Sarajevo

A Ghost Story

Adem unwrapped the first of three chocolate bars that he had pulled from his backpack and, well-mannered child that he is, offered me a piece. It was barely 9 am in the morning, and we were dangling perilously in a gondola over neatly tended homes and vegetable gardens as it made its way up the Sarajevo mountainside, so I was not hungry. When he devoured all three bars in rapid succession, I suspected we were both grateful for the rejection.

Adem was 12 years old, and his English wasn’t nearly as good as he thought it was. But with the help of Google translate, we managed to keep the conversation going for the slow ride up the mountain. I asked him what he was going to do once we arrived, and he responded “sailing,” which surprised me since I didn’t know there was a lake up there. But then, I didn’t know much of anything about Sarajevo before I arrived there, except for the three events that most of us picked up in high school history or on 1990s television news: the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the 1984 Winter Olympics, and, of course, the Bosnian war.

I asked him what he thought about the war. “I do not understand,” he replied, and I thought he meant he didn’t understand my question. But no, he shook his head impatiently at my misinterpretion. “I do not understand why there is war.”

Fair enough. I couldn’t understand how this lovely city could be the site of so much war either.

It had been an enlightening few days. Upon arrival, I had immediately run into trouble, because if you think you’re going to just la di dah your way into Sarajevo on a Wednesday night in June and find a hotel room, my friend, you have another thing coming.

The first eight or so hotels I tried were all full, and that included the glass-panelled tower I initially avoided because its interior looked scary in a 1978 kind of way but had to sheepishly return to when no other options appeared. Mystified, I asked the receptionist if there was some special event going on in the city, only to find him snippily mystified by the question. As in: what did you expect, you clueless tourist who shows up without a booking in high season in this obviously popular destination? (To learn how my accommodations saga “resolved” itself, see The Addresses section below.)

What draws all the visitors? Sarajevo has the feel of a mountain town, with alluringly crisp air, a burbling river running through its center, and lush green hillsides swaddling the spires, domes, and steeples that populate the streets. Not that long ago, it was the most multicultural of capitals, with a history that veered from Ottoman to Austro-Hungarian to Soviet to post-; and an ethnic and religious blend that included Bosniak Muslims; Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews; Orthodox Serbians and Catholic Croats.

I’d love to say that it was that complexity, Sarajevo’s former status as a veritable model of the multicultural city, that was drawing all the tourists today. But that, I think, would be a lie. Because as far as I could tell from my ambles through the narrow streets of Bascarsija—the old part of the city, which retains the feel, if not the quality of a bazaar— there are two general categories of tourists in Sarajevo, and neither of them are there for the Kumbayah vibes.

I don’t mean to be schematic, and indeed, I could see for myself that sometimes the two groups overlapped. Strolling through Bascarsija in the evening, for example, feeding the pigeons, laughing at the antics of the Turkish ice cream vendor: in those places, it was a mix of Saudis and Swedes, halter tops and burqas.

But in general terms, the divisions were pretty stark. There were the Middle Eastern tourists who come in part for Sarajevo’s mosques and Ottoman history, but perhaps more for the refreshing temperatures and– if the line of ladies crowding the aisles of Cosmetic Market at 9pm on a Saturday night are any indication—for the shopping.

And then there were the Europeans and Americans who, if the results of my constant eavesdropping were any indication, were almost uniformly there for the war. And not the Great War, in which of course Sarajevo also played a starring role (and which I’ll write about next time). They were there for the more recent trauma.

In case you need a refresher, the Bosnian war began in 1992 and was one of the conflicts during the breakup of Yugoslavia and pitted the mainly Serbian (and Orthodox) Yugoslavian army against (Catholic) Croats and (Muslim) Bosniaks. It included ethnic cleansing, mass rape, and indiscriminate shelling of cities and towns on all sides, but was perpetrated with special brutality by the Serbs, whose atrocities seemed all the more horrific for being broadcast nightly on television just months after the European Union had been officially established. As the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo was hit especially hard, blockaded by the Serbian military for nearly four years–the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare. When it was over, nearly 14,000 Sarajevans were dead.

I knew that this year marks the 30th anniversary since the Dayton Peace Agreement brought that war to an uneasy conclusion. What I didn’t know was just how present that war would still be.

I didn’t notice the ghosts at first. The low brick domes of the former bathhouses, the elegant façades of Austro-Hungarian mansions, the smoky scent of grilled meat billowing from the cevapci joints; the courtyards coated in graffiti hiding hookah bars; the row of crouching babushkas near the market selling fat bunches of elderflower; handknit socks, and little tubs of rose petals; the graduation parties with high school girls so glam they made me think I had taken a wrong turn over Austria and wandered into the Oscars pre-game: there was a lot to take in.

So it wasn’t until the following morning that I noticed the bullet holes and shell craters pockmarking a downtown apartment building. And once I had spotted them in one façade, I saw them everywhere. There were buildings that looked totally bombed out; others with just a light sprinkling of holes; in some blocks it seemed as though every third or fourth structure bore the scars.There were other kinds as well: the plaques along Sniper Alley or other once perilous streets commemorating the citizens gunned down there; the “Sarajevo Roses” in the sidewalks, painted red and fossilizing the shrapnel from exploding shells.

Later I would read that a weak economy and a gridlocked government had made funding the restoration of all those damaged buildings difficult. And like many places that have undergone unspeakable trauma, there was an ongoing debate over whether to commemorate or rebuild. But one other factor seemed undeniably to play a role in the presence of all those ghosts and scars. Sarajevo needs its Western tourists, and what Western tourists want, it seems, is war.

