Sarajevo rises from ashes of war and welcomes tourists
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina —
Three flights and 17 hours after leaving Seattle, I arrived in this city with a feeling of uneasy excitement.
Stamped on my airline ticket jacket was a reminder of a U.S. government travel warning that's been in place on and off since the Balkan war ended here in 1995.
Yet as the taxi sped along the Miljacka River past communist-era high-rises, 19th-century Austro-Hungarian mansions and Turkish-style mosques, I sensed I'd made the right decision to spend a few days exploring what was the former Yugoslavia's crown jewel.
Within an hour of unpacking at the Guest House Halvat, I followed the smells of fresh pita bread and finger-sized sausages called cevapcici grilling atop pans of coals in the windowsills of little restaurants.
This was Bascarsija, Sarajevo's Ottoman old town, where the architecture and traditions reflect four centuries of Turkish rule. A three-year siege by Serbian militants nearly destroyed the area, but the war has been over for nine years, and restoration is nearly complete.
Men once again fill their water bottles at an old fountain, and copper and silver shops line alleyways flanked by low-slung wooden buildings with new tile roofs.
In a corner metalworking shop, Ismet Muhamed, 34, carries on a 280-year-old family business of crafting tiny, hand-hammered coffee pitchers and thimble-sized cups.
I was tempted to buy one of his coffee sets. Twenty dollars seemed reasonable, but when I hesitated, he lowered the price to $15.
"For Turkish coffee?" I asked. "No. Bosanska Kafa," he smiled. "Here, try some."
He packed coffee into the little pot, called a dzezva, then poured in boiling water. The mixture was thick, strong and, with two lumps of sugar, like a liquid dessert.
Sarajevo as a tourist destination? I was beginning to get it.
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Despite the U.S. travel warning (a broad advisory that focuses mainly on land mines and localized political troubles), the Bosnian capital is once again on its way to becoming the city whose mix of eastern and western cultures and stunning mountain setting drew the world's attention during the 1984 Winter Olympic Games.
"To overcome a war-torn image takes a long, long time," Mark Wheeler, an American and a specialist in Balkan and European history, told me when I met him on a hike a few days later.
He's been living in Sarajevo for three years, where he works for the Office of the High Representative, the United Nation organization that oversees peacekeeping under the Dayton Accord, the agreement signed in Dayton, Ohio, that ended the war.
"Suffice it to say, there are no roving bands of Islamic fanatics aiming to victimize Westerners," Wheeler said. "Since Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) continue to credit the Clinton administration with saving them from Serb clutches in 1995, the greater risk is that Americans will have to endure excessive hospitality."
Scars remain
Reconstruction has been massive. Still, physical as well as psychological scars remain. For anyone with doubts about the lingering consequences of war in first-world countries, Sarajevo is a living history lesson.
Shells of bombed-out buildings await investors with the money to rebuild. The insides of many homes have been repaired, but the outsides still are punctured with bullet holes. Red paint splotches on the sidewalks, called "red roses," mark spots where people died from sniper fire or mortar attacks.
But the only risk I sensed in three days of exploring was gaining weight from indulging in 25-cent gelato as good as anything I've had in Italy, 60-cent slices of baklava and $2 glasses of local wine accompanying too many good Mediterranean-style meals.
Sarajevo, like all of Bosnia, is a bargain for travelers.
At Inat Kuca, a historical Turkish house turned into a restaurant, my husband and I sat overlooking the Miljacka and ate bureks, traditional pies stuffed with meat or spinach, encased in long strands of dough, rolled up like a braided rug and cooked over a wood fire. With salads and beer, the bill came to about $13.
Our large double room in the five-room Halvat was $74, including an ample breakfast, in-suite bathroom, telephone and TV. A tram ride across town was 60 cents; coffee cost about the same.
Nearly everyone I met spoke English. With little or no prompting, each had a war story to share with an interested stranger.
One morning, after breakfast, Alema Sadikovic, a worker at the Halvat and a Muslim, told me hers.
She was 18 when the war ended, but nine years later, she recalls the details of the day a Serbian soldier knocked down the door of her family home in Brcko, a Muslim-dominated area of Northern Bosnia.
"He said, 'You have five minutes to get out or I'll shoot.' Our bags were packed and near the door, but no one remembered to take them."
Alema, now 27, left with only the dress and tennis shoes she was wearing. She and her family fled to Tuzla, where they lived for the first five days in a bus.
"I was wounded," she said, rolling up her pants to show me where. It happened in the last days of the war when she went out for a cigarette. She keeps a photograph of herself in front of the store where she was struck. A piece of shrapnel pierced her left leg.
"Some generations will never forgive," she said. But Alema has. Her boyfriend is a Catholic Croat, and they have friends who are Serbs. Like many, she's moved on.
Cultural diversity
Large numbers of Bosnians converted to Islam during Ottoman times, adopting the religion while keeping their Slavic language, customs and culture. Other religions were tolerated, however, and by the time the region fell under Austro-Hungarian rule in the late 1800s, Bosnia's population included Muslims, Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Jews. The region became a crossroads between the Islamic and Christian worlds.
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Until the recent war, Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Serbs were neighbors, friends and co-workers. Today much of what was the former Yugoslavia has been segregated along national and religious lines. "Sarajevo is the exception," says Peter Hwosch, an American musician and peace activist.
