bosnians are the reverse – too dumb for our own good, too underutilizing of our strengths to be helpful to you.”
“And the Serbs – we don’t joke about the Serbs.”
Part IV: The War
As I admitted in the intro, I came to Bosnia wanting to learn a lot about the war, and we found that the nation certainly makes the information available to you. I’ll limit what I share here, though, to two recommendations.
One is to watch No Man’s Land (2001). Writer and director Danis Tanović based this on his own experience embedding with the Bosnian Army during the war. This movie will show far better than I could possibly tell some of the central tensions and traumas faced by soldiers in the conflict.
The other is to visit the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo. The museum is one of a few others like it in former conflict zones worldwide. It originated out of a book that a survivor of the Bosnian War compiled of short statements from other child survivors. These brief memories only scratched the surface of what people wanted to share, and so the concept of a museum showcasing longer stories paired with tangible items from each contributor came about. It’s a memorial to this terrible thing that happened to these people when they were children, because war always happens to children, right? Children are never the actors and perpetrators who make war, even if their lives do become bound up in the state business of it.
The museum is intentionally intimate. They want to give you the chance to absorb each person’s story. Every year a new rotation of stories from the collection is featured so that everyone who has chosen to share has their opportunity.
One of our guides, Mustafa, who lived through the almost four-year siege of Sarajevo in his teens, told us that it feels like that time was an entirely different life, like he saw it from the outside. "You know what I most wanted during my teenage years? – Just not to have to run all the time. I wanted to be able to get somewhere without sprinting to avoid bullets and explosions. Think about what that means,” he went on, “to have that be the desire I most recall from my teenage years. Not for a girlfriend, not for objects or future plans, but just not to have to run everywhere.”
So I think a museum like this is an important way to foster healing for a generation that came of age in wartime – it seemed like it allowed people to bring this experience that happened to them out into the open, to acknowledge and contemplate it, collectively.
Part V: "Perpetual Corruption Mobile"?
The war is over, but Bosnia is still a divided country: it consists of two “autonomous entities,” BiH and Republika Srpska, and the self-governing Brcko District, an administrative center balanced between Croat, Bosniak, and Serb leadership. All of this is part of the war-ending Dayton Peace Accords of 1995, aka the country’s standing constitution. Sound complicated? It is. Here are some anecdotes to give you a tiny taste of how this situation plays out in everyday life in 2023:
One: we went to see a historic Jewish cemetery in the hills above Sarajevo. To get there we had to pass briefly into and out of Republika Srpska. As we entered, our guide swiftly removed the FK Sarajevo decal hanging from his rearview mirror. “Not really a big deal, but if anybody does stop us, it could be trouble,” he said. On the other hand, Matt and I explored the abandoned bobsled track from the 1984 Sarajevo Olympic Games. Riding the cable car up to the access point also puts you technically in the Republika Srpska, but to be honest it didn’t even register at the time.
Two: Our guide also explained to us that there are three languages stating the health warning on any pack of cigarettes produced in BiH – Croat, Serb, and Bosnian. The thing is, all three are the same spoken language. Serb has a different alphabet (Cyrillic), at least, but “Croat” and “Bosnian” are exactly the same, spoken and written. “So how do you even know which is the Croatian warning and which Bosnian?” I asked. “We don’t,” he said, “but that’s how we keep the peace.” Considering how many people smoke in this country, I suppose a little cigarette diplomacy doesn’t hurt.
Three: we went to a post office to mail some postcards and a letter. That’s how we found out that there are Croat post offices and Bosnian post offices in Sarajevo; presumably there are Serb ones in the part of Sarajevo located in Republika Srpska. As with the cigarettes, it seems, it’s best to issue things in threes in BiH, especially if they are government agencies offering coveted salaries and benefits.
All of this fashioning a three-legged stool to keep the peace has resulted in a tripled administration. BiH has 3 presidents and one prime minister. A number of people we met lamented that so much of the nation’s money is pumped into a bloated bureaucracy and that to get a piece of national infrastructure built or renovated all governing parties must agree on it. BiH’s possible membership in the EU also hangs in the balance, since we also heard repeatedly that the EU requires BiH to resolve some of these differences before admission can even be considered. More with practicality than with cynicism, Mustafa hypothesized that jumping through EU membership hoops might actually force resolution of some of the problems still facing the country.
That said, I perceived a few hopeful signs:
For one, there's the celebration of all the ethnicities and cultures of Bosnia in the museums of Mostar and Sarajevo. These exhibits are old. They predate the 90s war, they survived it, and they are maintained today to teach all visitors -- foreign and domestic tourists -- about the broad ethnic and cultural makeup of the nation in a way that emphasizes local pride in its diversity.
Almost any vista of Mostar will contain both steeples and minarets
For another, there's the way that our Bosniak tour guides spoke about people. The same guide who removed his decal and expressed trepidation about entering Republika Srpska also used only the phrase "the opposition" to refer to Croats and Serbs in the war. He told us this phrasing was intentional, his commitment to not harboring ill will based on ethnicity. The guide who told us the Yugoslav jokes shared that because his family fled the country when he was a kid, he grew up meeting a lot of Serbs abroad and has also spent time visiting Serbia. "And you know what? When we're outside of the Balkans, we relate because we speak the same language and we have way more in common with each other than with foreigners. And in Serbia, the Serbs I've met are all fantastic people who treated me well."
Part VI: The food
In two weeks we tried a lot of great food and learned to prepare some of the dishes in a cooking class. We soaked in the cafe culture of the cities where locals drink Bosnian coffee all evening long (how do they sleep?). And then we had another culinary breakdown at the end of our stay (when that hike got canceled and we went into a brief tailspin) and ate cevapi three nights in a row, which I cannot dissuade you strongly enough from doing; you will regret it so much. As we boarded our flight for Turkey, all I could think of was salad. Which was good, because it helped me feel less sad to be leaving Bosnia behind.
A sampling of Bosnian cuisine besides cevapi:
Sogan dolma, meat-stuffed peppers, onions, and grape leaves that we prepared in Mersiha's cooking class
Pomegranate juice – we caught the right time of year on this one. Fresh-pressed pomegranate juice would follow us from Bosnia to Turkey
Klepe, meat filled dumplings served with sour cream (not pictured). We got the final order of the lunch rush at the family owned and operated Restoran Preporod in Sarajevo. One son was the host, another the waiter; the father visited our table to check in on us, and I think it’s safe to assume other relatives were preparing food in the kitchen.
Mixed grill platter at “National Restaurant” Tima-Irma in Mostar. It’s got ajvar, stuffed peppers, local fresh cheeses, grilled meats, and pita. Yum.
Burek, aka pita, phyllo dough filled with cheese or potatoes or spinach or meat or a combination. Since we basically ate it every day (cheap and available at all hours!), it was great that Mersiha taught us the traditional way to make it in her cooking class. To stretch the dough so thin really takes a big table and a proper team. We were lucky to have the well-traveled, super-friendly couple Peggy and Paul with us in the class.
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