How else to explain the tables of bullet casings, some glued together into little toy tanks and all of them imported from China, for sale in the souvenir shops of Bascarsija. Or the placards erected in the square across the river from city hall, with large-scale black and white photos whose accompanying texts–written in English–gave eyewitness accounts of the most baroque atrocities? Or the proliferation of trauma galleries: The Siege of Sarajevo museum; the War Childhood museum; and the Crimes Against Humanity museum, which is not to be confused with the Genocide Gallery, which at the time was very prominently advertising its “special” exhibit on the Srebrenica massacre? All of which, as far as I could tell from their brochures, are rather sparsely and haphazardly curated and all of which, more to the point, are privately owned. Someone even told me that there was a guy who ran a hostel out of his house where, for the equivalent of 20 euros, the “guest” could have the experience of spending the night in a makeshift bunker, complete with hardtack rations and, thanks to a looping soundtrack, the noise of artillery fire just outside the door. But when I finally tracked down the house where it was located, there was no longer any hint of accommodations, just a sign warning it was private property.

Every tour guide I passed who was speaking a language I could understand, from the young man gesticulating to his Italian flock as they descended from a bus near the Latin bridge to the severe-looking woman noting a plaque on a downtown shopping street commemorating a shooting to a posh British couple to the curly blonde explaining what a sniper was her Spanish troops to the utterly charming woman who interrupted her discourse on how to make Bosnian coffee to point out a Sarajevo rose to a boatload of American cruise passengers, was feeding the impulse.

“Of course, we want people to understand what happened,” a security guard named Saumir told me. “But if you ask me, it’s too much. War, war, war, all the time war.“

Exactly. At breakfast one morning I listened to an Australian woman tell her friend how Bosnia felt like a “Third World country–you can see the trauma.” At dinner another night, I overheard an older American man—who I at first took for a spy, then for a diplomat, before finally realizing he was just an professor of International Relations—explain at length to two younger colleagues how “US complacency was misinterpreted as the will for Yugoslavia to fall apart.”

I went to one semi-public (the docent explained that the same ethnically divided government that couldn’t agree on paying for building restorations also couldn’t agree on heritage funding) museum that included a half-hearted installation on the war. But otherwise, I couldn’t bring myself to pay someone to capitalize on the trauma.

Besides, it’s not like Sarajevo needs anyone to invent memorials to that conflict. One day, as I headed on a long walk up the hill to try a restaurant a waiter in another place had recommended, I came to a cemetery, where each grave was marked with a white engraved post. There were hundreds and hundreds of them, stretching in long rows, and although the birthdates on each pillar varied significantly, the death dates did not: every single one fell between 1992 and 1996.

As the road climbed, I passed more cemeteries. One was overgrown, with weeds sprouting among the roses. Another was just for women. A third seemed more like a repurposed backyard than a formal cemetery. In all of them, the gravestones bore those same final dates. I’m not sure what else you need to know.

When I finally and sweatily reached the restaurant, I was ushered upstairs to a pretty, garden-like dining room overlooking the city. The place was empty except for one other table containing a slick-haired man speaking loudly into his phone about deliveries to Zagreb, and the two women with very long nails who accompanied him. So the server, Nina, had time to talk with me.

Having picked up a few Slavic-sounding words from the other table, I asked her if Bosnians today still learned Serbo-Croatian along with Bosniak; I think I expected a Danish-Swedish situation where the languages are technically separate but the two groups can still understand each other. But Nina scoffed. “The nationalists–the Serbs–want you to believe that they’re different languages. But they are the same,” she said heatedly. “In some ways, I wish Yugoslavia hadn’t collapsed because we are the same. We speak the same language. You look at our DNA, we are the same people. It’s only the religions that are different.”

She was just getting started. “I’m proud to come from a place that has so many cultures. I’m proud that during the Second World War, Muslim women veiled their Jewish neighbors to disguise and protect them. We should celebrate that!” And noting that Serbia still had designs on Kosovo, which it had once captured for the Ottoman Empire, she scoffed again. “Who cares what happened 500 years ago? Or 30 years ago? We should look ahead.”

Which brought us, naturally, back to the war. Nina was 7 when it broke out, and said she remembers all of it. “But I think we all have PTSD.” A PTSD that never heals, she added, because the past is kept in everyone’s faces. “It’s what interests tourists,” she said. “And what makes money.”

Nina’s words were in my head on that gondola ride. I had taken it because on my first day someone had recommended the hiking trails at the top of the mountain, and I was looking forward to a morning out in nature. But as we climbed up, the patches of white–-one cemetery after the other–came multiplyingly into view. I wanted to know what someone born well after the conflict ended thought about it. And so I asked my question.

I had taken Adem’s reply on not understanding to be the answer of a budding young sage. But just as the gondola neared the top, he pointed to the ruins of a stone house down below, on the edge of a forest. “It belonged to a Serb,” he said. “They burned it. I think.”

I got the distinct feeling he was trying to placate me, offering this bit of information as obligingly as he had offered the chocolate bar. It made me queasy, and I was relieved to disembark, and start wandering in the fresh air. Not far down the trail, I came across the bobsled track–long abandoned and covered in graffiti–that had been used in the Olympics and now lay crumbling in the forest, like a ruin from an ancient civilization. One more piece of Sarajevo frozen in the past.

It put me in a melancholy mood. But as I returned to the gondola station, I ran into Adem again. He was standing by a bench on which he had set up a row of powdered drink canisters. Something clicked: it wasn’t sailing he was doing up there; it was selling.

I ordered a peach-flavored cup of sugar water, paid him two marka, and felt better for knowing that for one entrepreneurial 12-year-old in Sarajevo, at least, the future seemed full of possibility.

The Addresses

Below, paid subscribers will find a list of the places where we ate, drank, and stayed in Sarajevo. But, a gentle reminder: wouldn’t it be more fun to find your own?