Jewish cemeteries and synagogues and Catholic and Orthodox churches are scattered among dozens of mosques and minarets. We walked home from dinner each night to the sound of the Muslim call to prayer and awakened to the ring of church bells.
Sipping coffee in Bascarsija's main square, I watched as a woman in a green headscarf and flowing skirt crossed paths with another dressed in halter top and tight yellow hip-huggers.
Middle-Eastern music flowed from the brass and silver shops, while a few blocks away, along the main pedestrian street of Ferhadija, the scene reflected more recent history. In this part of the city, streets are wide, and the architecture is a mix of Austro-Hungarian influences and socialist-style buildings.
"It's like going from Turkey to Vienna to Belgrade as you move from one end of the city to another," said John Drwienkiewicz, a Londoner working in Sarajevo.
Everywhere there are signs of budding entrepreneurism.
A pizza restaurant surrounded by cafes shaded with Coca-Cola umbrellas has replaced the bakery where the first massacre by Serbs in 1992 killed 17 people who were waiting in line to buy bread.
Nearby is "Club Bill Gates" with a neon likeness of the Microsoft chairman in oversized glasses. Around the corner, near a covered market where 68 people were killed in another attack, I watched as a man sold rounds of pita bread out of a big basket while NATO peacekeepers in fatigues and combat boots window-shopped for bargains on gold and silver jewelry.
Survival
As communism throughout Eastern Europe began to crumble in late 1989, and the break-up of Yugoslavia began, Serbian politician Slobodan Milosevic came to power with a plan to create a Greater Serbia by controlling Bosnia and parts of Croatia. Serbs dominated the Yugoslav army, and their forces surrounded Sarajevo from the hills and bombarded it but never captured the city itself.
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For a better understanding of what happened, we took a tram, then a taxi to the Tunnel Museum, owned and run by the Kolar family in their former home near the Sarajevo airport.
During the war, the airport was the only link between the city and free territory controlled by the Bosnian army. People could get to safe areas by running across the runway, but they were exposed to sniper fire and many were killed.
When Serb shelling destroyed the roof and garage of their home, the Kolars moved out and donated their house to the military. The army and volunteers carried out a plan to dig a secret tunnel below the house and under the runway. Once underground, people could move safely and transport food and other supplies into the city.
"It was the only way for Sarajevo people to survive," said Fikret Kahrovic,48.
A Bosnian Muslim, he worked in a heating plant during communist times and fought against the Serbs during the war. He lost contact with his wife and three children for three months after they went to live with her mother in a nearby settlement that Serbian forces later occupied. After they were expelled, they rejoined him in Sarajevo.
"Very often I think about it, but now it seems like a very bad movie I saw 10 years ago." A climber and mountaineer, he now makes his living leading walking tours and hikes.
Many of his friends' graves are among seas of white headstones in city cemeteries with dates that start in 1969 or 1970 and end in 1992 or 1993. As a boy growing up in Sarajevo, he remembers playing in a park that was turned into a cemetery when the city ran out of room to bury its war dead.
In a setting shaped like a bowl and surrounded by green hills and snow-capped mountains, Sarajevo is compact, with most of the main sights, mosques and museums within walking distance or a short tram or taxi ride.
Kahrovic suggested we take a 10-minute taxi ride to a hillside neighborhood for an aerial view, then walk back to town. The driver let us off at a stone gate built in the 1600s by the Turks. In the distance was a half-destroyed castle built by the Austrians later used as a military barracks. Plans are to turn it into a hotel.
We walked down a stone stairway, past homes still pockmarked with bullet holes, and Kahrovic bent over and picked up a piece of rusted metal. It was scrap of shrapnel. "Here, a present for you."
Hiking in the hills
Bouncing along a gravel road the next morning in a 1989 Subaru driven by Tim Clancy, an American who came to Bosnia in 1992 as an aide worker, we joined several others for a day hike in the hills above Sarajevo.
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Land mines keep acres of pristine forest off limits, and guidebooks advise visitors to stay on asphalt or marked paths, but local guides know the safe areas and can organize trips.
Our destination was Bukovik Mountain, elevation 5,000 feet, and the Skakavac waterfalls. About a 20-minute drive from town, the area was controlled by the Serbs and was never mined.
Clancy, 33, and friends formed a company called Green Visions four years ago to develop Bosnia's potential for hiking, climbing, rafting and trekking.
"Everyone thought we were absolutely nuts," he said. Under communism, there was little interest in preserving the natural environment, and after the war, developing outdoor recreation wasn't a priority. "The term 'eco-tourism' was completely foreign to them."
We were headed past the former front line near the zoo to the village of Nahorevo. Serbs captured the town and expelled the Muslims living there. After the war, many returned. Among them was Miki Bahuna, a shepherd who earns extra money selling soft drinks to families who come to the mountains to picnic and play soccer.
With its steep, rocky paths, open meadows and fields of wildflowers, Clancy calls this area Sarajevo's backyard garden. A climb to a windy bluff opened up city views. A clearing in a pine forest became our picnic table.
Clancy laid out a spread of chocolate, nuts, fruit, pastries filled with meat and spinach and potatoes, rounds of pita bread and a creamy local cheese called Kajmak.
"I can see no reason whatsoever that Americans should not come to Bosnia," said Mark Wheeler as we sat on the grass, sharing our lunch in the sunshine.
At that moment, neither could I.
Carol Pucci: 206-464-3701 or cpucci@seattletimes.com