The people in Serbia acted a little strange when I said I was going to Sarajevo. I knew there were tensions without really knowing the full truth, which I was to soon discover.
It was a long bus ride that departed at 4:00 pm and arrived at almost midnight. I made an exception in this case for arriving late in a new city because the hostel offered to pick me up for free, not a bad deal for a 10 euro a night hostel. It was right in the center of town and the people were very pleasant. It almost made up for the overcrowded dorm, dirty and too few bathrooms, and lack of a kitchen. I slept poorly because of obnoxious people in the room. In the morning, groggy, I put on the cleanest and least wrinkled shirt I had and went down to breakfast. Breakfast was fascinating. Two hard boiled eggs, bread, feta cheese, a bowl of cold, blanched and sliced, cabbage, a small, sugar syrup soaked buckwheat-like pancake, and tea. It wasn’t bad, wasn’t good, but interesting.
I went on a tour around town that is organized by the hostel. First stop was the war tunnel museum where I learned the story about history of the Serb-Bosnian conflict. As the coalition of Yugoslavia fell apart, the Milosovic decided he wanted to make a great Serb-only state and that meant he had to get rid of the non-Serbs. He figured that the easiest way was through genocide. The Serbians invaded the army-less country of Bosnia, occupying 70% of it, and laid siege to the capital, Sarajevo. For four years, the Serbian army sat in the hills above the city and shot everything that moved. Men, women, children, everything. The world community did little to help. The UN made huge mistakes and ended up making many things worse. The tiny, water filled, war tunnel was the only way in or out of the city for years. Of the 300,000 people in the city, about one in five was wounded or killed. The nearby city of Sjbrenica was also under siege when the UN moved in, declaring it a safe zone. The Serbs moved in anyway, killing all 8,000 men in the city. The UN only moved the women and children out, they did nothing to stop the slaughter of the men.
It was at this point that I realized that my thoughtless choice of apparel that morning was not a good thing. I had put on my Belgrade, Serbia t-shirt. It was also then that the tour guide, a siege survivor, pointed out that, yes, maybe that wasn’t the best shirt to be wearing, and that if I had worn that the night before when there was a big football match, I very likely would have run into trouble. I felt terrible. Luckily, I had purchased a local shirt that morning and immediately put it on over the Belgrade shirt. Even luckier, it was the shirt of the winning Sarajevo team. I still felt bad about being so oblivious and ignorant of the local history. I felt like such a stupid tourist.
The city at street level looks pretty normal in most places. If you look up, like in the photo above, you see some of what four years of being shot at is like. Almost every building is riddled with bullet holes. You can see places where there were gun fights around doorways and windows where the walls are chewed up in very scary reminders of the all too recent war. You can see many places with the Sarajevo rose, mortar scars in the pavement that look flower shaped. Over the four years of siege, the Serbs launched a daily average of 370 mortar shells a day, often randomly. Apparently the battle scarred city is much better than it was 3 or 4 years ago, much of the damage has been fixed—looking at the buildings, that is hard to imagine.
I tried the local food, burek, a greasy meat or cheese pie, and found it very tasty. I have been eating way to much and have put on some weight lately, so I had to control myself. I am trying to eat only when I am hungry rather than eating because food tastes good, which kind of sucks, you know?
