You will Miss Sarajevo

There are a few cities in the world where you visit and, for whatever reason, can’t seem to leave. Unlike Paris or Rome - where you could spend weeks visiting museums and sites -  these are cities that lure you in with their easiness, inviting you to just hang out for a while. Until suddenly, ten days later, you’re wondering where so much time went, and how it’s possible that you’re still not ready to go?

Sarajevo is one of these cities.

If you’re a history buff, you will remember that it was in Sarajevo where the shot that started WWI was fired. If you’re a music fan, you might recognize U2’s tribute, “Miss Sarajevo,” and if you’re a sports fan,

you probably watched the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics.

If you’ve read Lonely Planet this year, you’ll know that Sarajevo is listed as one of the Top 10 Cities to Visit in 2010.

But if you’re like most people, you will still get chills from the very name Sarajevo, remembering that from 1992 to 1996, during the Bosnian War, it was the victim of a siege that has been compared to Stalingrad in brutality.

When I first arrived, I felt uncomfortable to be in a city that still has bullet holes in its buildings, libraries still in ruins, and thousands of its residents still unaccounted for, while I knew next to nothing about what went on there.

But I didn’t have to worry about my lack of knowledge for long – Sarajevo is also a history teacher.

For a fairly small city – about half the size of Portland – it has many museums, including a History Museum with photos, newspaper articles and artifacts detailing, sometimes excruciatingly, the siege in the 1990s.

There are “Sarajevo Roses” around the city: old mortar shell explosion-sites filled in with red paint so they can’t be missed. You’ll see them on the sidewalks, in parks, in a marketplace where civilians were killed while they queued up for bread.

There are many commemorative plaques; one where Franz Ferdinand was murdered, another on the former National Library that says: ‘On this place Serbian criminals in the night of 25th, 26th August 1992 set on fire National and University’s Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Over 2 millions of books, periodicals and documents vanished in the flame. Do not forget, remember and

 warn.’

There is a guided tour to the tunnel that led one million Sarajevans out of their besieged city to safety.

You can walk through the remaining 20 metre section and try to imagine how it felt to make that walk not twenty years ago, risking your life to leave the city you love.

The tour guide, probably a young Bosnian who lived through the siege himself, then takes you to the spot in the mountains where part of the Olympic luge still sweeps down through the trees. Ten years after it was used for sport, it was the point from which soldiers fired down into the city.

I asked my guide, Mustafa, why the past seemed more available in Sarajevo than in other Croatian and Serbian cities, which suffered through the same war but do not have nearly the same amount of commemoration.

‘We didn’t do anything wrong in Sarajevo, we

were not the aggressors, so we aren’t ashamed to talk about it,’ Mustafa said.

Sarajevo wants its history, albeit sometimes

painful, on display so that it doesn’t repeat itself.

But its history isn’t all bad, it’s not limited to the siege, and it didn’t begin in the 1990s: it was the Ottoman Empire that had the biggest impact on Sarajevo, not to mention the tastiest.

Thanks to 400-years of Ottoman rule in Bosnia, there are coffee shops aplenty in which to sit for hours with strong cups of Turkish coffee. That is, when your mouth isn’t full of cevapcici; a minced-meat, Ottoman-era delicacy that is enjoyed throughout the Balkan countries, but perfected in Bosnia, where its is paired with onions and sour cream on a doughy flatbread.

 Fascinating history lessons, great coffee, spicy cevapcici, and all a fraction of the price that you’d pay elsewhere.

No wonder the city is a black hole for tourists.

You’ll see them wandering the cobblestone streets of Bascarsija, feeling like they’ve just stepped out of Europe and into the Middle East. Bascarsija, the old Ottoman bazaar, is the heart of Sarajevo now just as it was four hundred years ago. Each of its narrow streets is dedicated to a particular craft; you can buy rugs, pottery, handmade jewelry, and copper coffee sets. In the doorway of the tiny shops, the employees sit on carpeted stools, drinking little coffees, while the sweet scents of shisha waft out of cafes and the calls to prayer sound from the minarets overhead.

Legend says that if you drink water from one of Sarajevo’s many fountains, you’ll come back someday; most visitors, although having spent more than enough time in the city already, will have a quick,, hopefuly sip from the fountain in the centre of Bascarsija, outside the Ferhadija Mosque.

Before the siege displaced 100,000 people, Sarajevo was called the Jerusalem of Europe with its mixed population of Bosnian Muslims, Serbian Orthodox and Croatian Catholics. The demographics have changed, but within the city you can still Catholic and Orthodox churches, a synagogue, and mosques such as Ferhadija, the country’s finest example of Ottoman Islamic architecture, damaged but not destroyed in the war.

Together, they have reached a level of peaceful co-existence where other Bosnian cities have not been

so successful.

Despite all its tragedy, it is a city that inspires. Only Sarajevo could have produced stories such as the 1993 Miss Sarajevo pageant, held in one of the many underground cellars for protection. Or the “Romeo and Juliet” of Sarajevo, a young couple killed at the foot of a bridge as they tried to escape their burning city.

The owners of a restaurant called “To Be or Not To Be” crossed out the “Not to Be” on the sign over their door, offering no other choice but to survive. On the wall of that restaurant today is a poster of the Cellist of Sarajevo, defying snipers by playing his instrument amid the rubble of the National Library.

If a city can be defined by a word, then Sarajevo’s word is LIVE.

On the eleventh night of my scheduled 2-day trip to Sarajevo, I met my friends in the Sarajevska Pivara Brewery across the Miljacka River, a grand room with delicious dark beer and good music. The brewery is one of Bosnia’s most successful industries, established during Ottoman rule and flourishing under the Austro-Hungarians. It is also one of the best places in the city to spend an evening.

When we left at midnight, the snow had started to come down. By the next day, it would cover the entire city, from the cobbles of Bascarsija up to the cold mountains, where red flags warning of landmines are still posted in the grass.

We walked home in the dark, clear night, sliding along the sparkling roads, throwing snowballs and drawing our initials on windshields. The windows of the houses were yellow-tinted and peaceful.

We felt exhilarated to

 be alive, sorry that we didn’t know enough about what happened here in the past, but grateful to have finally learned.

And we thought maybe that’s why Sarajevo makes everyone stay around for so long: you can’t leave before you understand it, this city that makes you wholeheartedly believe in the promise of a water fountain.